I admit this isn't how I wanted to make the point but I sure hope we can now all agree that a cap system that doesn't really allow for any flexibility in case the cap drops is probably a bad idea.
Most chatter (via CJ) regarding the cap is that the league and PA will not allow it to drop, holding flat at worst, but I do agree there should be a mechanism in place (luxury tax).
A luxury tax would be awesome, but the owners will never allow it.
I think the fairest thing to do is to set the cap at roughly what it would have been had there been no pandemic. If you do that then all of the players will take a salary hit in proportion to their current salary and/or salary that they would have received had there been no pandemic (via the escrow mechanism).
If you set the cap (substantially) lower than that (and there is no buyout mechanism), what will wind up happening is that all of the players who already have contracts will not take (much of) a hit and there will be no money left to pay the free agents. It doesn't seem reasonable that there be massive discrepancies in pay based solely on whether or not a player has a contract through the next year or is a free agent.
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More generally, a better way to do player contracts is not to assign players set dollar amounts but rather to assign them cap percentages each year. Then the money they receive automatically goes up and down with league revenue. Players (and GMs) wouldn't have to guess at what future caps will be. Right now, we'll have a huge decrease, but in some future year, when we recover, we'll likely have some massive increase. It makes more sense to me to avoid the guess work involved in economic forecasting, and simply assign players value relative to the cap (and eachother).
