Spurs win 11 straight, NBA over

For years, NBA teams could pay NBA players whatever the team wanted to.

A 25-year, $25 million deal? Draw it up. Superstar contract leapt over the salary cap? Let it leap, and name the exception to the rule after the superstar. Want to be paid a single dollar more than your enemy? Want to personally make more than the total payroll of all but five other teams, two years in a row?

That's what Magic, Larry, Russell, Wilt and Michael got to do, and all that ended in 1999. The 1999 season, truncated due to an owner's lockout, was the first to feature maximum salaries. The Larry Bird Rule remained, still remains, but for the first time teams were restricted in what they could offer their superstar.

Before then, front offices had to be cool. Russell was the best player in the league, Red Auerbach agreed, but only a buck better than Wilt. Bird and Magic dealt with contentious negotiations with their teams, even during the most productive times of their careers. That stopped with Mike, who decided he was going to make as much money as the combined salaries of all the Cavs plus most of the Raptors, or else he was going to play in New York for a little thing called "whatever they have left."

When Jordan retired in 1999, a pecking order emerged, and then immediately dissipated. Though some stars were grandfathered into massive contracts, the next generation's torch-bearers made the same maximum terms: Allen Iverson, Kobe Bryant, and Ray Allen all inked a six-year, $70.9 million deal, Kobe loved that.

And, hey, so did Shareef Abdur-Rahim and Antoine Walker and Stephon Marbury and Zydrunas Ilgauskas, same max deal, all making as much as Kobe. Kobe really enjoyed this, all the different dweebs around him with backstage passes.