Obviously, there is a defense against these poison pill contracts, which is to include enough team options in a contract with a second round pick that you will have full Bird rights on the guy before he gets to hit the RFA market. So, does anyone know if there are teams that are still signing 2nd rounders to short contracts? Or has everyone switched to doing the Morey-style contract?
Didn't know that; smart of Sacto to sign him, he's a decent backup and with the very last pick of the 2nd round.
Mark Deeks ("Sham" on this BBS) wrote a great blog entry about this issue, primarily about the situations of Omer Asik and Landry Fields. Here is the link: http://www.shamsports.com/2012/07/omer-asik-should-still-be-bull-and.html Some teams simply CANNOT offer their second round picks more than two-year deals if they are both capped out and have already used their MLE on other players. (FYI, the Room Exception can be used to sign players to a contract with a maximum length of two years, so that would not help a team avoid an Arenas Rule situation.) But many teams--as Mark points out in his blog entry--simply mismanage their cap to create these situations down the line. For instance, not locking Asik up for three years as a rookie was pretty stupid by the Bulls. He was a highly touted player out of Turkey, and the Bulls spent (I believe) THREE second rounders to acquire him on draft night. I think we will see fewer and fewer teams making these mistakes. Look no further than the Kings and Isaiah Thomas. Thomas was the 60th and final pick of the 2011 NBA Draft. In the past, guys drafted there would be lucky even to get a one-year guaranteed deal. However, the Kings elected to sign Thomas to a three-year deal with their cap room, and it looks like a brilliant decision now given Thomas's strong play. Because fewer teams will continue to mismanage their cap situations in this manner, I think the number of Arenas Rule situations will be fairly rare. This past summer, with THREE Arenas Rule free agents (Lin, Asik, Fields) drawing "poison pill" contract offer sheets, was an aberration the likes of which we probably won't see again. Maybe we'll have one or two of them over the next few years combined. But then again, who knows what may happen with some owners desperate to sign someone and throwing crazy money around. Even under the new CBA.
