Good answer, thanks.
The luxury tax was intended to act soft salary cap and that’s exactly what it is: a cap on cheap teams that allow it to be, or small market teams that are forced into it; and nothing to a team that doesn’t give a **** about what they spend on players. So, to your point, if you want to significantly level the playing field, they’d have to come up with something harder.
The … ahem … $64 question is what would the cap have to be in order to be effective. If they make it too high, obviously, the big market teams would still outspend the majority of teams that would voluntarily keep themselves well under it anyway. It’s true that a few teams on the margins today might join that elite group under a high-cap scenario. But it would still be an elite group, and it would still be a clear minority of teams.
If they make the cap too low, then to free agents, it becomes less about who pays you more, because teams essentially are on even footing, and more about lifestyle choice, such as where your family lives, or where your family want to move to America to live, or where the media you want to highlight your personal brand are, or basically, who happens to be winning right now.
Either way, I think most fans would probably believe the Tigers would lose under either scenario, because in a too-high-cap scenario the Tigers would presumably still not keep up with major market teams—because Ilitch, I guess—and in a too-low-cap scenario, free agents would not choose to come to Detroit as a lifestyle choice, basically same as today.
So, short of bringing back the reserve clause, I’m not sure how they can essentially “force” players to stay in or choose Detroit as a place to play ball and live six or so months a year, even in a salary cap situation.