Four NBA Contracts That Will Age Terribly
The NBA offseason is notorious for teams tossing ludicrous contracts at players. While not all of these contracts are from this offseason, they will inevitably not age well.
This year’s NBA silly season has not nearly been as bad as last year’s. Now that general managers and front offices around the league have settled into the salary cap status quo, the handing out of ridiculous contracts seems to have been reeled in a little bit.
Still, there is more money flying around the association than ever before, and we have certainly become somewhat desensitized to some of the coinage paid out to players around the NBA. Contracts that would’ve shattered presses around the nation just a few years ago now barely even register a blip on the radar.
With this in mind, and with contract stupidity having (somewhat) subsided, let’s pick out a few deals around the league that have very good chances to age terribly.
Blake Griffin
After Chris Paul was traded to the Houston Rockets, the Los Angeles Clippers had a decision to make. And, by that, I mean, President of Basketball Operations and Head Coach, Doc Rivers, along with new advisory board member Jerry West, had a decision to make. Rivers had to decide whether superstar power forward Blake Griffin — who had played his entire career with the team — would be re-signed or dealt to another team to engender a full-scale rebuild.
The Griffin and Rivers tandem, which had also included Paul for the past six seasons, and center DeAndre Jordan, had never made it past the conference semifinals. The past two years, they’d been bounced in the first round.
The decision boiled down to whether the team thought “Earthquake Blake” was a player they could contend with for the foreseeable future, despite having not seen much success with him on the team thus far — that is, despite being paired with arguably the best point guard in the world. Also weighing into the equation was the brand Griffin had created — a humorous, happy-go-lucky media personality, star of multiple State Farm advertisements, an all-around perfect athlete for the Los Angeles market.
For whatever combination of reasons, Los Angeles decided it had to keep him, and the cost of doing so ended up as a heavily back-loaded $172 million contract over five years. 2022 is the next time Griffin will come onto the market, and he will do so as an unrestricted free agent.
Griffin is undoubtedly one of the premier talents in the NBA, and if the Clippers had decided not to give the man his money, someone would have. But, this contract still raises a number of questions.
The first obviously pertains to the success the team has currently seen with Griffin in its colors — not much. People are starting to question whether the 28-year-old is a player that a team can win with, and win big with.
This is far from a throwaway question. Obviously, Doc Rivers’ leadership has come into question plenty during his stint coaching the team, but at the end of the day, Los Angeles just did nothing short of wasting six years with a future Hall-of-Fame point guard. If Griffin can’t succeed with Chris Paul by his side, is there anyone out there with whom he can?
The two almost seemed perfectly matched. Griffin, the high-flying, stadium-rocking, slam-dunking monster, who had over the past few seasons also developed a neat post game and some halfway decent passing skills; paired with Paul, undisputedly one of the best passers we’ve ever seen, and a hugely underrated scorer and shooter. The cherry on the sundae was DeAndre Jordan’s low-post defensive and rebounding skills, freeing up Griffin to work his deadly inside-out game.
But, how much does no Chris Paul detract from Griffin’s (and Jordan’s for that matter) value? The league is geared toward playmakers now more than ever, and people had genuinely started wondering whether Griffin was a good enough secondary playmaker alongside Paul, let alone a primary one.
Also coming under suspicion is Griffin’s oft-injured body. The Oklahoma native’s “bull in a china shop” play style has seen him pull up lame multiple times over his seven-year career, with an injury list containing back spasms, torn quads, broken hands, knee surgery and most recently, a broken toe.
Griffin medically redshirted his rookie season, pushing his debut back to the 2010–11 campaign, which happens to have thus far been the healthiest of his seasons in the NBA, in which he played all 82 games. In each regular season since, his game totals are 66, 80, 80, 67, 35 and 61.
Griffin is now signed on a contract that happens to currently be the third-highest, after James Harden’s recent signing. He is signed through to age 32, and as mentioned, that contract is heavily back-loaded. At age 30, he will earn $34.5 million; at age 31, $36.8 million; and at age 32, a whopping $39.2 million.
There’s no doubt Jerry West knows his basketball. He helped build the crosstown Los Angeles Lakers dynasty of the 1980s and set in motion their later success in the early 2000s. After that, he built a frequently postseason-bound Memphis Grizzlies team, and most recently, helped construct the Golden State Warriors dynasty. The guy knows a thing or two about how to succeed in the league, even if his POBO Doc Rivers does not.
However, there are just far too many ways for this contract to go wrong for me to tick it off. Mr. West certainly knows more about basketball than I, but I see multiple timelines where this contract does not work out as planned.
Let’s hope the Clippers’ Delorean lands in the right future.
Andre Drummond
When it comes to enigmas around the NBA, there are few harder to understand than what the Detroit Pistons are doing. Jeff Bower is currently their general manager, and while there is talent on his roster, none of it seems to fit, and his players all seem slightly one-dimensional.
The epitome of those one-dimensional players comes with his hulking center, Andre Drummond, 6-foot-11, 280 pounds. Drummond is a rebound and put-back machine, and has shown a mean ability to protect the rim when focused on such.
Drummond is just 23, is coming into his sixth season in the league, and was an All-Star the year before last. This time last year, Detroit signed him to a fat extension that made him the highest paid Piston ever — $125 million over five seasons.
It’s easy to see why Detroit was so keen to keep Drummond. The last NBA title the Pistons won was in 2004, which featured an eerily similar man at center, named Ben Wallace. While most fans have pointed to that title team as an outlier, given their lack of a true alpha dog, the Pistons will be hoping their lanky man in the middle is a prominent feature in their next championship team.
