Actually that makes more sense. Either way, free trade isn’t an issue.
The agreement between the players’ union and the team owners does.
As already said, a player can sit out a year and re-enter the draft next year. It helps if you are good in two sports, like Elway was; he threatened to play baseball for the New York Yankees for a year if the Colts didn’t trade him. In fact, Bo Jackson told Tampa Bay the same thing, and Tampa Bay didn’t trade him, so they ended up getting nothing for the #1 overall pick in that draft. (IIRC, one of Jackson’s demands was that he would only play for a team that would let him play baseball, and then join the football team when baseball season was over; the following year, I think the Raiders drafted him in something like the fourth round.)
Note that, in the NBA (at least), if a drafted player signs a contract with a non-NBA team, the NBA team keeps his draft rights until 12 months after the player is no longer playing in another league.
Players declining the draft is actually a fairly commonplace thing, though you usually don’t hear about it. The most common reason for a player declining to sign is they feel they have a chance to be drafted higher (thus making more money) with one or more years of additional collegiate experience, or they just don’t think they were offered enough.
Barry Bonds, for instance, was drafted out of high school by the Giants, but elected to go to college instead, as the Giants did not meet his demands. He was then drafted out of college by the Pirates three years later.
If it were only the league and the teams mandating the draft, that would probably be the case. In fact, in the 1970s a player named Yazoo Smith (hilarious, i know) sued the league (football) arguing that the draft constituted a restraint of trade and thus was illegal under anti-trust law.
Smith won his case, and he won the appeal. What the league did in response was go to the players’ union and get them on board with the draft. Securing the agreement of the union, which was the representative of professional football players, meant that the league effectively had the employees on board, and labor law made exemptions to anti-trust laws as long as the recognized representatives of the employees were party to the agreement.
So, because the players’ unions agree to the draft, the draft is legal under anti-trust law. The problem, of course, is that while the players’ unions ostensibly represent all players, they tend to be controlled by senior players, and the restraints on trade that are put in place by the draft actually help established players at the expense of rookies.*
The draft, by eliminating the free market for players looking to enter the league (and indeed, for some years thereafter, depending on the sport), basically eliminates the financial competition for new players, replacing a bidding war with an orchestrated circus of draft picks. This, in turn, dramatically reduces the amount of money that teams need to spend on new young talent, and therefore leaves a greater proportion of the pie for the veterans.
If you make it to veteran status, the draft can dramatically increase your earning power, but as a result many players in the first few years of their service are paid much less than what they would be paid as free agents.
- It helps owners too, of course, because they get to pay below market value for their employees. It seems to me, on the face of it, that it would particularly benefit owners in cases where there is no overall salary cap (baseball), and would particularly benefit senior players in sports where there is a team salary cap (football), although that’s just a hunch and not something that i’ve thought enough about to claim with confidence.
But surely an individual cannot be forced to join the union, that would be illegal no?
A college kid, really good at football, could set up his own contract with a team could he not? They are a business, he is a private individual. I’m not seeing what stops him from doing so.
Nothing stops him, per se.
The agreement between the league and the teams, and between all the teams that make up the league, stop them from doing it. The player is perfectly within his legal rights to approach each team and propose a contract, but each team is going to politely point him to the door and tell him that they will negotiate with him if and when they choose him in the draft.
As others have said, no.
His rights will belong to the team that drafted him. A couple very highly-regarded players in the past have had the leverage to demand a trade. A couple others have gone to the Canadian league and played there for a year or two until their drafting rights expired (IIRC, teams now hold the rights for one year, after which players can sign wherever they wish). Both of these events are very rare, maybe once per decade. Basketball is much the same (though the situation there is different for international players; they pretty commonly can and do play offers from European leagues against the NBA)
Baseball (and I think Hockey) are slightly different, in that the professional leagues start drafting players at 18, and the players have the choice of signing with the team that drafted them, or else choosing to play in college. Some baseball players will get drafted 3 or even 4 times before they decide to sign. In Football and Basketball, once you declare yourself “eligible” for the draft, there’s no going back to college to play. Yes, this is shitty.
Pro Sports teams in the US are independant private businesses, but on some issues, they agree to abide by league rules. Player allotment is one of them.
No, it was just “I won’t play for Tampa Bay.” He felt they screwed him out of his baseball eligibility, and held a grudge against Hugh Culverhouse for years. It wasn’t until they drafted him anyway that pro baseball was a serious possibility.
Baseball and hockey are the only sports that apply to.
That’s the vast majority of the players drafted in professional sports every year. What’s your point?
I meant it as two examples. The NBA occasionally assigned players to teams, as in Chamberlain. The ABA in the 1960s assigned all or most players to teams.
Non-USAians must be bewildered by the drafts held by our major sports leagues. WRT to the NFL in particular, Patrick Hruby, until recently a columnist at Sports on Earth, is of the opinion that it isn’t even necessary, that it’s mostly a big spectacle for its most gullible consumers.
A hard salary cap (another concept that must have Europeans shaking their heads in disbelief) makes a draft pretty unnecessary – besides the pony show, it’s main purpose in recent years has been to negate a player’s negotiating leverage as much as possible.
