Hollinger with a good article in the athletic on the cap. I dont think many people fully realize what is going to happen with the cap. He projects the cap is will go up to $200mil by 2028 with max contracts at $70mil
This impacts Mitchell as there is probably no way to extend him unless they change the CBA. He will likely hit the market as an UFA in '25 since he will get a lot more then the extension.
For RJ, if you can lock him up to a 4 or 5 year deal it will be well worth it by the middle/end of his deal.
Randle's contract wont even look that bad by the end of his deal.
Knicks may actually be set up pretty decently to make a big move if they play there cards right.
Similarly, this situation hangs over the Donovan Mitchell situation in Utah — another player who is really good but perhaps not quite good enough to become supermax eligible. One reason the Jazz might be looking harder at trading him now and rebuilding the team is the impossibility of extending him ahead of his player option in 2025. He can make an estimated $48 million that year as a free agent but only $41.8 million on the first year of a non-supermax extension.
Now we get to the tricky part: the players who aren’t quite All-Stars but still are pretty good, still on their rookie deals and still pretty obviously capable of getting better. As you’ll see, it gets pretty hard to overpay some of these guys once you factor in the rising cap.
Running my BORD$ model on some of these players, even with its hazy crystal ball looking multiple years in the future, showed just how hard it actually is to screw this up: Players like RJ Barrett, Jordan Poole and Tyler Herro pencil out as being worth something like 50 percent more than their maximum deal.
This results from a combination of the players’ youth and the rising cap. For the youngest cohort of extension-eligible players, it seems virtually impossible to overpay them at almost any price; in fact, “extendability” creates a downside risk that the contract might end up too low just as the player’s value peaks.
For instance, the biggest risk with an extension like Johnson’s above is that he’ll depart in unrestricted free agency at the end of the deal due to the near-impossibility of a workable extension. By BORD$, Johnson’s contract is a humungous value in any environment where we have 10 percent year-over-year cap increases (or anything even remotely close). However, he can only be extended for $21 million a season in the final year of the deal — a pittance for a then-27-year-old in a nearly $200 million cap environment if he’s just a solid starter, let alone a star.
In some cases, that’s the case even if the player’s development stalls out. For example, BORDS$ values Poole as being worth $28.7 million for the coming season. If he doesn’t improve at all from that point, the rises in the cap environment alone will make him worth $145 million over the first four years of an extension. The most the Warriors can legally pay him over those four years is $147 million. The math for Barrett and Herro — both of whom are a year younger than Poole — plays out nearly as strongly.
Thus, committing to pay one of these guys $40 million in 2026-27 may seem like a big swallow, but it’s the equivalent of a salary in the $25 million range today. From the team side, they don’t need to become All-Stars for the contracts to turn into big wins. Also, going longer is likely even better. A full five years on a “designated rookie” deal looks aggressive at first, but by the end of the deal, you have a 27-year-old being paid regular starter money.
Meanwhile, from the players’ side, one wonders if some of these guys will want to bet on themselves rather than go long. Wouldn’t a player like Herro or Barrett prefer to sign, say, a short three-year extension and hit unrestricted free agency as a 26-year-old with a post-TV-deal cap?
