yosemiteben wrote:BlackOutBuzz wrote:Better to sign him to a max deal this off-season then a near-max next year, with the owner's "smoothing" proposal shot down the cap is likely gonna shoot up all at once.
Can you expound on this? With a max he'll benefit from any increase in the cap, right? Don't understand why we'd be better off unless you're just referring to getting that first year at a discount, which wouldn't be a discount compared to what he would already be paid under his current contract.
Well first, his current contract is set in stone now that his options have been exercised, so any extension would have no effect on what he makes next season and would instead start in 2016.
Secondly, you're right in that technically a max contract has to do with a proportion of the cap the year it begins and not a particular dollar amount (25% of the cap for players coming off rookie deals). And since the official cap is announced right before Free Agency, a player signed to a "max" extension won't even know exactly how much it'll be worth until the next season.
Admittedly I got my years mixed up, and MKG's max would hit the same year as the cap increases (instead of a year prior as I was thinking before). So a better example would be Kyrie Irving. He got a max deal that will kick in next season at 25% of the cap, however, it's not 25% every year. Instead he'll get 7.5% raises each season regardless of how much the cap increases. Last year was the one to really take advantage of this, as evidenced by a lot of extensions: Irving, Kemba, Thompson, Burks, etc.
That said, the team could always employ a tactic used by GS this past offseason with Klay Thompson. It's true they gave him max dollars, but they did not word it as such in the contract. Klay got what they predicted the max contract would be, but not technically a max. So the dollars are set regardless of the cap. So unlike true "max" deals, Thompson's is already set.
