07-28-2026, 01:56 AM
Two contract-related notes on RFA players that I really don't understand:
1 Watson - The report all along is that DEN really wants him. THEN the contract they offered is reported (The Athletic) to be 5/70M, which computes to be starting at 12M. Wait what? Either my understanding of salaries is way off (which is possible, because the sinking NBA revenues are a MAJOR factor across the NBA and seem to have GMs scared), or he's way less value than we have been led to believe, or they just want him for a year (pushing him to take the 6.5M QO so they can have him for cheap for a year before he walks). If he's only worth 12M, are the contracts of much worse players such as Jovic, Braun, Sharpe, etc going to be way way more problematic and strangling in the future than we have considered? Or is Watson a much worse player than we've been thinking?
2 Duren - He is eligible with DET to get up to a 30% supermax for a player coming off rookie scale. He demanded it. But by all accounts they "only" offered him all of the normal max of 25%, right up front, which matches or exceeds the most any other team could possibly offer (depending on whether they included 5% or 8% raises). I say "only" because I didn't think he was really worth even that, and it seemed too generous to me. Not to him. He didn't like the DET max offer, so he (weirdly) went looking for a more desirable offer from another team (which makes no sense, since it would AT BEST be the same or less money than the Pistons had already offered, and then DET would just match it anyhow). So now he's supposedly threatening to take the QO of only 9.6M (vs the 25% max of 41.2M) so that he can be a FA next summer and sign for no more than the 25% max that he is refusing from DET. What's going on here? Is he just an idiot with counting numbers? It makes no sense.
1 Watson - The report all along is that DEN really wants him. THEN the contract they offered is reported (The Athletic) to be 5/70M, which computes to be starting at 12M. Wait what? Either my understanding of salaries is way off (which is possible, because the sinking NBA revenues are a MAJOR factor across the NBA and seem to have GMs scared), or he's way less value than we have been led to believe, or they just want him for a year (pushing him to take the 6.5M QO so they can have him for cheap for a year before he walks). If he's only worth 12M, are the contracts of much worse players such as Jovic, Braun, Sharpe, etc going to be way way more problematic and strangling in the future than we have considered? Or is Watson a much worse player than we've been thinking?
2 Duren - He is eligible with DET to get up to a 30% supermax for a player coming off rookie scale. He demanded it. But by all accounts they "only" offered him all of the normal max of 25%, right up front, which matches or exceeds the most any other team could possibly offer (depending on whether they included 5% or 8% raises). I say "only" because I didn't think he was really worth even that, and it seemed too generous to me. Not to him. He didn't like the DET max offer, so he (weirdly) went looking for a more desirable offer from another team (which makes no sense, since it would AT BEST be the same or less money than the Pistons had already offered, and then DET would just match it anyhow). So now he's supposedly threatening to take the QO of only 9.6M (vs the 25% max of 41.2M) so that he can be a FA next summer and sign for no more than the 25% max that he is refusing from DET. What's going on here? Is he just an idiot with counting numbers? It makes no sense.
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