bwgood77 wrote:As I mentioned in the game thread, Sam Vecenie wrote a solid piece in The Athletic about the Ayton decision, so ignore if you are tired of reading/thinking/discussing this, but I imagine some might want to read and find what he has to say interesting. Beware though, it's lengthy, even longer than most of GoK's posts.
I tried to bold and slightly enlarge some of the items that haven't been talked about...I mentioned a few items briefly in maybe the game thread or a post or two yesterday after reading it, but many may have not seen.Spoiler:[spoiler]By Sam Vecenie Oct 19, 2021
The decision not to sign Deandre Ayton to a max rookie extension baffles me, and it baffles me for reasons that have very little to do with the perception of Suns owner Robert Sarver being “cheap.” Let me explain.
The way the Phoenix Suns have gone about building their contender over the last few years is something of a model for other organizations. They drafted well, hitting on high picks in Devin Booker, Ayton, Cam Johnson and Mikal Bridges. Then, when they thought that group was ready to take the next step, they took advantage of their open cap sheet and acquired Chris Paul.
It’s exactly how rebuilding teams should do it once they find a star in the draft like Booker. Rack up a couple of valuable picks while waiting for that star to mature, hit on those draft picks, then transition into trying to compete by making smart moves for veterans who help you take the leap.
Now, the Suns took the leap into legitimate title contention much faster than anyone could have anticipated by making the NBA Finals last year, a real testament to the moves made by general manager James Jones that have made them difficult to guard on offense while also being a tough defensive team.
Having said all of that, the next step after you reach that contention window is being willing to pay your stars. The Suns did that by giving Paul a creative four-year, $120 million deal with outs essentially after a Year 3 partial guarantee and a total out after Year 4 if his age ever catches up with him. They’ve already given Booker a max deal, and they decided to sign Bridges to a four-year, $90 million extension that I loved and wrote about.
But in the case of Ayton, the team’s No. 1 overall pick back in 2018, the Suns seem to have drawn their line — at least for now.
The team did not agree to a contract extension with Ayton before the Monday deadline. Ayton and his camp firmly believed he was a max player following the start to his career, where he has averaged 16 points and 10.6 rebounds while emerging as a defensive building block on the interior who also can stay on the court in crunch time in playoff games. He was an essential cog in Phoenix’s run toward the NBA Finals last year as a 22-year-old, seeing absolutely no dropoff in terms of production. So why didn’t Phoenix agree?
The aforementioned Jones, who has done a terrific job over the last 12 months in cultivating a legitimate contender after years of losing in Phoenix, gave his answers to our own Sam Amick, and it’s worth reading those to understand the team’s thought process. It seems there was a legitimate breakdown in communication. And of course, it’s important to note the team doesn’t lose Ayton’s rights. He’ll still be a restricted free agent in the summer, and the Suns will be able to match any deal he gets on the open market. They also can offer him a five-year max then. Ayton’s time with the Suns isn’t over by any stretch, and it’s possible this ends up being an academic exercise.
But to say the Suns’ decision was met with confusion from other teams was a bit of an understatement. Just to make sure I wasn’t taking crazy pills about his value, I reached out to high-ranking representatives for three other organizations to get a feel for Ayton’s perceived value league-wide.
All three said they would have been comfortable giving Ayton the five-year max, especially if they were in Phoenix’s position. They wouldn’t have loved doing it, but they would have done it in the end. Two said they would have probably tried to hold firm on a team option in the fifth year in order to get some security in case he does end up settling more in the Clint Capela or Myles Turner mold long-term as a productive but just-below-elite defensive center — great players, maybe All-Stars in a weird year, but not quite consistent stars. However, all evaluators agreed Ayton possesses upside beyond that duo, and a max deal was in order given his productivity, youth, upside, pedigree and contributions he made to a winning team last year.
The Suns, though, just didn’t feel that way, clearly. Regardless of what Jones said, I think it just comes down to the simple fact that the Suns don’t think Ayton has proven himself as a max player yet, despite his representation pricing him as such. Occam’s Razor states that the simpler theories are more likely to be correct than complicated ones, and that’s really the simplest explanation here. If they felt he was a max guy, they would have given him the max and it wouldn’t have come to this. They want to see him prove what he did in the second half of the regular season and in the playoffs for one more season.
