Why Expensive Rosters Break Up
The pressure that dismantles a costly roster is only partly the tax bill. The deeper problem is that an expensive team loses the ability to fix itself. When a role player is injured or turns out to be worse than expected, the team above the threshold has no exception to sign a replacement and no way to aggregate salary to trade for one. Its weaknesses persist for the whole season by rule.
That creates an unattractive combination: the highest payroll in the sport, a shallow supporting cast and no path to improvement. Front offices respond by acting early, trading one of the expensive players while he still commands a strong return rather than paying a punitive bill for a roster they cannot repair. The result is that contending groups get broken up while they still look formidable, which reads from the outside as impatience and is usually the system working exactly as designed.
