This One Little Trick Could Make Detroit a Free Agent Draw

Detroit sports fans have been in a depressive state for several years. We see glimpses of success, followed by hard letdowns by our four major professional sports teams. We know that anything can happen if our teams just make the playoffs. Hope springs eternal, or something like that.

All four major sports leagues have some form of salary cap. The NHL and NFL having a hard cap; the NBA with a soft cap, and MLB enforcing a luxury tax on teams spending over a certain threshold. These applications used to promote parity, stability, and allow for a certain spreading of talent around each league.

That’s great in theory, and each league is raking cash from ticket sales, jerseys, and television deals, but somehow, we Detroiters understand that we will never compete like the major destination teams. How did the Dodgers end up signing or trading for the top baseball players every year?

How do NHL teams in Florida keep restocking with best players in the show? How has the Vegas Golden Knights, established only 10 years ago, made it to the Stanely Cups finals three times, winning at all once while an Original Six franchise like the Red Wings has struggled to break .500? 

All four Detroit-based teams typically rely on homegrown talent with the occasional free agent signing—usually a has-been extending his career into his mid-30s, but Detroit fans never seem to get that superstar in his prime with perennial All Star ability and top-five skill set.

It’s a hard pill to swallow that the state of Michigan is not a free-agent destination. We’re a northern city with harsh winters, humid as hell summers, a place where deaths outpacing births and college grads depart for more exciting places.

So how do we turn Detroit into a free-agent destination for athletes, and by extension a desired landing spot for top talent in other occupational lanes? Well, what is drawing athletes and other wealthy folks to states such as Florida, Texas, and Nevada?

According to several reports and studies over recent years, affluent high-income earners such as professional athletes have flocked to states with no income tax, most famously the states of Florida, Texas, and Nevada. Polling by the New York Times of current and former NHL players indicated a vast majority reported that state income tax, or a lack thereof, was as a major consideration when signing with a team and deciding where to live in the off-season.

Michigan has fallen in most economic rankings in recent years and politicians across the political spectrum have continually sought tired old initiatives such as tax incentives, subsidies, and payoffs to bolster economic growth as a means to compete with other states for manufacturing, tech, but nothing seems to work.

One thing we as a state haven’t tried is abolishing the state income tax, but even now the notion is verboten in most establishment circles.

It’s not that we don’t know it will work. Every large state without income tax has thrived, yet we keep the status quo. In fact, Michigan is a status quo state; never changing, resigned to an unchanging stagnant rate of managed decline and from the outside looking in, that’s how we are perceived.

During this current Michigan governor’s race, current Republican nominee Congressman John James and fformer AG Mike Cox spoke with Michigan Enjoyer about the possibility of Detroit losing its Red Wing captain, Dylan Larkin, and about their plans to abolish the state income as a means to keep professional athletes from leaving the state as free agents. James has committed to phasing out the state’s 4.25% income tax if elected governor. In a recent interview, his oppenent Jocelyn Benson couldn’t say for certain what the state income tax rate even was.

We are not doomers in Michigan. Everyone great team we’ve had, every moment of glory, every piece of hardware won in those eras was force multiplied by top free agent talent.

I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when the Red Wings traded for Brendan Shanahan. I know the very moment I learned Brett Hull was signed late in the 2001 offseason. Remember the shockwaves through the NBA when the Pistons snagged Rasheed Wallace? The excitement in the voices on sports talk radio when Pudge signed with the Tigers in 2004, followed by Magglio the next year, and the blockbuster trade that brought Miggy the year after that?

Nostalgia being the rust of memory, one shouldn’t dwell too long in past glory. Perhaps we should focus on success in the future, and what could make Michigan a destination for the best athletes, the best workers, and the highest achievers in the world. 

Abolish the damn income tax and let’s start winning. I mean, what are we even debating at this point?