Money over Loyalty?
Professional athletes are often faced with the tough decision of whether to stay with their hometown team for a discount rate, or cash in elsewhere while they can
Mike Triplett of ESPN.com wrote an article Monday addressing the New Orleans Saints need to “trim more than $20 million from their salary cap by the start of the league year March 11.”
But how is this even possible? How can you cut such a large portion of your salary while still keeping the core players of your team intact?
Well, as Triplett explains in the article, you can’t. That is unless you are able to renegotiate and reduce these players’ contracts.
For Will Smith, an All-Pro defensive end who has been a Saint his entire 10 year career, his history with the team will mean nothing when he gets cut this off-season, unless of course, he agrees to a significant pay cut.
But should players even be considering taking pay cuts to stay with their current teams, when they could make more money elsewhere? A professional athlete’s career is so short. Why wouldn’t you simply try to make the most money while you can, uninfluenced by public opinion or the idea of team loyalty?
Shaquille O’Neal recently revealed that money was the main reason he left the Lakers in 2004; not the infamously feuding relationship he had with Kobe Bryant.
“It was a money situation, I was getting older. They wanted me to take less money. I wasn't going to do that, so they traded me to Miami.”
And when Kobe Bryant signed his $48 million contract extension earlier this season, he took a lot of criticism for not taking a more significant reduction in pay that would have given the Lakers more flexibility to improve their team in free agency.
“If Bryant really wanted to put a title ring first, he would have put his contract last, in terms of priority and dollars.”
— Ben Bolch, latimes.com
“For all of his talk about wanting to win ring No. 6, it’s clear Bryant was at least equally concerned about keeping his status as the league’s highest-player. If not, he would’ve done what Tim Duncan and Kevin Garnett did previously, and what Dirk Nowitzki has pledged to do next summer: Take a big pay cut – in the neighborhood of at least 50 percent – to give the Lakers the kind of flexibility to make a run at players to surround Bryant with in order to legitimately chase a title.”
— Tim Bontemps, nypost.com
To which Bryant responded very publicly via Twitter:
The cap rules players have to be “selfless” on To “help” BILLIONAIRE owners R the same cap rules the owners LOCKED US out to put in #think
Don’t just learn ur sport .. Learn the sports industry #futureathletes
Btw lakers have max cap space and then some #mitchissharp #bussfamsharp #lakers
And later in an interview with Yahoo! Sports Kobe further explained his sentiments.
“You have to be able to wear both hats. You can’t sit up there and say, ‘Well, I’m going to take substantially less because there’s public pressure, because all of a sudden, if you don’t take less, you don’t give a crap about winning. That’s total bull—-.”
But Bryant is one of the lucky ones, one of the rarities; part of an elite group of players who have the luxury of spending their entire careers with one team.
Fittingly today, Derek Jeter announced he would be retiring following this upcoming season. He will have played his entire 20-year career for the New York Yankees. And with sports becoming even more of a business, it’s easy to see how players like Bryant and Jeter, who spend their entire careers with one team, are becoming nearly extinct.
When his former Yankee teammate Robinson Cano signed with Seattle for $240 million this winter, Jeter gave an old cliché that is becoming more and more the accepted reality of sports today.
“I understand it’s a business, it’s a business on both sides…guys move on.”
