Trying to work out how our payroll would work if, in the best case scenario, all of our young guys (Sengun, Green, Jabari, Eason, Amen, Whitmore) work out and we want to keep them past their rookie contracts.
First round Rookies are eligible for extensions before their fourth season, which means Sengun / Green are up for extensions this offseason and Jabari / Eason the year after.
Teams are only allowed to have two designated rookie extension players on their roster at any given time. This means that if we extend both Sengun and Green this offseason, we cannot do the same for Jabari / Eason the next year (nor Thompson / Whitmore the year after).
In addition, the 2023 CBA now allows five-year rookie extensions to be less than the max, meaning they can be less than 25% of the salary cap.
How does this affect our ability to sign all of our young guys and keep this core for the long term? Not sure if we’re in an unprecedented situation with six high flying prospects across three consecutive classes, but is there a strategy that allows us to keep all of them?
- Will we only give one of Sengun / Jalen a rookie extension to preserve our flexibility to offer one to a guy from another class?
- Is it even that big of a risk for a team to forgo offering a rookie extension to a player they want to keep because they anyway have the opportunity to retain the player in restricted free agency?
- If we give two rookie extensions across the next two classes, and then Amen becomes an All-NBA player and becomes eligible for a rookie supermax that we cannot give, what are the implications?
Too early expectations for me:
Max bucket lock category
r/Sengun
Probable max on current trajectory category
Unknowns due to it be WAY TOO EARLY, for the too early projections category
Nice contract but not the max category
Tari (I may eat my words if he shuffles everyone around with a Kawhi-like emergence but Pop and staff prioritized Kawhi with Parker and Manu (non-max 6th man) around Duncan and idk how they do it unless some combination of Bari, Jalen, and/or Amen/Cam fall off the wayside (including massive injury misfortunes).
These things could change as we have seen the past. They’re all on trial. Sengun has shown the world his style works well and we aren’t criticizing him like as done in the past bc we are not collapsing on defense due to his own contributions and the type of personnel around him now.
Good analysis — I agree it’s unlikely we keep all of these guys. My sense is we probably wouldn’t want to unless we had a clear “best player on a championship team” type emergence so that we could keep cap space for a blockbuster trade / FA landing