Illuminaire wrote:I was having this argument with a friend. I fully concede that Lillard is a fantastic player and teammate. While I might not say he's the 3rd best guard in the league, he's absolutely top five even if I'm splitting hairs.
He's still not worth the supermax.
That's not his fault. It's that almost no one in the league IS worth 35% of the cap. Teams that sign those contracts have generally struggled to compete at the highest level; the only time it's safe to lock down that much of your cap is when you are already a championship caliber team and you're just going deeper into luxury tax territory.
The Blazers are going to lose a large number of rotation players this offseason. They also have CJ's new contract coming up. Does CJ think he's all that much worse than Lillard, or much less valuable to the team? Even if it's just perception, if Lillard takes the maximum possible compensation, CJ will probably want to get as much as possible too.
That combination of contracts will sink their team for the next half decade. Again, it's not the fault of those players... and I respect people who want to get paid.
But man. The price is steep. And not just in $$$.
I actually think he
is worth the supermax. That's actually the problem. Fans tend to think players are only "worth" something if they can realistically envision a way to build a top end contender with the player on their contract on a roster. That's not actually a sign of a player being paid what they're worth. That's a sign of a player being underpaid.
Really, if all things were equal and every player was paid exactly what they were worth and every team paid the same salaries out to get precisely the same value per dollar spent, you'd see every team at .500. That's the measure of value, to my mind. Can you build a team that's about .500 relatively easily with a player on that contract? If so, the player is probably worth his contract. The issue is that building a team full of players who are worth their contract results in a .500 team which isn't what fans actually want. They're looking for players who are underpaid relative the market and then branding that as fair value for the player. I'd suggest that Lillard is currently underpaid on his current contract and the supermax will be closer to his actual worth. Being close to his actual worth does make it harder to build a legitimate contender around him, though, as the team will have to find other players to get value of by virtue of underpaying relative what they bring and they won't have a lot of salary room to do it with.
And I had the same thought as you about Lillard: he can't possibly be the third best guard in the NBA. Then I took a look. He probably is. Curry and Harden are obviously better but after them, things level out really, really quickly. Lillard is probably a little better than the current older version of Chris Paul even though Paul doesn't show how good he is statistically with Harden on the roster. Ben Simmons may pass him eventually but he needs to learn to shoot from somewhere, even the FT line, before he even has a chance. Westbrook would be debatable but I think Lillard is better than him at this point. Lowry, Irving, Bledsoe, Walker, Conley, Butler, Oladipo, Beal, etc. are all worse than Lillard. Third is probably the right spot for him right now. That might not be true even next season, but this season, it sure looks like it.
