kodo wrote:dc wrote:Catchall wrote:Hayward is 6'9". .
The guy measured out at 6' 6.75". That shouldn't determine his worth as a player or his contract, but height exaggeration of players is just a pet peeve of mine (sorry).
If Hayward is 6' 6" then Al Jefferson must be really short for a center.

Hayward is 6'6.75" barefoot and Al Jefferson is 6'8.5" barefoot, so Jefferson is only 1.75 inches taller and it looks about right in that picture. The thing is, though, when it comes to NBA length, standing reach tends to be the better measure, and Al Jefferson is 9'2" to Hayward's 8'7". That's a 7-inch difference. Paul George is only 1 inch taller barefoot at 6'7.75", but George's standing reach is 8'11". Hayward is not a long player.
Hayward doesn't have George's physical tools (and, by extension, George's ceiling). What Hayward has is a high skill level. While a high skill level is valuable, it's also generally considered something acquirable, unlike physical tools, so Hayward's market value isn't nearly as high as George's. No executive is going to look at what George has gotten and say, "So that's Hayward's ballpark because they have similar offensive production." Hayward doesn't have the physical tools to defend or rebound (or dominate offensively) at George's ceiling.
That said, players of Hayward's caliber are hard to ink in free agency, especially if your team is not an attractive FA destination, so I think $10 mil a year is a fair offer. If Hayward asked for more than that I would let him test the RFA market. I doubt another team is going to offer more than that for a player without exceptional physical tools for his position. Highly skilled and physically flawed two-way wings get paid in the $7 mil range; highly skilled and physically average two-way wings are worth a few more mils than that.
$7-8 mil isn't some kind of magical range for every very good not-quite-borderline-star. Those fall in a wider-than-$1-mil-a-year range. A very good two-way not-quite-borderline-star doesn't have to become a borderline star to be worth $10 mil a year. That follows naturally from the fact that signing a borderline star for $10 mil a year is a very good deal. Also, raising your PPG from 17.5 to 20 doesn't magically turn you into a borderline star (and thereby magically raise your worth from $7-8 mil a year to $12-16 mil a year by the distinction).