CLEVELAND, Ohio - The Indiana Pacers and Oklahoma City Thunder facing off in the NBA Finals isn’t just an anomaly – it’s a testament to how the NBA’s financial structure has created a level of competitive balance that Major League Baseball can only dream about.
And according to cleveland.com sports columnist Terry Pluto, there’s a blueprint here that could revolutionize baseball if MLB had the courage to implement it.
In the latest episode of the Terry’s Talkin’ Podcast, Pluto delivered a breakdown of why the NBA’s approach to contracts and team building has fundamentally changed basketball’s competitive landscape – and why baseball should be taking notes.
“I wanted to know who was predicting a year ago at this time that we would see OKC and Indiana in the Finals,” Pluto said. “Nobody that I saw. Yeah, I mean, that’s, you know, so you look at that teams are having trouble repeating, they’re having trouble even getting back there.”
This parity isn’t happening by accident. It’s the direct result of the NBA’s financial rules, particularly its “second apron” and maximum contract limitations. These constraints have opened doors for mid-market teams like Indiana and Oklahoma City to compete against traditional powerhouses.
When co-host David Campbell noted how different this is from baseball, where some teams seem perpetually unable to compete for championships, Pluto didn’t mince words about what MLB needs to do.
“It’s an obvious fix. It just is,” Pluto said, arguing that baseball should adopt the NBA’s maximum contract approach, which limits not just the amount of money players can earn but, crucially, the length of those contracts.
“Most of these max contracts are four or five years and that’s it,” Pluto said. “They’re worth a lot of money. But it’s not 13 years or 10 years. Because if you’re in a middle market baseball team, you think, ‘All right, I’m gonna go, you know, five years and $200 million for this guy.’ And I’m thinking, in the back of my mind, if he’s a star, if it doesn’t work out, within two or three years, I can still trade him.”
This dynamic fundamentally changes how teams approach risk. The current MLB system allows wealthy teams to sign superstars to decade-plus contracts worth half a billion dollars, effectively removing those players from ever being available to mid-market teams like Cleveland.
Campbell responded that the MLB Players Association would likely resist such changes. Pluto countered with a proposal: What if MLB offered better compensation to players in their first years to offset the maximum contract limitations that would affect only the top 5% of players?
“The Players Association, if you were to offer them, as they would say, more for the working-class players as opposed to the 5 or less percent of the players who would ever qualify for a maximum contract,” Pluto suggested, “the first three years of your major league career before you’re not even eligible for arbitration... If they were to go into that somehow and you maybe make those first three years you are set. It’s like, you know, a million, $2 million, $3 million, something like that.”
Pluto said this approach would “flatten the salary structure across the league” and potentially provide a pathway to meaningful change that benefits more players while creating more competitive balance.
Listen to the full conversation in the latest Terry’s Talkin’ podcast:
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_Note: Artificial intelligence was used to help generate this story from Terry’s Talkin’, a weekly cleveland.com sports podcast. Visitors to cleveland.com have asked for more text stories based on website podcast discussions._