-
Sports in general are just a “big spectacle” and a “pony show.” The whole damn thing is grown men in funny clothing chasing a ball around. IME, sportwriters are more inclined to attach importance to them than the average fan is.
-
ISTM pretty much every industry with a unionized labor force undercompensates new workers in order to favor veterans. Certainly Europeans would be familiar with that.
Hruby sounds like a douche.
Canadians understand it pretty well.
While that’s kind of true, it’s also kind of false. Yes, the purpose is to reduce young players’ negitiating position.
The idea, though, that a salary cap negates the draft’s value in achieving competitive balance is just insane. It is immediately obvious that the draft has a potentially enormous impact in making bad teams good simply by adding talent, especially in basketball but also in hockey and football, teams with salary caps. Ask Penguins fans if they’d be happy with a salary cap but just a 1-in-30 chance of having gotten Sidney Crosby.
In North American leagues players can’t reap the full benefits of free agency until they’ve been in the league awhile, and the thing is that it’s just that period of time that much of a player’s value exists. The ability to acquires young players at controllable prices is what has allowed many, many shitty teams to develop championship squads.
While this might be true, isn’t it possible that the presence of the draft itself has encouraged at least some teams to be much more miserly than they might be under a system without one?
In some sports, a losing team is not necessarily an unprofitable team, and the presence of a draft, which effectively guarantees that crappy teams can pick up great talent for a bargain-basement price, distorts the market in a way that allows some teams to avoid paying for that talent even when they might have both the money and the incentive (in terms of creating a winning team) to do so?
That is, if we eliminated the mechanism that allows shitty teams to pick up great players for almost no money, maybe the owners of those shitty teams might be willing to actually spend more money on making them less shitty.
I’m not making this argument out of an extensive knowledge of draft workings. Even in my own favorite North American sport, baseball, the draft is one area that i don’t pay a huge amount of attention to. But even i know that there have been owners who refuse to spend money on their teams even when those owners make money, and when they also benefit from revenue-sharing agreements. The draft can help to make such behavior worthwhile for owners because it effectively hands them something for free (or, at least, for cheap) rather than making them pay for it.
Of course, professional sports, in some ways, has a somewhat different relationship to the free market than other for-profit businesses. The owners of Wal-Mart or Amazon might be happy for their companies to completely steamroll the opposition and attain a monopolistic place in the market, but while the fans and the owners of sports teams want their teams to win, they don’t want to create a situation where one team wins all the time. The very nature of the competition itself is an important part of sports, there is an interest in competitive balance that doesn’t really exist in the same way for other businesses.
The other side of the coin, of course, is that in some pro leagues, even teams that are consistently shitty can still make money for their owners, meaning that if the owner is more interested in money than in a winning team, he might not have much motivation to produce a winner. Now, some people claim that sports team owners aren’t in it for the money, and that they’re more concerned with winning than with profit, but while that might be true in some cases, i don’t think it’s always true by any means.
Yep and that’s also how it works for Aussie Rules teams in Australia. A draft allows lower finishing teams to rebuild their teams to ensure a fairer competition. Once major exception we have is the “father son” rule. This allows a team to hand in any first round pick to pick up and eligible son before any one else does.
It is an issue but a team would have done due diligence to ensure the kid is not going to get homesick to quick.
And Australians.
No, no and no. Well, except maybe for that Crosby example, which I don’t really understand.
Eliminate the draft and all you do is give any number of shitty teams a shot at the next Peyton Manning, not just the absolute No. 1 shittiest in the previous year’s standings. In fact, you give all the crappy teams a better chance to rebuild over a span of a couple of years; one team could outbid everybody else for the best two receivers and be set at the position for a dozen years. Another team might spend heavily on offensive linemen to protect their young QB. Yet another could collar a bunch of stud DBs over a couple of years and build a lockdown secondary.
The cap is the great equalizer. Maximizing value is the key to winning and all the draft does is dictate which teams get to control a few players at non-market prices.
The rookie salary cap is an abomination. It should be an affront to us all.
Maybe we should also argue about what a crapshoot the draft is when it comes to actually evaluating talent. It must be incredibly difficult because NFL teams don’t seem to be very good at it. And if its end product is mostly a result of luck, then we might as well stop dumping all over the newest Not-For-Long members of the labor pool.
I think that you dramatically overestimate their chances of getting Crosby if he’d been a UFA at age 18. He’d been hyped for over a decade by that point, and all of the big-market teams would have cleared cap room in order to sign him. A small market team as bad as the 2005-2006 Penguins would never have a chance (and frankly, that might well have finished a franchise that was in bad financial shape at the time).
What makes you think “the next Peyton Manning” is going to sign with a shitty team if he could sign with a competitive team that is bad at quarterback? He’s not going to, unless the shitty team decides to spend all its money on him. And when they do that, they’ll have no cap space with which to sign anyone else. You think anyone is going to take a fair market deal to play for the Raiders?
The problem is exacerbated by varying cost of living/quality of life considerations. Remember that time all those NBA free agents decided to take less money to sign together in Cleveland so they could guarantee themselves some championships? No, because it didn’t happen; they took their talents to South Beach and its attendant fake tits, Bentley dealerships and 0% state income tax.
ETA: I happen to think the US salary cap system and the draft are extremely un-American, but that’s neither here nor there.