threrf23 wrote:Homerclease wrote:threrf23 wrote:
Our core isn't going to stay 100% together as is. Players get older, things fall apart, and complacency kills. We can't even be guaranteed that Kyrie resigns and besides him Tatum's the only guy IMO with the potential to be a truly elite player.
Still doesn’t mean we have to pay Smart nearly double what his market dictates
It's also about showing good will to buy loyalty, showing everyone in the locker room we are trying to pay them
their worth rather than
the lowest salary we can get away with, and it's also about having tradeable salaries that can enable us to make trades that otherwise would require us to break up or primary core.
One could argue that those two things are the same. I'm not going to do that. But, one could.
What I will say is that it's not good business to voluntarily give away a ton of leverage. When you offer a player an early extension, often times it will be a middle-of-the-road offer, which they either take for stability, or choose to gamble on themselves and head to free agency. That's a totally fine and fair way of operating. All the burden and risk shouldn't be on the team - there should be some assumption of risk by both sides. The team may find themselves having to match something well above their original offer or lose the player, and the player may find that the market doesn't bear anything even at the level of the original offer.
If the team follows your policy and then goes ahead and gives a significantly above market value contract to the player anyway, then the team has damaged their leverage in future negotiations, and no player will ever take the early extension offer unless it's already about at the max they can envision for themselves.
Earning loyalty is one thing. Methodically outbidding the rest of the league for your players, however, is a sure-fire way to fill your roster with bad contracts and significantly damage your chances at contention.
