TwinnerA had an interesting complaint in the Suns vs Grizz thread, about how players on our team are getting paid full wack, despite not making it to the playoffs, and sucking in general.

In that spirit, I've come up with a cunning plan:

Even though I don't side with the owners often, I'd support a player/coach compensation scheme that rewarded wins through bonuses, at least for the stars.  Make this a 50:50 base/bonus plan.

Take Shaq, for instance.  Split his $20M into 2 parts: $10M base salary, and bonuses.  Lets be generous, and let him match his base salary with 50 wins.. so he'd get $200K for every win.

If the team wins more than 50 games, his bonus would exceed his base salary.  In a 60 win season, Shaq would make $22M.

However, I would do a bunch of things in this scheme:

1. Exclude the Veterans minimum from the scheme, so that a player is guaranteed to make the minimum.  eg. if the Vet's minimum for a player of a certain age is $2M, and his contract is $3M, then the bonus applies only to the $1M left after subtracting the Vets minimum (and not to the $1.5M which is 50% of the player's salary).
   
2. Increase the Veterans minimum.
3. Exclude players on 1 year contracts, or shorter.
4. Enforce the salary cap, so that the total base + 50 win bonus salaries cannot exceed the salary cap.
5. Extend the bonus scheme to include the post season, and make these bonuses exempt from the cap.
6. Enforce the salary floor, so that owners like Donald Sterling can't get away with uber-cheapness.  If the salary floor exceeds the total base salaries for the team, then the difference should be treated as a mandatory bonus.