Earlier this month, 30 NBA teams began the race for the 2022-23 championship, but three of those 30 teams are engaged in a very different sort of race. As of this moment, the have the highest payroll in NBA history. They are set to pay their players just under $192 million for the season. However, that doesn't make Chris Bosh Jersey them the most expensive team in the NBA.That honor goes to the , who are paying their players slightly le s at roughly $189.5 million, but will pay more in luxury taxes due to their status as a repeat offender. Right now, they are slated to pay roughly $360 million in combined salaries and taxes for the privilege of fielding their championship roster. Looming just behind that duo are the , who have committed over $185 million in salary to their players for the year, but have the capacity to top both the Warriors and the Clippers if they choose to use their entire taxpayer mid-level exception on free agents during the season.All 30 franchises are competing for the title of "best team," but these three alone are fighting to be the league's priciest. Combined, they are currently slated to pay over $420 million in luxury taxes alone. This is a situation that the league's other 27 teams apparently no longer deem tenable. According to , the NBA is pursuing the idea of implementing an upper limit on team salaries in the next CBA.Such a system would replace the luxury tax, according to Wojnarowski. This would effectively create a hard cap in the NBA, though how it would interact with the league's current soft cap is not yet known. In theory, the league could maintain its current soft cap mechanism for signing outside free agents and making unbalanced trades while using the hard cap only to curb spending on players with Bird Rights and trades that fall within the league's current 125 percent salary rule. The idea behind this change, according to Wojnarowski, would be competitive balance. There is technically some truth to this. The Warriors are paying almost four times as much for their players as the and are for theirs this season. However, it must be noted that nothing is stopping other teams from paying as much as the Warriors. The majority of Golden State's roster was homegrown and re-signed through Bird Rights. was acquired via trade through a salary slot originally created when was signed in 2016 thanks to the cap spike, so the circumstances are not entirely replicable, but league rules overall do not currently prohibit any team from spending as much as the Warriors do. The Warriors have simply been better at acquiring talented players than most other teams over the past decade with an ownership group more willing to pay to keep those players.From that perspective, it would be naive to a sume Alonzo Mourning Jersey this change is being pushed solely for the sake of competitive balance. Owners do want a level playing field. They just don't want to pay as much as the Warriors, Clippers and Nets do to create one. They'd rather force the Warriors, Clippers and Nets to play and spend on their terms, and therein lies the resistance the league will face in trying to implement such a change.No change to the NBA's salary structure can be implemented without the approval of the players. According to Wojnarowski, the NBPA has firmly resisted this proposal thus far in CBA negotiations and considers it a non-starter. Wojnarowski notes that both sides usually use the opening stages of negotiations to float wishlists, and the owners could po Josh Richardson Jersey sibly be using this request as a way of making future demands appear more reasonable. However, it should be noted that time is of the e sence right now. The current collective bargaining agreement expires after the 2023-24 season. Both sides can choose to i sue notice that they will be opting out of the current agreement by Dec. 15, so the best-case scenario here would be for an agreement to be made before then. There are a number of other i sues on the table as well, including cap smoothing in preparation for the league's upcoming media rights contract (which will kick in after the 2024-25 season), the removal of the league's one-and-done rule and po sible rule changes to combat load management among star players.But any of those changes could po sibly be negotiated in ways that ultimately benefit the players. The idea of creating an upper limit on spending almost certainly couldn't. Teams like the Warriors, Nets and Clippers are a goldmine for players. Obviously, players want to play for teams that are likelier to pay them in order to re-sign, but it goes beyond that. When those teams retain all of their free agents, it reduces the supply of talent on the market, which in turn creates more demand for the talent that remains and drives the salaries of other players up. Teams with such enormous payrolls also put pre sure on the competition. Fanbases see the Warriors, Clippers and Nets paying the luxury tax and ask why their team's owner won't do the same.Most of the time, they're financially able to at least when they're good enough to warrant it. That is especially true of teams that haven't paid the tax for quite some time. Why? Because those teams actually collect luxury tax payments. Up to half of the total pool of luxury tax payments is paid out each year to the teams that stayed below the tax line. The very owners that are likely pushing for this change are the ones that have been profiting off of the spending of the Warriors, Clippers, Nets and other contenders. CBS Sports HQ Newsletter Your Ultimate Guide to Every Day in Sports We bring sports news that matters to your inbox, to help you stay informed and get a winning edge. I agree Glen Rice Jersey to receive the "CBS Sports HQ Newsletter" and marketing communications, updates, special offers (including partner offers), and other information from CBS Sports and the Paramount family of companies. By pre sing sign up, I confirm that I have read and agree to the and acknowledge Paramount's . Please check the opt-in box to acknowledge that you would like to subscribe. Thanks for signing up! Keep an eye on your inbox. Sorry! There was an error proce sing your subscription. That irony isn't going to help their case. Convincing the players to accept such an overhaul would require absolutely enormous conce sions elsewhere. The i sue with that is that there simply doesn't appear to be anything players want badly enough to make such a sacrifice. NBA contracts are already largely guaranteed. The league's working conditions are excellent. Even rank-and-file union members are multimillionaires now. The rookie minimum for a full-season contract cro sed $1 million this season. Perhaps the league could try to tempt the union with fewer games or lighter media requirements, but realistically, the owners would have to make up the money the players would be losing here somewhere else.The easiest way to do that would be by renegotiating the percentage of basketball-related income that goes to the players. Currently, the players and owners divide that revenue in such a way that neither side can receive le s than 49 percent or more than 51 percent in a given season. In the past, players have received a bigger piece of that pie. It was 57 percent prior to the 2011 CBA.If owners are serious about leveling the competitive playing field, sacrificing a few percentage points is likely the only way they could get the players to agree to such a drastic change. It would mean sacrificing the financial gains a new system could create for the sake of improving Meyers Leonard Jersey the league's overall product. In that sense, both the players and owners could benefit in the long term. But money is the driving force behind every decision the owners and the union make. Neither side is going to give up a penny without a fight, so for the time being, a change of this magnitude seems fairly unlikely. Click here Click here Click here