Consider the cap inflation in the CBA. 5-9 million in the previous CBA could be considered 10-14 million today.
I never really considered Memphis a championship level team and when Allen was with Celtics his last contract was for 2.5 million and essentially left because Ainge didn't want to match what Memphis was offering.
I'm not really sure what the relevance of this response is?
Mr. Dee just (correctly) pointed out that you really can't compare today's salary numbers to historical ones, because the salary cap today is so much higher then it ever has been in the past.
Prior to this new TV deal, the salary cap typically hovered between $50m-$55m. Now it's up around the $100m mark. That's why you need to look at salaries as a percentage of the cap, not as raw numbers.
Smart making $10M a year might seem like a huge amount for a one dimensional backup guard, but if next year's salary cap is $100M then that contact would only be about 10% of the cap. That would be about the equivalent of $5M for Tony Allen back when the cap was around $55M - -it's not all that different.
For example, consider that Miami is paying Kelly Olynyk $10.6M and he's only playing 24 MPG. Portland is paying Evan Turner $17M for 7 points, 3 rebounds and 2 assists.
$10M in today's NBA is simply worth about half what it was three seasons ago. Even though it's actually not in the real world, but fact is every team has double the cap space of what they normally would, more cap space means there are more teams out there looking to buy, so the players benefit because. They know if one team doesn't pay them another will, and the teams know this too, so teams have no choice but to overpay as a result of the cap situation.
It's because of this that a guy like Smart can ask for $10M, and will probably get it. Though hard for me to imagine him getting much more than that.
Topic: Serious Marcus Smart Question (Read 2116 times)