{"id":4694,"date":"2014-07-10T09:04:44","date_gmt":"2014-07-10T14:04:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/?p=4694"},"modified":"2014-07-10T09:04:44","modified_gmt":"2014-07-10T14:04:44","slug":"clearing-cap-space","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/2014\/07\/10\/clearing-cap-space\/","title":{"rendered":"Clearing Cap Space"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Apologies to ThickCulture readers for all the sports talk recently. I&#8217;ll get more sociological again soon. I promise. I wrote the following as an email to my pal and historian of American sports, Dan Hawkins, but thought I&#8217;d post it here to get a wider response.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been following the latest NBA free agent rumors and pretty much every other sentence on ESPN is &#8220;clearing cap space.&#8221; I certainly remember a lot of talk about &#8220;cap space&#8221; going back to 2008 when teams started drooling over LeBron&#8217;s availability in 2010. But I don&#8217;t recall much talk about it before then. If memory serves, in the 1990s, people tended to talk about &#8220;blockbuster trades&#8221; more.<\/p>\n<p>I have several hypotheses to help explain this observation:<\/p>\n<p>1) <strong>I&#8217;m wrong<\/strong>. Perhaps I&#8217;m just more tuned into NBA post-2008, but I kind of doubt it. I feel less tuned in to the NBA than I was 1990-2002.<\/p>\n<p>2) <strong>It&#8217;s a media effect<\/strong>. Maybe cap space was always a big issue, but because ESPN and its ilk have created a bigger &#8220;newshole&#8221; for sports coverage, they can cover acquisitions issues more closely. It seems like Bill Simmons and others responded to\/created market demand for this sort of trade and signing speculation.<\/p>\n<p>3) <strong>It&#8217;s a product of the superstar era<\/strong>. The modern game relies on superstars to a greater extent and so free agent signings have become more important means by which teams improve. Thus, &#8220;freeing cap space&#8221; to sign free agent has become a more common tactic.<\/p>\n<p>4) <strong>NBA rules have changed<\/strong>. Here, I&#8217;m way out of my depth. Have there been changes to the regulations surrounding acquisitions that have made free agent signings more desirable?<\/p>\n<p>Thoughts?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Apologies to ThickCulture readers for all the sports talk recently. I&#8217;ll get more sociological again soon. I promise. I wrote the following as an email to my pal and historian of American sports, Dan Hawkins, but thought I&#8217;d post it here to get a wider response. I&#8217;ve been following the latest NBA free agent rumors [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4694","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4694","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4694"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4694\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4695,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4694\/revisions\/4695"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4694"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4694"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4694"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}