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I'd be much more open to that than a longer deal at the same price. By that point he will either have proven himself as legitimately worthy of the big money, or he'll be a young, 'solid' expiring.
2 years + a team option is probably a compromise I'd be fairly willing to consider: the $20m a year Lonzo would want, but with the flexibility that helps the team long term. If Lonzo/Klutch weren't amenable to that kind of middle ground then I'd just move on from him completely honestly.
Basketball.
I don't mean to dig on Lonzo here, and I know it's just a coincidence and that he'll almost certainly bounce back, but it is quite funny that after everyone made jokes about him only being good in February he immediately comes out in March and goes
- 23/7/8 on 56/60/100 splits vs Utah (really good game)
- 12/1/5 on 50/33/0 vs Chicago
- 10/4/1 on 25/18/0 vs Miami.
He's shooting 31.8% from 3 over three games in March. Again, that will almost certainly improve after all-star break, but it is funny. Dude just loves February.
Mike Conley's first extension with the Grizzlies is the best/most favorable outcome I can come up with. Not that they're similar players necessarily, but the profile is pretty equivalent...high draft pick, mostly disappointing play with some positive signs, team no good though some pieces were there (Gasol/Z-Bo), etc.
Very interesting-
Per @cleantheglass Lonzo Ball-Brandon Ingram-Zion Williamson-led lineups have a +16.5 efficiency differential w/o Bledsoe on the floor. That figure jumps to +32.6 w/o Bledsoe and Adams.
— Oleh Kosel (@OlehKosel) March 11, 2021
So yes, I want to see the Pelicans engineer a better roster around this young trio.
I just don't want to see Lonzo walk for nothing. Sure, it's better than making a mistake, but you either trade him before the deadline or you dig in and are willing to match any offer.
Maybe a year of warning cries has the effect of teams overcorrecting and trying to squeeze, but in general, when teams have money, they spend it.
— Shamit Dua (@FearTheBrown) March 11, 2021
I really think you're going to see an offer for Lonzo between 20M to his max around 28+M per year.
Well, it's not exactly baseless: it's based on the track record of what teams actually do in these kinds of circumstances.
Free agency coming up. The actual FA class is not particularly loaded, with most of the big names either extended or under normal contract, but there's a lot of teams with a lot of cap space. What happens when multiple teams with a lot of money run into a FA with no real stars in it?
Solomon Hill gets $12m a year, Otto Porter gets $24m a year, Timofey Mozgov gets a $62m deal, Bismack Biyombo signs for $18m a year, Harrison Barnes gets $24m a year.
Why, when the cap is larger now than it was then, would it be at all surprising for Lonzo to be offered $20m or more per season? That's the 2021 monetary equivalent of the Biyombo deal, really.
Remember when I was saying that one huge thing for me when it comes to Lonzo is the consistency, because I have basically no faith in him to continue hot streaks?
Over the last 6 games, Lonzo Ball is averaging:
12/3/5 on 35.9% from the floor and 29.2% from 3.
This is after averaging 16/5/5 on 46.5% from the floor and 48.9% from 3 in February.
We all expected those averages to come down a bit, sure - I don't think even his biggest fans expected him to suddenly shoot 49% from 3 forever - but to crash this hard this quickly is a testament to that unreliability.
Of course, 6 games is a small sample size and for all we know it's just a blip and he'll pick back up and shoot 39% from 3 from now until the end of the year again, but it's this sort of thing - the fact that his suddenly shooting 29% from 3 isn't surprising - to makes me very concerned about giving him the cash: zero faith in consistency.
As I said, I can see something around $20 million, but nothing close to the max as Shamit stated. I know you know that most of those deals you are referring to came in a one-time year when the cap skyrocketed because the NBAPA refused to allow the spreading of the large increase in cap. This year is not even remotely comparable. Also, none of those are nearly max deals that Shamit referred to as a possibility for Ball.
This was what I said-
Maybe at the $20 million mark, but I cannot see anyone maxing him out.
You chose to bring up completely irrelevant contracts to say that his comment was reasonable. Everyone knows this is not 2016 as the cap did not artificially balloon with a one-time infusion. When teams have money, they may spend, but typically not on long-term deals. I do not see Ball getting a 4-5 year max deal simply because a team has money to spend. I also do not see him signing a 1 year deal with a team for $20-$28 million. Now, maybe some team will think he is their future and splurge, but I doubt it.
Shamit said that due to all the money going around and the lack of marquee free agents, he could see someone offering him a contract between $20 and $28m a year.
You came out and said, essentially, ''that's a baseless opinion, I could maybe see someone offering $20m but not the upper end of that range''
Which is basically just agreeing in principle with minor quibbles over the detail. It doesn't actually matter for our purposes if Lonzo gets offered $20m or $22m or $28m because all of those numbers are too much.
If you can't see someone offering him $28m, then cool, good for you; but you could imagine someone maybe giving him $20m, which is still too much so what difference does it make? Very little.
The ''irrelevant contracts'' are not really irrelevant: everyone knows that this is not 2016 but the fact remains that there are several teams with a lot of money and not many names to spend it on: the why for that situation is what is really irrelevant. If someone was willing to spend $18m a year on Bismack Biyombo in 2016, which had a cap of around $95m (ish), that was about 19% of the cap. I personally don't think it's at all unlikely that someone will offer Lonzo an equivalent chunk of the cap this year, which (in this year's $109m cap) is about $21.8m.
A contract of equal proportion for Lonzo yields something like $22m a year in today's cap; can I see someone taking a swing on Lonzo for equivalent cap impacts as they were willing to swing on Biyombo? Yes, I can. That's why I brought it up: because if you can imagine one, you'd have to see Lonzo's value as being inarguably lower than Biyombo's to argue that this $20-28m range was out of the question. Unless you think the NBA FO's have just become collectively far far smarter in the last 5 years, which maybe you do.
$20 million for an ascending player is an easy contract to move, but $25-28... He'll cost you assets to move if plummets back down to his old mean. High risk/mild reward at the end of the day. You're Paying and Praying that he doesn't stay just average with a very flawed game.
The Clippers, with a well-chronicled need for a playmaking upgrade, are exploring trade routes to acquiring New Orleans' Lonzo Ball before next Thursday's NBA trade deadline, league sources say.
— Marc Stein (@TheSteinLine) March 19, 2021
Funnily enough, what the Clips need most is a penetrator who can threaten the rim and create collapses, and Lonzo is very much not that.
But if they want to cough up or facilitate a three way for him, I'm in.
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