I dunno about that. I think people underestimate how much a billion is. As far as I know Jordan is the only NBA player billionaire. Not even Shaq, Magic, and LeBron who are rife with non basketball enterprises are close to billionaires in terms of net worth.
Well, their earnings will certainly be a billion. After taxes and spending who knows, depends on how they invest. The TV deal potentially tripling means salaries would could triple. Players are currently getting 4/160 maxes all the way up to 5/230 contracts, if players start getting 4/480 to 5/690 deals, You combine that with the endorsements and shoe deals, we will start to see the consistent top 10 level players earn a billion. LBJ has reportedly earned a billion as of this year.
I feel every team should have a max salary contract slot that if the player has been with the team 3 years or more, they should be able to offer them whatever they want money wise, however, only counts against the cap as if it were a max contract. So for example Rockets could offered James a 2 year $200 million extension.
That summer after the first season was a pure disaster from day 1. That started this entire nightmare
The list of scrub acquisitions at that time was just comical. I remember folks throwing a bunch of nonsense on the wall about how all these players were going to be good.
Getting rid of CP was understandable. He was on the wrong side of 35 with a huge contract and a not so great year where he looked like he might have completely lost a step. Who else was willing to trade a star for CP3 for ANYTHING that would have enabled Rockets to extend window? Because it was a fairly big gamble to keep CP3 and pray Harden didn’t demand a trade. It was a justified panic trade, imo. Not a good trade by most means, but what other choice did we have if we intended to keep Harden and win ASAP? Got to remember how slow CP3 looked ALL season before the trade. As for Ariza, he didn’t play all that well in the playoffs IIRC. Granted he’s guarding Durant, but his shot was not reliable in the latter part of the season into playoffs. If he wanted anything close to 15/yr I too would have let him walk. Has Trevor really contributed to any team winning since leaving? James Ennis was not expected to be as bad as he was. Our window shut the moment CP3 shimmied Curry and the basketball gods cursed us...
It is more than what meets the eye. We all saw the reports of rifts between Cp3 and harden, chemistry is integral for the marathon of a championship. Ariza was our glue guy. I'll let Chris Paul explain it himself(from the knuckleheads podcast): “People don’t realize, that’s the biggest thing that we missed. That was tough when we lost [Ariza] because he sorta was like the glue. He was that glue for our team.” Harden, growing up in LA, also respected the guy and picked his ear on what it was like winning a title with Kobe. He was also the guy to write the players tribune lobbying harden for MVP. These things are subtle and hard to measure by any sort of stat, but the glue guy is a real thing. Miami pays haslem now to not even play. Those are things about a culture that matter. On top of that, asset wise he was a one year over paid contract, doesn't hurt us in the future and let alone becomes a tradeable expiring contract that deadline for which he was traded for Kelly Oubre. I'm fine with getting rid of him though or any player, what matters is who we replace him with when we're in our 'window' which we were because the year before we were a game away from the finals. When the league moved out out of the way for the warriors, we made them sweat and I'm definitely proud of that. But our replacements were Carmelo(who was asked to leave in ten days, a minimum contract who wasn't cut so we could trade him for tax savings), Michael ccarter williams, and James ennis who was actually in MDA's frustratingly short rotation before he was traded at the deadline....for a top 55 protected pick, coincidentally also got us under the cap space. To those saying those guys don't matter, look back at all the league champions. Kerr, Horry, PAxon, Fisher, Elie...year in and out role players who aren't wroth it make a big shot or play and championships are won on very close margins. How we fill out our roster to play all 48 minutes matters. So in this case with Jrue. They didn't have the leverage as they traded away a lot for him and he had all the leverage. Thats why its a billionaires game. I remember celtics saying their title year was one of their poorer performing finance years. Let alone the constant inflation of tv deals just raising the bar on contracts. Milwaulkee is showing Giannis they will swing for the fences. We can call it dumb, but arguably toronto trading for a 34 year old marc gasol due 50 million wasn't worth it, but they took a swing, got the right bounce in playoffs, and now they have their first title. If you want a ring, you aren't going to get guaranteed ones, you have to take swings and compete at all angles.
Whoa. Totally forgot about that and never looked at it from that perspective but you are 100% correct.
