The story of the NBA summer is the amount of available money. The salary cap is rising once again, currently estimated at a cool $92 million, due to the recent TV deal that the league has signed. Nearly every team will have the cap space to go after max players.
This scenario is paving the way for a crazy free agency period with a sub-par free agency class able to get a ton of money. We will likely see some mediocre players get paid quite a bit of money, because teams have plenty to spend.
Mark Cuban, however, thinks we are overreacting. The Dallas Mavericks owner believes that players should be wary of their expectations about massive deals.
Following from ESPN’s Tim MacMahon:
“Every player thinks it’s just going to be a money train this summer. There’s a lot of money; there’s not THAT much money. … And I think there’s going to be teams that save their money for next year, because it’s a better free agent class. People just presume now that everybody’s going to get paid a lot of money, and it’ll be interesting to see if that happens.”
I do get Cuban’s point about teams wanting to roll over money to the next free agency period. That certainly makes sense and some teams will likely attempt to do just that.
But part of the reason expectations are high for this summer is that the cap will get another big bump next year, meaning every deal signed this summer will look much better as a percentage of the cap next year. This means a lot of franchises will be willing to overpay players in order to keep them on long-term deals that look like bargains in a year. His own small forward, Chandler Parsons, may very well be getting a max contract of his own.
So yes, Mark Cuban is right that there may be an overestimation based on teams wanting to keep flexibility. But the thing is, they can overpay players and add to their rosters while still keeping quite a bit of flexibility for next year just by virtue of the cap structure in these next two years.