Honestly, the idea that Ayton isn’t “worth” a max deal yet is an argument that holds water right now, especially in the current ecosystem the NBA finds itself in with big men. I’ve been as outspoken as anyone evaluating in the public sphere when it comes to not wanting to pay non-All-Star big men. Ayton, at this point, hasn’t reached the level of All-Star. In a vacuum, I understand the hesitation.
Unfortunately for Phoenix, I don’t think that is the reality of the situation it finds itself in or an accurate read of the marketplace. The Suns are trying to win a championship this year and should be maximizing all avenues toward doing so. The team has now created a situation that will hang over it all year, as Ayton just became the first No. 1 overall pick to not receive a contract extension since Anthony Bennett, despite having proven more in the playoffs than any of the others that were selected between the two of them.
Additionally, I don’t buy the argument that the team gets an added benefit by not extending Ayton. The Suns are absolutely an over-the-cap team in the summer of 2022 with or without Ayton’s cap hold after signing Bridges and Landry Shamet to extensions. Speaking of Shamet, it’s also hard for me to get past the idea of Phoenix driving a hard bargain when it comes to Ayton but then deciding to extend Shamet on a multi-year deal at around $10 million per year. The last time we saw Shamet, he was a defensive liability when he was on the court for the Nets against the Milwaukee Bucks in the playoffs. There is a real chance he can’t stay on the floor in lineups with Payne off the bench in critical moments. I’m not totally convinced he’s a considerably better option than someone like Bryn Forbes, who has signed deals for $2.3 million and $4.5 million each of the last two years. The team likely felt like it became pot-committed when it traded a first-round pick for Shamet over the summer, but I can’t help but wonder if this is compounding one mistake with another.
Theoretically, waiting on Ayton does afford them the flexibility in trades of not already having two designated rookie extension players on the books — something Amick’s story alluded to — but that is such a small, marginal value add. Those players get traded so rarely, and there aren’t enough of them out there. By the time franchise players like Trae Young, Luka Doncic, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Jayson Tatum, Donovan Mitchell, De’Aaron Fox and Bam Adebayo have potential to come available (in three years), Booker will already be off his designated extension, meaning the team would have its extra spot for a designated player back.
Really, there are only four players out there where that argument holds any water because 2017 and 2018 didn’t feature many extensions: Ben Simmons, Karl-Anthony Towns, Michael Porter Jr. and Jamal Murray. Murray is out with a torn ACL right now and doesn’t look like he’s leaving Denver any time soon. Porter just signed his extension, but it seems like a real risk to withhold an Ayton deal because maybe you want to acquire Porter when he’s not currently available and Denver has tended to retain its talent. Simmons hasn’t proven himself in the playoffs, and the cost to acquiring him is pretty prohibitive given that fact, so I wouldn’t be interested in messing up the chemistry of this team with him if I was Jones. Towns is intriguing. He and Booker are known to be close. But here’s the thing: In a Towns trade, you’re going to have to send back Ayton (or route him to a third team) anyway. If the idea that an Ayton trade limits your trade flexibility was a part of the rationale, it’s overthinking the entire exercise by a substantial margin.
I also don’t love the position Phoenix finds itself in with regard to the free-agency market. Simply put, while value does matter in regard to a player’s salary, you’re “worth” whatever a team is willing to pay. Ayton is now arguably the most attractive free agent on the marketplace next year outside of Zach LaVine. And he’ll be entering a market where plenty of teams out there have enough money to pay him that also need a center.
Detroit would love to find a long-term answer next to Cade Cunningham, will have max cap space and likely wouldn’t be scared off by multi-big lineups involving both Ayton and Isaiah Stewart. San Antonio has a need at the center position and can very easily create max cap space. Ayton would figure to be one of the few free agents of interest to Oklahoma City because he’s one of the few stars who could fit the Thunder’s long-term timeline, and they can easily create the space. And this is before we get into teams being able to create max cap space out of thin air, as we saw this past summer with sign-and-trade deals.
Cap space is now a fungible commodity league-wide, with a lot of creative executives capable of maneuvering clever moves. Charlotte particularly stands out as a team that could maneuver itself into max cap space to pair Ayton with an elite pick-and-roll guard in LaMelo Ball. In Ayton’s case, every NBA executive I spoke with noted that they felt he would get a max deal on the open market this coming summer barring a large collapse in his level of play.
