Are arranged marriages the NBA’s next big strategic advantage?

Every NBA team is constantly looking for an edge on the competition. Could an actual marriage between an owner and player be the next big thing?

NBA fans are doing everything we can to keep the ol’ gray matter busy during this period of social distancing and sheltering-in-place. Often that means reaching far back into the brain and dusting off some hypotheticals you haven’t been brave enough to let see the light of day. Like the user in NBA Reddit wondering if an NBA owner marrying one of their players would allow them to circumvent the NBA’s salary cap, paying smaller contracts and sharing their personal wealth as married assets:

"“Like, let’s say Wes Edens just marries Giannis. he could pay him the minimum to stay with the Bucks, and just share his assets on the back end.Or if AD just marries Jeanie. the Lakers could incur another massive contract because AD is getting paid and laid off the books.”"

It’s an interesting question, if only because there is such a dearth of other interesting basketball questions to be answered right now.

I asked cap expert Jeff Siegel, founder of the invaluable Early Bird Rights, if he thought it might work. He mostly laughed the idea off, saying, “it’s technically possible but if anybody ever found out it was explicitly for circumvention reasons, there would be hell to pay.”

It seems like the issue here is about convincing the rest of the NBA world that the marriage is legitimate and not just a legal arrangement to circumnavigate financial rules. That might be hard to do but Green Card marriages do exist — and sometimes turn out to be true love, like Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds! It may be difficult to imagine an owner and player pulling off such a charade, and essentially sustaining it for a lifetime since there could almost certainly be retroactive repercussions if the scheme was revealed after the fact. But hey, Tom and Wendy Haverford had all of Pawnee, IN convinced their marriage was real for years, so it’s not impossible.

Anyway. Basketball, we miss you. Get well soon.