Drummond is certainly a talented player. His 13.6 points, 13.8 rebounds and 1.5 blocks per game are seldom found around the league, and he also boasts an extremely economical .530 field goal percentage. For the majority of his career, he’s remained healthy, and his head coach happens to be Stan Van Gundy, who helped shape Dwight Howard — another Drummond clone — into the monster he was with the Orlando Magic.
However, remember what I said earlier about the importance of playmaking, and the flux of change the league is going through position-wise? Arguably no position has changed more in the past couple of seasons than Drummond’s, and with the alien-like beasts coming into the NBA at the five, it may actually be that Drummond has come along five or 10 years too late.
Let’s have a look at some of the younger big men/centers that have entered the league recently and are younger than/around Drummond’s age — Anthony Davis, Nikola Jokic, Karl-Anthony Towns, DeMarcus Cousins, Kristaps Porzingis and Joel Embiid. All these men possess freakish skill-sets that, while would’ve been unrealistic even in NBA 2K 10 years ago, is now the norm for a young team looking to contend in the coming years.
It may be harsh, but Drummond does not own half the skill-set that the above listed do, and unfortunately for him, that is the direction the NBA is headed in. Drummond may have been one of the best centers in the Eastern Conference in 2007, but in 2017, four of those six mentioned are East centers. It’s hard to envision how Drummond even makes it onto the All-Star team in the coming years, let alone to the Conference Finals, or further.
Even worse, Drummond has concerningly not shown signs of improvement over the past few seasons. In his second year in the league, 2013–14, his totals were 13.5 points, 13.2 rebounds, 1.6 blocks and 62.3 percent from the field. Now go back and look at what they were this year.
As fate would have it, Detroit has locked Drummond in on an average salary of $25.4 million until at least 2021. Oh, by the way, you know that first team All-NBA center I listed earlier — Anthony Davis — he is reportedly on the exact same dollar amount as Drummond, through to the end of the exact same season.
Looking at it through one pair of glasses, Drummond’s contact is not bad. Looking at it through just about every other pair you can find, it’s a nightmare.
Carmelo Anthony
On his show “The Herd” on Fox Sports, Colin Cowherd recently stated that the current New York Knicks management is so bad, that it was similar to the Clippers’ (mis)management of 10–15 years ago. That is about as bad a rep a front office can get.
In a way, it’s a little depressing such a revered, legendary basketball figure such as Phil Jackson came out of retirement to punch his legacy in the face so hard that we’ve almost forgotten he was ever part of Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant’s career. It is what it is though. Not even Jackson has been able to fix New York basketball, and it seems that the antithesis of the Knicks’ hopelessness in recent years has been the man they once hailed the arrival of — Carmelo Anthony.
Even with his slightly “ball-hog” undertones, Anthony was once a premier player in the NBA. He was a legend in the state of New York thanks to his national championship with Syracuse in college, and when he finally arrived in New York City, the decade-long perils of the once-mighty Knicks were set to end.
To his credit, ‘Melo, alongside Amar’e Stoudemire, guided New York back to the playoffs, and took them as far as the Conference Semifinals in 2013, where they fell to the second-seeded Indiana Pacers. Since then, Anthony has become a miserable shadow of his former self, with his production having declined each year and his previously bloody spots, such as his shooting percentages, now bleeding profusely.
This contract may only last one more year, but it’s so bad I’ve included it on this list. It’s currently in the process of aging about as well as a $10 box of wine, and next year, when Anthony celebrates his 34th birthday, he will do so by cashing an almost $28 million check from the Knicks. To boot, he even has a no-trade clause, which he has been reportedly considering waiving if the right situation arose. But, with a deal as horrific as the one he’s on, it’s unlikely one will.
There is one thing the New York front offices do know — they’re located in Manhattan in New York City, and NYC loves their celebrities. There’s a good chance Anthony helps them makes back every cent of that money he’s being paid, as he should. Although, with each passing year, more people are coming to see Kristaps Porzingis and are sighing at the sight of Anthony suiting up once again for their beloved Knicks.
Al Horford
There are lots of things fans of the league hate. Everyone has their pet peeve. Mine are Boston Celtics apologists — the ones convinced that every move the team makes is correct, and that despite not having been to the NBA Finals since 2010, they are still the best operating team in the league.
Recently, these people have convinced a fair amount of the NBA’s fanbase that the team’s signing of Al Horford to a $113 million contact over four years was a thing of beauty, a work of art to rival anything found in the Museum of Fine Arts in Mission Hill. Spoiler alert — it’s not.
Let’s start with some perspective. Horford is currently the second-highest paid center in the league, behind our man Andre Drummond (although Anthony Davis is listed as a power forward), and last year, he was actually paid the most cash of any center. I don’t think anyone’s arguing Horford actually projects to be as valuable as the money he’s being paid… right…?
Well, maybe a few people, but right off the bat, that’s poor value. The contract was signed last offseason, which means Horford is about to enter the second year of his deal, at age 31. Last season, every one of his statistical categories declined from the season prior, and this season, I don’t think it’s that far of a stretch of the imagination to suggest the same course of action will take place.
For reference, those stats he put up last year were 14 points, 6.8 rebounds, five assists and 1.3 blocks on 47.3 percent shooting from the field. For some more reality, among centers, his points per game from last year had him at 13th, his blocks per game at 16th, his rebounds per game at 27th, and his field goal percentage a shocking 77th (among those who played at least 41 games). Again, we’re projecting these will decline.
However, Horford will still be getting paid as if he were the best center in the NBA next year, at a shocking $3.5 million more than the next highest cap hit. By the time his contracts winds up, Horford will be 33, and will be making a staggering $30 million. To do what though, is anyone’s guess.
Could this be the worst contract in the league? Potentially, yes.