Ultimately, I think playing this game of chicken with Ayton is a bit of an error in judgment. The advantage the team has in extension talks is that it’s guaranteeing security to a player that hasn’t received an exorbitant amount of money yet, and they’re doing it a year ahead of time without any other competition on the marketplace. Phoenix had the ability to guarantee itself a contract that worked on its terms, as opposed to now putting itself at risk for Ayton to sign a deal that is more on his terms. Teams looking to sign Ayton this summer will be able to throw every poison pill in the book at him to make it less attractive for Phoenix to match. They can give him 50 percent of his salary upfront at the start of each league year. They can throw in a max trade kicker. They can put in a player option after the third year, allowing him to hit free agency sooner. All of this is similar to the framework of what happened with the end of Gordon Hayward’s tenure in Utah back in 2014. Utah matched that deal, but he ended up leaving after three more years.
“Speaking in theory without knowing his or his representation’s thinking, it’s a lot easier to turn down a five-year, $170-plus million offer if such an offer comes from Phoenix this summer when you have a four-year deal on the table that guarantees you $130 million and has a player option that puts you in position to opt out after three, which is potentially when Ayton would be able to really cash in on a new league-wide television deal,” one NBA executive who specializes in the salary cap told The Athletic.
Indeed, the specter of the NBA’s next television contract hangs over all of the extensions that were or weren’t agreed to this week. And frankly, this is where we start to get a bit speculative, but a deal is coming and it’s going to affect the league.
The NBA is slated to start negotiating a new television rights agreement at some point in the not-so-distant future, where its asking price is reported to be something in the ballpark of $75 billion, according to CNBC. The league’s current arrangement with WarnerMedia and Disney expires in 2024-25, which means a new deal would kick in for the 2025-26 season. How does that affect Ayton and other players looking to maximize their earnings? It means we could be in for a real salary-cap spike in the 2025-26 offseason. Even if the league and players’ association agrees to cap smoothing measures that they didn’t agree to following the most recent TV deal back in 2016, it’s very possible we could be looking at an enormous salary cap jump. And if you think teams aren’t already accounting for this in decision-making, you’re dead wrong.
That means an Ayton max signed today by Phoenix wouldn’t have necessarily looked like a typical max in 2025-26. The 2025-26 season is when Ayton would have been starting the fourth year of a five-year max contract. So while a max signed by Ayton would have amounted to 25 percent of the salary cap next year, it might have looked more like 20 to 22 percent range for his fourth year of the deal in 2025-26 despite his salary rising in the preceding years. Such a situation gave Phoenix a real incentive to try to get a maximum deal done now for five years. The team would have wrung real value out of his deal in the first three years, given that this is when they are likely to be competing with Paul at the helm next to Booker. Then, they would have gotten a potential bargain in terms of salary if the cap hits the levels prognosticators league-wide think it could.
Again, it’s worth noting that a max five-year, approximately $172 million deal will still be on the table for the Suns to offer this summer. But they have opened themselves up to Ayton potentially signing an offer sheet from someone else through market competition. And it’s worth explaining how the numbers might result in him actually declining such a max offer from Phoenix and instead forcing them to match an offer from a different team.
If Ayton does sign a four-year offer sheet with a player option for the 2025-26 season (thus giving him the option of hitting free agency in the summer of 2025), he has a chance to double-dip value-wise in contractually advantageous ways. He’ll be eligible for a maximum deal that allows his contract to start at 30 percent of the cap by nature of having seven years of experience in the NBA (as opposed to the 25 percent of the cap that his contract can start at now because he has under seven years experience). On top of that, if the TV money kicks in, we could be talking about Ayton being eligible to sign a contract for 30 percent of a salary cap that is in the $160 million range. That would be a deal starting at around $48 million. And by the way, if a $160 million salary cap sounds exorbitant to you, it might actually be a conservative estimate given that Forbes recently projected a potential $171 million salary cap for the 2025-26 season.
This is why the idea of a shorter-term max for Ayton doesn’t really make sense in a vacuum, if that’s what Phoenix really wanted to negotiate on. The value of signing Ayton to a max contract now came with the potential savings the Suns would be experiencing in 2025-26 and 2026-27 if they want to retain Ayton long-term. If Ayton continues to grow in the way that he did last season, taking another step forward, a max now could have looked like a bargain in the future.
It could, frankly, end up as something of a critical error in their long-term build, just because they wanted to save a bit of money now that doesn’t actually affect their short- or long-term flexibility as they build out their roster.
Great read!
Points out alot of things that you have already mentioned as well.
