Originally Posted by
steelreserve
Technically, both are free to walk away whenever they want. Of course, there are consequences for that for both sides.
If you mean "How come the player isn't free to leave and become a free agent at will, if the team can basically 'fire' him at will" ... the first part is just necessary to have a league at all. I mean, otherwise, everyone would basically be on a week-to-week contract and there's no way that would even remotely work. The second part is all down to negotiating. If you have the leverage, you CAN get a guaranteed contract, or at least guaranteed enough that no one in their right mind would cut you because of the financial penalty. If you don't have as much leverage, you can still trade off between "security" (guaranteed money, length of contract) and total dollars. If you are an end-of-the-bench scrub, then sorry, but you have no leverage, just like any job where there is really nothing stopping your employer from replacing you except the pain in the ass of finding someone else. This is all the free market that people are always talking about. In the end, it is on YOU to produce enough to justify your pay, which is not really unfair nor any different from any other line of work.
If you mean "Why do fans criticize the players more than the teams for walking away from a contract," well, that one is easy. As a fan, I'm rooting for the team to do well, not for my favorite players to be highly paid. I could care less about that. In fact, past a certain point, an individual player having a big salary is actually very BAD for the team's chances of winning. So there is a direct incentive to root against that, which is mainly mitigated by your own sense of common decency, e.g., what constitutes a "fair deal" in your mind.
So anyone trying to squeeze more money out in the middle of an existing deal - guess what, they run into a completely understandable negative reaction from the fans, unless it's a rare case where they have so CLEARLY outperformed their contract that people's fair-deal moral compass outweighs that.
Is this right or wrong? I guess that depends on your own sense of what's fair, but that's not the point; you asked why it is that way, so I explained why.
It certainly is moving toward guaranteed contracts (or at least more-guaranteed contracts), and I think a lot of the apprehension about it from fans and owners is overblown. As long as they do it right. That would mean implementing NBA-style rules where it's common to see things like sign-and-trade deals, trades for expiring contracts, player buyouts, cap exemptions, cash exchanges, and so forth. Fully guaranteed contracts with the rest of the current NFL system remaining in place would be a disaster. Unfortunately, I fear that's what they'll first try to do, or else come up with some halfway, 20x overlawyered, convoluted nightmare of a system that sucks for everyone, and fans end up spending twice as much time arguing over accounting, when even now it's way too much.
I don't think the guaranteed salaries in the NBA have anything to do with the perception that the "players are running the league" or whatever - that has more to do with the game itself. One or two individual players can make an outsized difference in basketball, and it's got by FAR the smallest number of players of any professional sport, so that "player's fraternity" is going to be a lot stronger, with them knowing each other and being friends with each other a lot more. I also think the max contracts where you can fit exactly three top-tier players on a given team contribute a lot to that - in other leagues where it's not as rigidly defined, the situation's a lot more fluid. Whereas in the NBA, the question is, "They can fit me plus two other superstars - which two superstars should I choose to have the best chance at (winning / fame / fun / money / bitches / guns)" or whatever else is important to that person, so naturally you get a lot of decisions made based on that.