Every team has 13 roster spots. There are 360-ish teams in Division 1A. Therefore, there are 4,600+ available spots for college athletes who want to play college basketball. Each one of those spots will pay different amounts. This is not dissimilar to the market forces that determine what your salary is going to be on your job. I'm just going to assume that you're a worthless employee who provides no value to your company and therefore your salary should be $0 per year. But, that's not how it works because all employees provide some value to the company just like how all players who earn a roster spot provide some value to their team. Thus, they should be fairly compensated for the value they provide. The question here is what is fair compensation for someone who is going to be the 10th, 11th, 12th, or 13th person on roster. This is similar to hiring "entry-level" talent at a company. Someone will think $40,000 is enough money while others may pay $100,000 depending on the role and the skill set. This is the same debate here. At the end of the day, a player may value themselves more, which is fine. If you think you're worth $250,000 a year then good for you. That only becomes an issue if no one is willing to offer you that. And, that's probably what's happening but that's because there's not structure to rev share or agreed upon contracts or things like that yet. For VT, we might have to decide how much money to offer our starting 5 versus how much depth do we actually want/need? If players don't want to take $100,000 offer anymore then maybe spend 80% of our budget on our top 8 guys then go bargain hunting for the rest. It's just so funny to see these debates because there's so many people on here that would describe themselves as "pro-capitalists" who absolutely hate that kind of system when it doesn't work in your favor or you disagree with the market forces behind something.