Is T-Mac's extension more than current max players receive?

[Disclaimer: when it comes to CBA/salaries/Salary Cap I am no expert, and I didn't stay at a Holiday Inn Express either.]

I didn't want this question lost in the stale "McGrady signed" thread either...

Isn't T-Mac about to be paid more than max players currently get under the CBA? (I know Garnett was grandfathered under his old salary, to the salary cap detriment of his team). Gasol & Kirilenko are getting 6/86M, which would probably be a bit less than 20M/yr on the 6th year of their contracts if I am not mistaken, and yet T-Mac is getting 24.1M on his 7th, which seems a bit higher raise than is allowable. Is this another case of a grandfathered contract which is higher for salary cap purposes?

Much of the excitement about getting T-Mac was in the fact that we were getting good value for our max contract whereas Francis yielded poor value on his. However, not knowing T-Mac's salary status, I assumed he was making max money and not max-plus money.

I am concerned with luxury tax implications of this (though CBA may soon be different)...

 

So it is just at the max, only we made it an eleven year max contract with max allowable raises? If so, I didn't know that extending the contract resulted in grandfathering the baseline in. (I thought you had to reset the max baseline each time you extended). Thanks KK.

Anyway, I think that it went under the radar for alot of us that what it would take to keep T-Mac would require such a mammoth salary cap drain that would make the Francis trade less in our favor than I originally thought.

I had hopes that we could reel in a third "near-star caliber" player, but each year could make that less and less likely as T-Mac's salary grows ever larger relative to the cap. I hate the thought of having bargain basement fodder forever surrounding the big two.

Fortunately, T-Mac's star power will still give us trade value above and beyond what his on-court contributions may be, at least for a while. Let's hope this experiment works, but I can't help but feel much less enthusiastic now that the probability is much reduced of being able to add quality players around them, and that each year it will be increasingly difficult as T-Mac's salary percentage relative to the team salary will increase. We truly are putting all our eggs in one basket here as long as we are paying his contract. Scary.

Well, best to get the doom and gloom out of the way before the season starts, anyway.