Lockdown504090 wrote:respectfully, that woman who own the team needs to sell it if she still owns. There is no reason from an asset management perspective to not give him the max. Giving him max now makes complete sense because of way the cap is set to raise over the next 3 years. There are probably only 7-10 teams that wouldnt give him a contract like that. Teams would rather trade for him WITH team control as opposed to being a potential rental and will use that to leverage him.
Ingram has 0 reason to do anything other than play for his numbers, try to stay healthy, sit out as many games as he can and wait until next offseason and get an even bigger max contract than what he would have signed this offseason.
Ingram's size/skill will likely age well, but I seem to recall him being rather injury prone. That he's also not the best fit next to Trey, Herb, and Zion isn't exactly a secret around the league.
Having an enormous amount of money sunk into 2 injury prone stars is potentially franchise crippling. I'm just not sure how much value an extension really adds versus the added risk in this situation. Who was the last star traded that turned into a rental? Kawhi to the Raptors? Ingram isn't a superstar, he's gonna sign for the money wherever he gets traded to.
Yes, the cap will go up because of the new TV deals, but with cap-smoothing in place we can make a fairly well educated guess that the cap will be around $155m in 25-26. New Orleans already has Zion and CJ taking up $70m in 25-26. Add in Ingram at $50m and you're already at $120m with just those three. Their other contracts add up to roughly $30m and that doesn't include Trey Murphy who will need a new deal.
Not bad, but also not great considering how punitive the tax penalties have become.