So LeBron James and Kobe Bryant are on record for saying that if someone from overseas were to offer them $50 million a season, they'd bolt from the NBA.  First off, who wouldn't?  Anyone that claims they would turn down this kind of outrageous money for one season for any reason, patriotism or otherwise, is completely full of it.  It's more than double the max contract the NBA will allow under current salary cap restrictions, and it's tax free!.  Not only would they be lying, they'd be stupid. 

This has to get David Stern's knickers in a twist.  For decades now, Stern has led the way in marketing the NBA based upon its best and brightest superstar players.  If, all of a sudden, there is a significantly better financial option for these guys, do you think its just going to be one or two who split?  It's going to be a flood of the top players in the league, as long as the money is flowing from European clubs.  And the NBA slowly becomes a league sporting the best of what's left over.  I wonder if he's rethinking all of that International marketing, and the push to allow NBA'ers into the Olympics as the original Dream Team that seemed like such a good idea at the time?

Worst of all for the League is that there isn't really a damn thing they can do about it.  There's no way Stern can allow NBA teams to match this kinds of money without totally scrapping the salary cap system, and that kind of upswing in pay around the league would make owning an NBA team a massive money pit.  Not to mention that the kind of parity we saw this year would be a thing of the past.  With no salary cap, high revenue clubs would dominate every year.  This isn't baseball where one player, no matter how great he is, cannot make you a champion.  In the NBA, one player is routinely the difference between 20 wins and 50.

There are only a couple of ways for the League to even try to deal with this.  One is to let them go, stick to your principles and hope that the huge money being thrown around by foreign teams runs out.  I mean, when you're paying one guy $50 million, that has to make it kind of difficult to turn a profit.  Business sense would have to kick in eventually, right?  Well, not if they guy writing those checks is a billionaire who spends $50 million a week on champagne, caviar and high-end escorts. 

Another is to set up some sort of punitive rules against players who choose this route.  Not sure exactly what those would be, but a buy-in to regain NBA eligibility would be an interesting  possibility.   Wanna go play in Europe, LeBron?  Okay, but when you want back into the NBA, you have to pay the League 40% of the money you earned over there, up front.  Otherwise, it was nice knowing you.  This wouldn't work either, and is probably illegal, but Stern has played hardball with guys in the past, and I could definitely see him try to punish guys for having the audacity of leaving his league.

Another way, and this would be more in keeping with Stern's sneaky corporate manueverings, would be to lobby for the IRS to get involved.  As it stands right now, the players keep all of this money, tax free.  Make a few well-placed bribes (sorry, we call them campaign contributions now) and change the rules and make this money taxable for U.S. citizens at something like 75% and that levels the playing field, unless they want to not just play overseas but defect as well.  Collecting a tax free paycheck is one thing, leaving the United States forever is quite another.  And they could even cloak this in rah-rah patriotism, "Keeping the best of America in America."

But probably the most effective way, and one that doesn't involve sticking it to guys who have every right to tell David Stern and his flunkies to shove it and sell their unique talents to the highest bidder, is some kind of eventual merger between the NBA and the Euroleague.  Two conferences, one in this half of the world and one in that half, everyone working under the same salary structures.  That still wouldn't rule out rogue billionaires throwing around big money from lesser leagues, but it brings most of Europe's big money players (the financial kind, not the basketball kind) under the NBA umbrella and theoretically benefits all concerned, with the exception of the occasional transcendent superstar, and there's always marketing dollars out there for them, even more so with a truly world-wide league.

Any way around it, the face of the NBA is changing far more quickly than I or anyone would have anticipated.  Major changes are coming if the NBA is going to stay the best league in the world and not just a footnote to the European Championships.  The next couple of years will tell the tale.  Both Kobe and LeBron have contracts running out, and someone from overseas will make a run at them.   And it now looks like it's going to take a helluva lot more than just trading Richard Jefferson to clear salary cap space to make a run at either of them.