I saw this comment on an article about the salary cap. It is from Yahoo! user Angel.

Here's my take on the salary cap. It's in the wrong place. Capping the salary a team can spend only makes it more difficult to keep players, because there will always be a player (like Shawn Horcoff) that takes up so much of the teams annual cap that the team is handcuffed on who they can sign and for what amount. Why not do it this way. Rookies/first year players make the base minimum salary, plus incentinves. Second year players (let's set the bar at 50 games played in the season) get an increase, plus incentives. And so on and so forth. The better players can ask for more in the way of incentives, based on their performance. In theory, if the player wants to earn a $6,000,000 bonus for leading the league in scoring, for example, then he would play alot harder to earn it. But that's just my mindset. In short, make it a base salary commiserate on the number of seasons played and the peformance incentives won't really affect the teams payroll if the player can't achieve their pesonal bonus clauses.