DayofMourning wrote:Got to find a way to keep Jae and Goran. It's all fun and games to think about what top tier dude you can add, but Jae and Dragon are MAJOR reasons why we are doing what we're doing. You get cute, and lose those guys, and you're not making postseason runs. We need one more top ten guy, but we need to keep these ELITE level role players.
My thought is that Jae will be harder to keep than Goran. Goran has had a big pay day and having a balloon payment next year with a more market-friendly longer deal will allow him to get to his drop off point having made some serious cash, then take on the bench mentor roles we know and love our Heat lifers in.
Jae will be just topping $35m career earnings this season (compared to Dragic’s more that $115m), and can likely double that from a team that can convince themselves that he’s their missing starting piece. He will definitely get full MLE offers, but may get more from someone like the Hawks - wouldn’t be surprised if they offered something like 45/3. Even if we balloon him up to something like $15m, it’s then him banking on us definitely signing him with the room MLE - then possibly having less guaranteed $ over those same year.
Jae fits us like a glove, but we can’t afford to hamstring ourselves. Yes we’re one top-10 piece away, and yes we get further away if we don’t have Jae & Goran. But we get a higher floor with that top-10 piece & we saw with the big-3: players are willing to take less to be part of something, if they’ve already made big money.
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