With the ink almost all signed and dry on the television contract, and NBC out while ABC and ESPN and TNT and TBS and the FBI and the CIA and the KGB and the BBC all get a piece of future broadcast rights, there are rumors beginning to circulate the league that the salary cap for next season is actually going to come DOWN.

	Seattle's Rashard Lewis might not like the change in the salary cap.

That's right, you heard correctly, the salary cap may come down.

No, it is not because of all those empty seats you see at arenas these days. Believe it or not, the attendance throughout the league has actually experienced a slight upsurge, with teams around the league averaging a few hundred more ticket sales this season than last season. (Can you say, Michael Jordan?)

Notice, I said ticket sales. I don't think that actual fans' fannies in chairs is up, just from being at almost every arena in the league this season. But the league refuses to release actual gate attendance, so we will have to go by their figures. (I just hope, for the league's sake, that Arthur Anderson is not involved in auditing the league's attendance or everybody in the front office on Fifth Avenue might want to head down to Chelsea and look for a Dairy Queen with a Help Wanted sign hanging outside. I think I know the perfect training director.)

In any case, while the salary cap is tied directly to revenue from attendance, it also is tied in large part to television revenue, and all indications are that teams are going to receive less money in the first year of the new deal than they did in this, the last year, of the current agreement with NBC.

Apparently, commissioner David Stern backloaded the contract so that the largest portion of money doled out to teams occurred now.

But with declining ratings and by virtue of all those empty seats, Stern did not get increases in television revenue streams for the first year of this deal.

My numbers may not be completely accurate, but word around the league is that each team is going to receive $2.5 million less from the television contract this year, which comes out to a $74 million shortfall.

The NBA uses some kooky formula that only Arthur Anderson employees understand to figure out the salary cap, but essentially they take a percentage of the BRI (basketball related income) to determine what the salary cap is, and the $74 million is only one portion of the BRI.

That is a fancy way of saying the old salary cap was $42.5 million, but the new still has to be calculated.

More important, how will this effect teams and players if it comes to fruition?

Well, clearly it will have an adverse effect for both, because there is less money to be doled out.

Right now, only two teams -- the Chicago Bulls and the Los Angeles Clippers -- are going to have cap space this summer to pursue free agents. That could change, depending on what teams make trades in the coming month for players in the last year of their contracts, positioning themselves for free agency. But say hypothetically the salary cap goes from $42.5 million to $40 million, and the Bulls thought they were going to have around $10 million to go after free agents this summer. Well, that clearly changes to having only $7.5 million to go after free agents, which means Crumbs Krause will have less money to throw at players who want to turn him down.

	Odom

The Clippers are in a little bit of a different situation because while they will have the most money available under the cap, they do not need to go out and recruit new talent. The Clippers have to make determinations if Michael Olowokandi and Lamar Odom are talents worth keeping for the future, and that is how they are going to use their money. They can go over the cap to re-sign their own guys anyway, so a reduced cap will not hurt them as much.

It is going to hurt free agents, though. For instance, the other day, Seattle's Rashard Lewis said he will opt out of his contract and wants the Sonics to pay him the max, which would be a seven-year, $102 million contract under the current climate.

But if the cap goes down to $40 million, Lewis' demands of a max contract suddenly is reduced to a seven-year deal for $88.375 million, a difference of almost $14 million, which is rather significant.

Portland's Rasheed Wallace has an incentive-based escape clause in his contract, which means he would be giving up the final two years and $32 million of his deal.

But Wallace is much less likely to opt out of that contract if he knows no other team can pay him because they are handcuffed by a lower cap number.

The other thing it will do is create a recession-like atmosphere throughout the league, which the rest of the country has been experiencing of late. Basically, when things are tight, people do not want to go out and spend money on lavish things, which means that a team that once thought it may have wanted to make some trades and get creative in order to shake up its roster may now reevaluate because it is going to have less money to spend.

	Jackson

NBA players began experiencing a dramatic jolt last summer, when players like Olden Polynice and Jim Jackson could not get contracts at all, and Anthony Mason, an All-Star, had to settle for somebody's $4.5 million exception.

They may be even more disappointed this summer, when they discover that what they thought was a bottomless well of ducats is beginning to dry up.

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