He has a point

Chauncey Billups got waived by the Knicks. Under the new CBA, teams can waive, blah blah blah, exempt blah blah blah, and blah blah blah to stay under the cap while they're singing Carmelos and Chris Pauls to max deals.

Chauncey's agent had this to say:

The way the league is structured, if you're a hot name and teams have interest in you, you have the ability to manufacture mass hysteria, and guys like Chauncey who put in years of high-level leadership, production, and service get lost.

Quite true. And this could be one case where the interest of fans, owners, and players could be brought under one umbrella.

Why not have a structure where there is no salary cap that applies to home-grown players (i.e., draftees), but only to guys who have achieved free agency? If a guy like Billups wanted to stay with the Knicks (imagining, for a moment, that New York had drafted him), and the team was pleased with Billups; and willing to pay him the millions owed on his contract, why not accomodate both parties? Why should they have to trade him just to stay within some arbitrary cap number?

The cap is designed, IMO, to keep big market teams from hording all the free agents. That goal can be attained, while still allowing fans the opportunity to enjoy watching a player for his whole career, and while allowing the players who qualify for free agency the choice to re-up with their current employer (who would not be bound by a cap to retain that players services), or go the F.A. route, in which case there would be a lot of bidders, but they'd bound by a F.A. salary cap.

How to handle trades? Not sure, but you couldn't get into the game of assigning salary differentials to F.A. cap, or you'd be undermining the whole point of this system (to allow the mid-tier player the chance to stay with a team, be well compensated, and not be a pawn in the game of getting high-value F.A.'s; also to allow fans to have stability on their teams).

One possibility: traded players who haven't gone the F.A. route would retain the cap-free designation.

Just a thought. Wish I'd had it before they just ratified the new CBA.