Mendelsohn’s The Cap tells how the NBA salary cap was invented

With the NBA’s salary cap being a staple of free agency conversations, a new book takes a look at how it came to exist in the first place.

Most casual NBA fans today have a working knowledge of the league’s salary cap. Frequent discussions on social media about free agency and trades depend on the people involved knowing a bit about the cap space of the teams involved, possible trade exceptions, an owner’s willingness to pay the luxury tax, and who has whose Bird Rights. However, far fewer fans are aware of the salary cap’s origins, and the battle that was waged between the NBA Players Association and the league itself nearly four decades ago.

Following the settlement of the Oscar Robertson suit in 1976, which led to the ABA-NBA merger, players finally gained the right to become free agents, though in a limited manner. Unsurprisingly, player salaries, which had already begun to skyrocket due to competition between the two leagues, grew even higher. This frightened the owners who found themselves paying more and more for players in a league that was not particularly successful at the time. When Moses Malone signed with the Philadelphia 76ers in 1982 for an at the time massive contract worth a potential $15 million — more than owner Howard Katz had paid for the team itself — it seemed to prove that their fears were well-founded.

How did the modern NBA salary cap come to be?

The league was therefore desperate to find a way to limit team spending while the players were equally eager to avoid limiting their earning potential. Instituting a salary cap, while also essentially making the players partners with the owners by guaranteeing them a percentage of league revenue, was the answer developed in negotiations throughout 1982 and 1983. It may not have saved the league, but it did create the framework for the NBA that we know today. For the first time, the full story of that agreement has been told in full in Joshua Mendelsohn’s debut book, The Cap: How Larry Fleisher and David Stern Built the Modern NBA.

Mendelsohn does a great job of providing historical context for the moment that gave rise to the salary cap. Much of the book’s first two-thirds are not really about the fight for and against a cap, but about setting the table for the bargaining sessions that would lead to its establishment. Full chapters are devoted to the history of the union, the near-strike of the 1964 All-Star Game, the Malone signing, and biographical sketches of Larry Fleisher and David Stern, the two men representing the players and the league in the negotiations captured here

Perhaps what’s most interesting about The Cap is how unlikely a salary cap appears throughout the bulk of the book despite the reader knowing that the agreement to institute one is inevitable. In light of the settlement of the Oscar Robertson suit, the players were in a rare position where they had more leverage than the owners since any agreement was bound to be looked over by judges who could strike down anything that went against the settlement’s pre-established terms. A salary cap would not have been legally approved unless the players themselves agreed to it, putting all the pressure on the league to come up with a proposal that was acceptable to the union.

Admittedly, The Cap does drag at points, which is perhaps inevitable in a book covering labor negotiations as closely and thoroughly as this one does. This is especially apparent in the book’s final third as the table-setting has all been done and there is nothing else to cover apart from the meetings themselves. While the meetings have their fair share of tension and ended up being extremely consequential, they are still business meetings after all. With the two sides belaboring the same points, again and again, refusing to budge, before finding common ground and moving towards it, the chapters briefly become as repetitive as the meetings themselves, which is no fault of the author, but an unfortunate side effect of the subject matter.

That caveat aside, even the most well-read NBA fan will discover a number of new stories and context as Mendelsohn writes about the various owners and players who collaborated to create the cap. There are a number of owners who are both helping lead the league into a new era such as Jerry Buss and Harold Katz as well as those who are holding it back, like Ted Stepien and Donald Sterling, reaffirming the idea that investing in the NBA is a risky proposition and not built for sustained success. This book captures a league on the precipice of major success, the type that players and owners could only have fantasized about before. Everyone involved seems confident that better times are coming, but having seen the league struggle to survive for so long, no one is willing to give themselves over to unbridled optimism. It didn’t hurt that a certain guard from North Carolina would enter the league just over a year later

Mendelsohn is the perfect person to write this book, being a labor lawyer who has been involved in negotiations “covering professional athletes and sports broadcasters with media companies and professional sports franchises.” He is able to expertly capture the nuances of the negotiations while explaining them in a way that any reader can understand. The language may be a bit dense at times, but it’s never impenetrable. He has also really done his research, spending lots of time reading little-read and out of print memoirs by the primary figures involved in addition to poring over the memos, notes, and memorandums from the meetings themselves. While he did not conduct a ton of interviews, one would hardly be able to tell in light of the depth of his research, making it seem like he was at the negotiating table himself all those years ago

The Cap is a very good book as well as an impressive, and important achievement. It admittedly has a limited target audience — people who are interested in the minutiae of NBA labor relations — but for those who fall within it, one could hardly imagine a better treatment of this pivotal moment in league history. If you want to learn about and understand the current financial state of the league, as well as the legal agreements and negotiations that gave rise to it, there are few better places to look than here.