People are so quick to throw max these days. LOL
Well, since the salary cap keeps increasing, more teams have massive amounts of money than ever before. Things will settle down if/when the cap increases slow a bit and teams have spent up to that level. Ainge being so frugal luckily benefited us this past off-season with Horford.
Players like Towns and Davis never become free agents because their teams lock them up for the first 9 years of their NBA careers. SL makes a very good argument for why Porter is a player who may grow into a max-worthy player and that WAS may not match. I am game if Durant, Griffin, and Hayward don't sign with us. As SL mentioned, this will be our last opportunity to land a big player before all of our own guys are up for humongous raises.
Key word: MAY. He may also not. After some ridiculous contracts by other teams and saw how it crippled their cap space tells me not to spend max for them, unless Danny sees something on them that we don't. People forget the Josh Smith and Ben Gordon situation the Pistons had.
Not remotely the same. Anyone who thought Josh Smith was going to become a better player in his new deal at age 28 simply doesn't understand the NBA aging curve. Porter will be 24, when many players are still in fact improving. Smith had been the same player for several years, for better and worse. His efficiency was quite low. Gordon was a little younger at 26, but still, he'd been the same player most of his career. He did come off a career year entering free agency, which someone could accuse Porter of doing. But the thing is, in terms of shooting efficiency, neither Gordon nor Smith ever had as efficient years in their career as Porter did last year, much less this year. Don't judge Otto Porter by Joe Dumars' failure to differentiate between volume scoring and good offense.
In order to be a true star, Porter probably needs to keep up his current pace to make up for his deficiency in creating off the dribble. But that would mean he'd outplay his contract in my opinion. If he split the difference between last year and this year, with an eFG over 56%, he wouldn't resemble an albatross. And it's unlikely that he'd perform worse than last year over the next four years, barring an unexpected injury (he's been pretty healthy most of his career, so there's no reason to expect one beyond the usual perils of playing a contact sport.) While that would make him overpaid, he'd still be quite useful, and it would be far from franchise killing.
The biggest question is what sort of payroll ownership is willing to put up. If they're willing to spend a small to moderate amount in the luxury tax, Porter wouldn't likely cost the team the ability to hold on to any of their key free agents in 2018. And, again, he's cheaper than Hayward, Griffin, Ibaka, etc, so if the team is somewhat more parsimonious than I'd like, he still allows for more flexibility in the summer of 2018.
Topic: Should Otto Porter be a potential max FA target? (Read 8776 times)