| Yeah this is one of the biggest urban legends in sports. It's just not a thing. A team won't pay a player just to keep them from going to their division rival or whatnot, it's a nice fairy tail for the ESPN talking heads to keep repeating and it generates a nice bit of juicy controversy, but it just isn't a thing. Besides it doesn't pass the smell test. If you don't value the player or you think your chances of winning are better by spending that money elsewhere, why would it be a net benefit to your team to keep a player you don't want to pay just to stop him from going to another team? Do you think the Dallas Cowboys are really thinking to themselves "Man, we don't really value RBs like that, but we really got to stop Zeke from going to the Eagles"? Nonsense! Likewise if Google really doesn't want an employee going somewhere else to put a damper on their dominance, if it really was the goal of that employee to prevent Google's dominance, don't you think there are infinitely many other avenues that person could take? If you are paying for the knowledge, what is to stop this individual from creating a pseudonym and committing to an open source AI library on a separate laptop on their free time? The answer is nothing, and in fact that happens all the time, or the employee is busy creating their side business unbeknownst to the company, leaves, and waits out their non-compete. It's a silly conspiracy to think smart people will willfully stand by getting paid to do busy work and not pick up on what's really going on, and it doesn't make sense. |
It just doesn't make sense to waste your cap space on a player you don't actually want to play. If you sign someone, you want to integrate them into your gameplan or at least warm the bench. And if they're a benchwarmer, you weren't signing them just to prevent others from doing so.