Stratmaster wrote:Except all of the top 150 paid players weren't starters. Everyone after the 150th paid player weren't reserves. Salaries in the NBA are highly dependent on how old or new the contract is. Vuc's salary is not the 84th highest salary for the coming season. If I didn't miss anyone it will be the 93rd highest salary, and to the point of my post would certainly drop out of the top 100 the following season. Sp let me restate that point of my post, as none of this has much to do with it. The comment was regarding a previous comment that someone had suggested extending Vuc for 2 seasons, and others were saying that was insane.
I said. The ONLY reason to give a player in Vuc's situation an extension would be if you felt that extending him at his current salary would make his contract more tradeable. I added that "I am not saying it WOULD make his contract more tradeable. I am just saying that would be the only reason to do it."
Agree or disagree with that statement?
From there, do you think if a team thought they could have Vuc at that price for 3 seasons instead of one it would make him more or less attractive? Keep in mind that the team trading for him would take into consideration whether or not THEY might have an easier time trading him a season down the road if they wanted to, and his 21 mil salary would certainly move down the rankings you and I were referring to over the next 2 seasons.
The reason I ask, and this is just my perception which may be off base, is that expiring contracts no longer seem to be valued as much as they used to in the trade market.
FWIW, I'm not trying to be argumentative. I'm trying to answer the question you pose of "would this make him more tradeable". The salary at 20M per year does not seem to make him more tradeable to me, nor do I think it qualifies him as a backup caliber player. Teams are not choosing to pay their backups 20M or more as a general rule.
There are exceptions in a few categories off the top of my head:
1: The guy is a bad contract.
2: The guy is really in your top 5 players, but you want him coming off the bench.
3: (Haven't looked but guess this could be true) A team has a ton of rookie deals that are really cheap on it but still performant players
Vuc at 20M isn't going to be in anyone's top 5 players IMO, and obviously you wouldn't want to extend him as a bad contract, and the 3rd situation is more of temporarily oddball position for a team to be in.
Generally, if you are making 20M, a team expects you to be in their top 4 players.
Two other loose thoughts around your idea:
1: A team can just extend him at time of trade as long as the extension isn't above 105% of his current salary or require more than 5% raises. Based on Vuc's last contract (same price, no raises), that would indicate any extension a team would do could be done at the trade time, so little reason for us to proactively give him one unless we potentially want him on that extension as well.
2: Another option is extending him at much less than 20M, like you could extend him at 10M a year, and then that might be more attractive to another team, but at the same time, I'd refer to point #1, if he'd agree to it now, he'd agree to it on trade most likely, so no reason to do it in advance unless we were also happy to have him on that same deal (which given our FO, I wouldn't be shocked if we'd be happy with Vuc at 10M for a couple more years).
