One Crazy Night In The NBA
By Chad Ford
NBA Insider
Have NBA owners and GMs lost their minds?
A labor war is looming. Owners are claiming poverty. David Stern is vowing to rid the NBA of deadbeat contracts.
So what happens on Monday, the last day for NBA teams to work out extensions with players who began their rookie year in 2001?
Owners hand a jaw-dropping $390 million worth of contract extensions on Monday evening. Tracy McGrady (four years, $85.7 million), Zach Randolph (six years, $84 million), Jason Richardson (six years, $70 million), Tony Parker (six years, $66 million), Troy Murphy (six years, $60 million) and Brendan Haywood (five years, $25 million) all struck gold.
The averages? That's $65.11 million per player. No wonder the owners are all claiming they're broke. And that's not factoring in the $86 million Pau Gasol and Andrei Kirilenko each got earlier in the week, nor the $76 million Richard Jefferson landed or the $40 million Jamaal Tinsley signed for earlier in the fall.
Nor does it include the billions of dollars owners forked out this summer for free agents.
Billy Hunter, the head of the NBA Players Association, is going to laugh in their faces. The owners are begging for stricter gun laws while shooting themselves in the foot repeatedly.
The most amazing thing is that the owners know better. They are on the verge of getting a new CBA that will have fewer contract years, smaller raises and a reduced mid-level exception that will limit free agent movement. Was this a going away gift?
The McGrady extension had to happen. If it didn't, he would've opted out of his contract this summer and someone else would've paid him the cash.
The Parker deal actually was reasonable given the market. He's a 22-year-old point guard with a ring and would have been one of the hottest commodities on the free agent market next summer. The Spurs would have had to fork over a lot more cash to keep him next summer. With him the Spurs are a serious contender for the championship. He's worth the cash.
From there . . . it gets a lot more iffy.
Start with Randolph. Here's a kid who posted monster numbers last season but has the maturity of 12-year old. Anyone who knows Randolph claims he's a nice enough kid, but the emphasis is heavily on the kid part. He's been in the headlines for all the wrong reasons lately and seems like the poster child for all that has ailed the Blazers this past decade.
So what do the Blazers do? They go out and give him a near-max deal (actually it will hit $86 million if Randolph makes the All-Star team). Why? What was Randolph's leverage? His agent, Raymond Brothers, claimed that he'd sign the one-year tender and then bolt the Blazers in 2006. They bit on that apparently, and then gave him all the money that he wanted.
In fairness to the Blazers, the deal isn't really as big as it appears on the surface. As we reported yesterday, 30 percent of it (or $25 million dollars for the math-impaired) is deferred for an additional six years after the contract expires in 2011. But for cap purposes this contract reads like a straight max deal.
Randolph's contract, along with the ones the Blazers signed Theo Ratliff and Darius Miles to this summer take away any potential for cap space next summer something that John Nash was adamant about keeping just six months ago.
Why? Nash explains: "We were very, very comfortable, knowing what we know about Zach Randolph, the person and the player, to go forward. Suffice it to say, we wouldn't have proceeded if we were uneasy."
Somehow I find that hard to swallow considering the things Blazers sources have been constantly telling me over the course of the past year. It might turn out to be a good deal for the Blazers in the long run with the deferred money . . . but Randolph's a risk, regardless of what the Blazers are saying now.
The Haywood deal just proves the old axiom that NBA teams always will overpay for seven-footers.
The Nets did it when they gave Jason Collins four years, $25 million and the Wizards did it with the Haywood contract. Haywood has done virtually nothing in his career. He's shown very few signs that he's going to get better. This is exactly the type of contract Stern despises, but it's also the NBA's old faithful. If you are big and have a pulse over 60, you're getting a big deal.
That leads us to what I like to call "Monday's Perfect Storm".
Mullin's latest head-scratching deals comes months after making Foyle, left, and Fisher, center, rich beyond belief.
On one side you have one of the most feared agents in the NBA, Dan Fegan, representing two players on the Warriors Richardson and Murphy. Fegan, regardless of what you think about his methods, has an uncanny knack for getting extraordinary deals for his client.
Shandon Anderson, Howard Eisley, Austin Croshere, Erick Dampier . . the list of B-list players with A-list contracts keeps going on and on.
On the other side, you have the Warriors. Their history of handing out bad contracts is almost as long as their league-leading playoff drought. New GM Chris Mullin had already signed two of the worst contracts of the summer, that five-year, $40-million dollar Adonal Foyle deal and the six-years, $37 million pact he gave to Derek Fisher.
