The conversation around the ongoing Kawhi Leonard saga got me wondering about this. Apparently, there are tons of small ways that owners find to compensate players beyond what's strictly allowed for under league salary cap rules: private use of team planes or properties, hooking them up with business partners or sponsors, and sometimes just outright fake jobs.
Bill Simmons has been talking about how common these things are and how much more difficult they're going to be to police. Specifically, he mentioned initial coin offerings and bitcoin as avenues players and owners can now use to skirt salary caps.
For the same reasons that make bitcoin better money in general, it's also a perfect vehicle by which owners can pay players on the side without anyone seeing it.
In such an environment, players will simply go to the highest bidder, regardless of who has enough cap room. The difference will just be how much of their salary is on the books and how much is on-chain.
Are salary caps still viable? Were they ever? And, is it better to just purge all this commie nonsense from sports anyway?