Good Lord, the league has lost it's mind. What possible reason would a person turn down $40M, especially given the millions Holiday has already made during his career? Is his life going to see significant change if he opts for $25M per for three seasons instead? I know, I know, it's the insane world of pro sports that we now live in, but some realistic perspective would be in order here. Of course, this same craziness is now trickling down into college and even high school. I find it very sad watching the slow death of amateur athletics. Pure greed from many sources has fueled this disaster.
Do you often take less money from your employer in order to do your job?
I guess Tenn's objection is to the amounts being discussed...at some point anything over a certain amount gets tagged by our brains as "too much money" and we have trouble making a distinction between different amounts over that. So $25m seems the same as $40m - it's an obscene amount of money, especially if the player has already made millions. As fans we would hope he would be willing to take less "for the good of the team".
Of course for people who do have money, there are many different categories of "being rich"...someone with a net worth of $20m would not be able to make certain investments or acquire certain parcels of real estate as someone who has $100m. Just like that $100m guy might not be able to have access to certain investments as a $500m guy, like be an investor in a sports team for example. But it's all too much for our everyday person brains to comprehend
And of course, salaries in the NBA are usually negotiated as a percentage of the salary cap, like a max contract is 35%, and the scale drops from there. So as the cap goes up the salaries they negotiate all go up based on that cap number. And the cap number goes up because the league itself is financially thriving. So if someone is going to take a discount, there would usually have to be a good reason why he would accept being paid like a lesser player would. Sometimes that might mean "for the good of the team", like Harden took a discount on his extension to help Daryl Morey sign more players, and on the expectation that 2 years later Daryl would return the favor. Of course we now all know Daryl did not - which is why it's understandable that these guys chase as much money as they can. Cold blooded business, this