dougthonus wrote:League Circles wrote:meekrab wrote:I mean the cap line in 26-27 is projected at $170M, they could easily offer Giddey a max and still have a max available next summer too.
In any case it's largely academic with the way he's been playing, Giddey will be wearing Bulls' Red next fall whether he signs for 25 or 35 million.
Yeah, I don't even want to think or talk about Giddey's deal anymore lol. It's gonna happen. The Bulls are gonna offer him a big deal during the negotiating period (in hopes he signs it before signing an even larger RFA offer sheet with Brooklyn or whoever), and the they'll match if he doesn't sign. The Bulls seriously might match a max offer for Giddey. Which could be a catastrophe but maybe still a better bet than letting him walk for nothing.
If I were the Bulls I'd front load the offer as much as possible.
I'm bracing myself for Giddey getting the 25% max contract, 5 years, player option on the last year.
Yeah me too. Hopefully it won't happen, sucks for team building, but it might make as much sense as anything for Brooklyn to try to do, and then might make more sense for the Bulls to match than to let him walk for nothing.
If he keeps killing it til the end of the season, especially if we make the playoffs for real and he looks pretty good in them, Bulls should maybe even pre-emptively use their ability to give him higher annual raises to force him to agree to a non-player option 5th year (either just guaranteed 5th year, team option or just a 4 year deal) and a slightly lower starting amount, such that before FA even starts, he's received an offer from the Bulls that is both the largest total dollars he can make and the minimum 2026-27 cap hit for the Bulls at that amount (due to increasing max raises).
This situation could suck but not as bad as not having a player as promising as Giddey or just kicking the can on the next 5 seasons in hopes of finding a unicorn in the draft that is much better.
Giddey is playing great right now, but his overall numbers this season still aren't that special, and he's still never gonna be a real plus defender, and his agent should know that, so I'd like to think the Bulls can definitely get him at anything close to a max deal. Just sucks that that's way more than we would have wanted. But we need to remember that what we wanted was for him to eventually become worth a max deal while playing on something much less. Obviously you always want that, but I always say, it's an unrealistic and unsustainable strategy to want to try to build a team on sub market value contracts. Sure you ink them when you can, but you shouldn't project the timing works out in your favor like that. Basically Giddey is starting to pretty consistently look like we wanted him to look next year AFTER he's on a new reasonable deal, he's just doing it uncomfortably early for team optimization.
