In 2023, the Denver Nuggets won the NBA title, and Bruce Brown capitalized. An important member of the championship run, he averaged 27 minutes in the playoffs and provided important utility as a hybrid man: Brown was raised as a point guard and can dribble and settle offenses down, but he’s also got the ability to defend, rebound, and finish in the paint like a power forward. His unique skill set proved essential to the Nuggets championship.
It also got him a two-year, $45 million contract with the Indiana Pacers. But in Naptown, he was less important to what his team did on the floor. Halfway through his first Pacers year, his contract was used as a financial puzzle piece in the deal that brought Pascal Siakam to Indy. Brown made little impact with his new team, the Toronto Raptors, and was shipped again a year later. This time, his income number was part of the Raptors’ acquisition of Brandon Ingram, and Brown ran out the clock on his contract with the New Orleans, for whom he played in just 23 games. The amount of people who can give detailed thoughts on his Pelicans days might be in the single digits.
In these two seasons making over $20 million dollars per, and being tossed around like a hot potato, Brown’s value was readjusted by the league. Now, Denver can afford him again; they were constitutionally disallowed from matching the Pacers’ offer, and literally could not possibly bring him back for their championship defense season (a second-round failure, without him). But at $3 million per season, the veteran minimum? Denver can do that. Bruce is coming home, as he presaged he would all Spring, showing up courtside to Nuggets playoff games in a cowboy hat.
Brown’s perfect fit in Denver, and odd existence elsewhere, brought this on—but so has the tight money landscape around the sport. Guards are, by default, the most plentiful players around. There are many more basketball players under 6’6” than there are NBA men larger than that. So, their position is being squeezed the most. Perhaps Brown can farm the Nuggets for another ring-and-payday boon, or perhaps this is just his new reality, shared with every other guard who’s not an All-Star.
Damian Lillard’s return to the Portland Trailblazers is both different and similar. Recent signee of a three-year, $42 million deal, he’s hardly the man who’s made over $300 million in the past decade. Lillard is recently 35, and also recently injured; he’ll miss all of the next season, recovering from a torn Achilles tendon he suffered in the first round of the playoffs, when his Milwaukee Bucks flamed out. Lillard’s new deal is both a diminution of his previous stature and pretty inflated; he definitely won’t be worth his cap hit in Portland during a season when he doesn’t play a single game, and even as an aging, under-sized, and battle-worn guard starting the second year of the contract at age 36, he’s not a great bet to be a $14 million guy in this financially oppressive NBA, either.
Lillard is probably worth more than that to the Blazers fanbase, though. Even him being on the bench is likely to boost ticket and merchandise sales. Bruce Brown won’t do that. It’s how Lillard got here, though, that connects his story to Brown’s. Waived and stretched by the Bucks after his injury, so that they could continue to make the most of Giannis Antentokounmpo’s prime, Lillard was ultimately viewed by Milwaukee more as a conduit of numbers and restrictions than as a basketball player. The harsh matrix of contracts that clash more than they interlock has chewed him up and spit him out, too. Anyone might want to go home after having their humanity commodified and rejected like that, no matter how they were compensated along the way.
Chris Paul got to avoid the pay-cut part of all this. Up until he was 39, he was still making $30 million per season. A few months younger than LeBron James, he’s the second oldest active player. Paul was president of the player’s union from 2013 to 2021, and helped engineer the golden years of salary growth that now seem to be disappearing for all but the most zenith-level of guards. He’s made $400 million over his two decades playing, so he’s okay going back to the Los Angeles Clippers for just a shade over $2 million in what might be his final hurrah. He reportedly values being with his family, full-time, more than whatever he might achieve on the court. Home is a great place to go when the sun is quickly setting, and you've gotten to avoid the worst of its burn.