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Adam Silver: Salary-cap boom will have 'unintended consequences'

Bob Donnan / USA TODAY Sports

When this coming summer's anticipated free-agent feeding frenzy kicks off in earnest on July 1, it'll have been nearly two years in the making. NBA prognosticators and front-office executives have been thinking and talking about it ever since the league inked a nine-year, $24-billion media rights deal in October 2014.

The agreement will kick in for the 2016-17 season, and with the players' union having rejected a "smoothing" proposal that would've worked the financial windfall into the league's salary-cap structure incrementally, the cap is set to jump by more than $20 million in July. In addition to causing a massive spike in player salaries, it'll leave nearly every team in the league with the cap room to sign a star from a free-agent pool that could include the likes of Kevin Durant, Al Horford, DeMar DeRozan, Mike Conley, Dwight Howard, and Nic Batum.

While this is obviously good news for NBA players, commissioner Adam Silver is concerned about what it might mean for the overall health of the league.

"That is not something we modeled for (in the Collective Bargaining Agreement)," Silver said Saturday during his annual All-Star weekend state-of-the-league address. "The intention wasn't that in this system that teams could sign without going above the tax that many max player contracts and that many All-Stars.

"So if you ask me from a league standpoint, we would prefer that our All-Stars be distributed around the league rather than having so many All-Stars in one market. But we'll see what happens this summer. I mean, as I've said, there will be unintended consequences from all this additional cap room this summer. I just don't know what those consequences will be."

The most damning potential consequence appears to be the death of competitive balance. If an already dominant team like the Golden State Warriors has the flexibility to sign a superstar like Durant in his prime, without altering the rest of its championship core, what hope is there for anyone else?

"Ultimately our goal from the league standpoint is to have truly a 30-team league where teams are competing based on management, based on either market size or an owner's willingness to lose substantial amounts of money," Silver said.

If things shake out the way Silver fears they will this summer, it could bode ill for negotiations on the next CBA. An opt-out clause allows either the players or owners to terminate the current agreement after the 2016-17 campaign.

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