The NBA’s offseason is needlessly bleeding over into the regular season
Not sure if you’ve heard, but with three days left to go before the two sides can agree on a contract extension, the San Antonio Spurs and Kawhi Leonard aren’t seeing eye to eye on terms (no pun intended) of the potential deal!
The same disconnect, weirdly, is also in place in Cleveland, where the Cavs and Tristan Thompson are attempting to get things together.
Also, hey, listen – I know this is going to sound weird, but Klay Thompson and the Golden State Warriors are also having the same sort of difficulties.
Jimmy Butler and the Bulls? Still workin’ on it.
Ricky Rubio and the Timberwolves? Attempting to try to place a dollar value on one of the weirder and more wonderful NBA players out there.
Iman Shumpert and the Knicks? They have three days to figure out if he’s going to be a millstone or a cornerstone.
Reggie Jackson and the Thunder? Both sides are counting dimes and taking their time.
Tobias Harris? Enes Kanter? Kemba Walker?
If you’re just catching up to the NBA after a lovely summer spent skipping stones and writin’ poems, let’s catch up.
Players that entered the league in the 2011-12 season have until midnight Oct. 31 to agree on contract extensions with their incumbent teams. If an agreement cannot be reached, the players in question will head into the summer of 2015 as a restricted free agent – which means their current team can match any offer a competing team would officially send a player’s way. This was the case with Utah last summer, as they matched a deal that Charlotte offered Gordon Hayward at a (currently) wild four-years and nearly $63 million.
If suitors are scared off by a move like Utah’s, refusing to bother negotiating with a restricted free agent they’d never get, a player could be caught in restricted free agency limbo. Such was the case for Detroit’s Greg Monroe and Phoenix’s Eric Bledsoe a few months ago. Monroe decided to end the charade and play for the “Qualifying Offer,” a below-market value one-year deal (in Monroe’s case, nearly $5.5 million this season) that comes with trade restrictions this season (he basically has a no-trade clause, should he choose to utilize it) and the ability to become an unrestricted free agent next summer. The Suns eventually relented with Bledsoe, and signed him to a five-year, $70 million deal.
It’s a juicy, not-all-that-complicated setup that creates intrigue and genuinely allows NBA teams to properly use the market to their advantage – something that was missing during the first batch of years that the league re-introduced restricted free agency, which led to the 2011 lockout. Teams would overpay without letting the players coming off of rookie deals sweat a bit, and the results were disastrous for fans.
One of the many problems with that lockout was the way NBA owners and players waited until autumn to start getting serious about proposals and negotiation points, which led to the cancellation of games and a rushed, not-all-that-great NBA season. Alongside a rushed, not-all-that-great collective bargaining agreement.
NBA teams and the players listed above had all of the 2014 summer to try and come up with contract extensions, and while several players did come to terms with their teams, too many are still left in the lurch. Neither the teams nor the players are at fault here, but the NBA’s season tips off for six teams on Tuesday, and the rest of the league shows up to work on Wednesday night.
Again, why is it that the NBA is forcing teams and especially its players to make massive, career-altering decisions during a work week? Both teams and players are making calculated but still risky decisions worked around salary cap worries, luxury tax fears, television revenue hopes, and all manner of actual basketball-related vicissitudes. To place a deadline during the actual regular season is so pointless, and so wrong.
Just ask Minnesota Timberwolves fans, who watched as their franchise player in Kevin Love forced a trade away from the team that will likely miss the playoffs for the 11th straight season this year. Due to the lockout, Love and the Wolves had to negotiate while the 2011-12 season was rolling along, and he signed a four-year, non-max extension with a player option after three years, one that immediately alienated Love from the team’s former general manager and current owner. Had the NBA put an earlier (albeit, truncated) offseason deadline in place, midseason emotions may not have ran so high, and the Wolves may have actually given Kevin the maximum contract he deserved.
Players and teams shouldn’t be putting off these sorts of extension talks until September and October, but if the NBA instituted, say, a Sept. 21 deadline (in honor of Artis Gilmore, Bill Murray, and Bryce Drew’s birthdays), we can avoid the sort of scene that sees Taj Gibson having to agree to a life-changing deal minutes after playing an actual regular season game that counts.
We’re not crying for these teams, which are handling things correctly, or these players that are set to make millions. The NBA’s offseason should already be extended (why is the NBA draft held mere days after the NBA Finals end?) as it is, and most of these teams (especially Golden State, with Stephen Curry’s contract) and signees turn out happy in the end.
Still, there’s no reason to plop this deadline down in the midst of the NBA’s first week. It’s not about messing with early-season NBA games that we’ll have forgotten by January. It’s about forcing teams and players to take a more sober approach to negotiations earlier in the NBA’s offseason.
Or, more specifically, in the actual offseason.
You’re hip to moving things around, Adam Silver. Hop on this one, too.
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Kelly Dwyer is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @KDonhoops