It wasn't a fair fight.
Fegan claimed he wanted both clients traded if they didn't work out a deal. Mullin claims he didn't panic, that he planned to hand out the $130 million worth of new contracts all along. Whatever.
Richardson's deal is huge, but it's within the realm of possibility. He put up great numbers in Golden State the past season has still has enough raw potential to become a star in a league. The Warriors paid a premium for it -- but so did the Nets with Jefferson, right?
Murphy's deal is one for the record books. Can you name the last player who missed 54 games in a season, has career averages of 8.9 ppg and 6.9 rpg and is rewarded with a huge deal like that? Murphy is a solid player who has proven that he can be a great rebounder when he's healthy.
But $60 million dollars?
And what for? Mullin has now spent more than $200 million dollars this summer locking up three players who have never been to the playoffs before and a fourth player who was a bit player on a former champion. He's determined to keep together a core of players who have never had a winning season.
Before the season, the Warriors were preaching change to the fans. Change from a horrendous streak of losing. Change from the bad contracts that former GM Garry St. Jean loved to sign. Change from the dysfunctional ways of one of the NBA's worst franchises.
Then they fired the only coach who's had any success there in the last decade, hired an unproven college coach, let their best center leave via free agency, signed Foyle to a ridiculous contract to compensate, overpaid Fisher and then locked the franchise into six years of the status quo by throwing $130 million at Richardson and Murphy.
People wonder why I'm down on the Warriors. Ladies and gentleman of the jury, I rest my case.
The Beat Goes On
Still not convinced that teams have lost their mind? On the same day that owners were handing out the GNP of a small country, two more overpriced, under-performing players hit the waiver wire.
Eddie Robinson and Bo Outlaw were bought out of their contracts. Robinson had two years, $14 million left on his contract. Outlaw had one year, $6.6 million left on his.
Earlier in the week, Eisley was bought out of the last two years, $14 million of his deal. And we all expect Anderson to be let go from the remaining three years, $24 million left on his deal.
Don't be confused by the waiver-wire thing. These teams are still on the hook for these players' contracts. The players might have given up a million or two for their freedom, but the team is on the hook for most of it. The players just don't have to suit up anymore.
You'd think that a laundry list of bad deals like that (two of which Fegan negotiated) would give an owner or two pause . . .
It didn't. Stern is right, the owners need protection from themselves. But it's hard to generate sympathy for successful businessmen who no longer seem capable of running their own business.
The Almost Deals
After that rant, it's probably hypocritical to criticize some teams that didn't get deals done by the deadline. For the most part, teams like the Bulls did the financially prudent thing in refusing to overpay for the potential of guys like Eddy Curry and Tyson Chandler.
But there was one deal that didn't get done that could haunt the team down the road. The Sixers' inability to get Samuel Dalembert locked up could cause them some big problems down the road.
Agent Marc Cornstein claimed that the two sides did strike up negotiations again on Monday, but "we were still very far apart."
Cornstein was comfortable turning down the Sixers' offer in part because "we've taken a look at the free agent landscape and are pretty confident that the teams with cap room will be interested in Sammy."
He's right. Once the Warriors, Spurs and Wizards locked up their guys, the free agent pool shrunk. Teams like the Hawks, Cavs, Bobcats, Clippers and possibly the Sonics will head into the summer with significant cap room. The Hawks, Cavs, and Sonics in particular will be in the market for a big man and Dalembert might be the best one on the board come July 1st.
If he progresses at the pace he did last year (or even if he doesn't: see the big man axiom above), the Sixers could get taken to the cleaners. Factor in that the also have Willie Green and Kyle Korver hitting the free agent market and the Sixers could be the one team that actually ended up getting screwed by not coming to terms on a deal now.
QUOTE OF THE DAY
Who would've thought that we'd ever have a quote to rival Spree's ridiculous "I've got a family to feed" line from Monday. Well, Eddie Robinson's agent, Paul Collier, might have topped it on Tuesday.
Here's what Collier said about his client after the Bulls dumped Robinson and agreed to eat the remaining $14 million of his deal instead of having the forward rot away on the bench for the next two seasons.
"Eddie Robinson is about one word: winning and losing." Ummmm. . . .actually Paul he's just about losing.
Chad Ford covers the NBA for ESPN Insider.
