Rob Bradford

Ray Davis of the Rangers wants a cap.

There's kind of a smaller... It's unfair to say Artie Moreno is in a smaller market group, but Artie Moreno, Castellini in Cincinnati, there's a group that is consistently...

Kind of a thorn in the commissioner's side, I think, is how to look at it.

And to some degree, if you're Rob Manfred, you've got to demonstrate to these guys who do want a cap a good faith effort to get it.

And then the question is if it really does seem that the players are entrenched, if the league hasn't been able to flip player sentiment on this.

Can they pivot?

Do they pivot?

And I would think logically they would, but they're also never going to telegraph that.

You're never going to make a proposal for a cap in the middle of 2026 and then say, but we'll come off of that later.

And so to go back to leverage of power, it's all kind of leverage building on both sides for a while here.

I was looking back through what happened last time.

The CBT money, the league didn't start offering big raises in the luxury tax dollars until February.

Things don't move, but there's so much yelling and bluster before it.

And I think the trick for people...

kind of in those early months, this season, in the offseason, once the lockout starts, is going to just be kind of trying to educate yourselves, and I'm going to try to educate myself and readers on, okay, how would these proposals work?

How do cap systems work?

What are the downsides?

What are the upsides?

And you want to try to follow the substance, the –

tactical positions, I don't want to say they're a distraction, but they kind of are.