Spursfanfromafar
06-24-2014, 02:11 AM
I have always liked David Aldridge as a commentator and reporter (back since his ESPN days to his current role with TNT). A very thorough and understated journalist who is genuinely liked by almost every who-is-who in the NBA who matters. Here he analyses the future of the Spurs and how many of their superstars took paycuts to build a contender. Good piece.
http://www.nba.com/2014/news/features/david_aldridge/06/23/morning-tip-david-aldridge-mock-draft-2014-san-antonio-spurs-win-finals-pat-riley-on-heat-big-three/index.html?ls=iref:nba:specialst3a
There are -- I've seen them -- actual unretouched photos of Kawhi Leonard smiling. (See? (http://i2.cdn.turner.com/nba/nba/dam/assets/140617094751-kawhi-leonard-celebrates-finals-mvp-with-spurs-061714.story-top.jpg))
Everybody's happy in San Antonio this morning, with a fifth NBA championship in the books and the hope that Tim Duncan will return for an 18th season next year increasing. Having slayed the Miami dragon, the Spurs can now turn toward history. The only thing the franchise hasn't accomplished during the David Robinson-Duncan Era is repeat as champions.
But while that will be a difficult feat to pull off in the rugged Western Conference, San Antonio has a distinct advantage over just about every team in the league.
Miami will have to navigate the minefield of free agency with its SuperFriends all eligible to opt out. Other teams, like Chicago and Houston, have to make significant moves to clear cap space.
Yet the Spurs march along, their core group already signed for next season. And if history is any indication, San Antonio won't have much problem keeping it together.
For all the success the Spurs have had the last 15 years, their biggest achievement may well be how they've somehow managed to build and maintain a contending team, year in and out, without paralyzing themselves financially.
San Antonio has made a science out of somehow getting Duncan, Manu Ginobili and Tony Parker to take less than they'd get on the open market, contract after contract. They're not playing for the minimum; each has made more than $100 million over the years. But they've also walked away from more, doing on multiple occasions what the SuperFriends did once in 2010 in order to keep playing together.
"I don't know how they've done that," said Lon Babby, Duncan's former longtime agent and now the president of the Phoenix Suns.
"In Tim's case, it was genuinely more important to him to be in a situation where he thought he could win than anything else," Babby said. "That's the reality of it. He knew he was being well-compensated and he wasn't spending any money. That's what motivated him. He kind of invented that Miami scenario before Miami did. It just wasn't as prominent. It was a different time and a different place and a different personality."
The Spurs have two free agents from their core group to re-sign starting next week: Boris Diaw and Patty Mills. No one expects Diaw to leave, given his lifelong friendship with Parker and his total embrace of San Antonio's pass-first system. Mills is likely to return as well.
During Robinson-Duncan, the Spurs have only given out one full-blown max deal, signing Duncan to a seven-year deal in 2003 worth $122 million. Other than one three-year max extension each for Duncan and Ginobili during their careers, the Big Three have left money on the table.
But, why?
"Everybody asks me that," Parker told me nearly two years ago. "I was talking with a couple of my friends and they were asking that. I was like, I don't know. I think it's just the atmosphere here, the family atmosphere.
"For me personally, why I did it was because, deep down in my heart I know Pop will take care of me until the end of my career. So that's why I felt like I can take less now and help the team out. And we were able to sign Danny [Green] and Boris. And I know when I get a little bit older, I know Pop will take care of me. I really feel that."
It is true: the Spurs don't forget their own. Robinson now owns a piece of the team. Sean Elliott is the team's color commentator on its TV broadcasts. Numerous former players have wound up on the bench as assistant coaches, the latest being Sean Marks and Ime Udoka. Even people with no current affiliation with the team, like former forward/center Fabricio Oberto, were around during The Finals and welcomed like long lost relatives.
It starts, as so many things in San Antonio have since 1997, with Duncan.
Duncan, famously, spurned Orlando's six-year offer in the summer of 2000 to remain in San Antonio, signing a three-year deal for $32.6 million, the most the Spurs could offer. It was the closest Duncan ever came to leaving the Spurs, so enticed was he by the idea of playing next to Grant Hill. Desperate entreaties from Robinson and Popovich saved the day.
"It was close. It was extremely close," Babby said. "It was David Robinson calling and saying, 'What are you doing? We just won a championship.' And it was his belief in Pop. But we engaged in the process. It wasn't just for show. And they were sufficiently worried."
After winning another championship in 2003, Duncan finally cashed in, for the maximum $122 million. But in 2007, Duncan negotiated a two-year extension to follow the last three years of the max deal. As the invaluableMark Deeks points out here (http://www.sbnation.com/nba/2014/6/5/5782398/san-antonio-spurs-roster-nba-finals-2014), Duncan could have signed a three-year extension for more than $76 million, or a two-year extension worth almost $49 million. Instead, he took a two-year extension for $40 million.
Parker and Ginobili have given the Spurs similar hometown discounts.
Parker got a six-year extension in 2004 for $66 million -- outstanding money for a then 22-year-old who had split time with Speedy Claxton in the 2003 Finals a year earlier. (That same summer of '04, Steve Nash signed with the Suns for five years and $65 million, a better average per year than Parker, but not ridiculously more.)
But Parker chose to sign another extension in 2010 rather than test free agency. Back then, he was 28, a Finals MVP, a three-time NBA champion and a three-time All-Star. If ever a guy could have been wined and dined and gotten the max, it was Parker. Yet he chose the security of a four-year, $50 million extension that runs through next season. Again: not chump change. But he didn't hold the Spurs hostage for the absolute max.
In 2012, James Harden signed a max deal with the Rockets after being traded by Oklahoma City. And I wondered why Parker never demanded the max from the Spurs.
"On the one hand, you can take less money like I did, like what Manu did, and stay with a winning team," Parker said then. "Or you can do your own thing and be your own man, like [Tracy] McGrady, and try to be a superstar and want to make the All-Star team, and [Harden] decided to do that. I wish him luck. Both ways, you can't go wrong. It depends who you want to be."
Ginobili has been even more generous. After getting his first big deal, a $52 million extension in 2004, he took a three-year extension for $39 million during the 2009-10 season rather than play out his existing contract and try free agency later that summer. Now, at the time, Ginobili was coming off an injury-plagued few seasons, and taking the security of a deal with people you knew may have been the smart move.
Yet after showing he could still play at a high level again, Ginobili signed a two-year deal with the Spurs for $14.5 million last summer.
"He could have said 'Herb, I don't want this. I don't want to take half of my salary,' " Ginobili's longtime agent, Herb Rudoy, said Sunday. "He never said that. He said 'I'll sign this.' For the good of the team. Years ago, he could have gone to Denver or Utah for a lot more money, but he never even thought about it."
By taking less, Ginobili allowed the Spurs to be able to comfortably sign free agent guard Marco Belinelli, who helped San Antonio stay atop the West during the regular season, while Parker and Leonard missed significant time with injuries.
Rudoy credits Ginobili's presence on the celebrated Argentina teams -- the "Golden Generation" -- that won Olympic gold in 2004, the silver at the World Championships in 2002 and a bronze in the Beijing Games in 2008, as part of the reason Ginobili so values team over individual accomplishments. The other part, Rudoy said, is Buford.
"R.C. gets a lot of credit for it," Rudoy said. "He has really paid attention to the psyche of all his players."
Babby also cites the Spurs' organizational approach as central to understanding why players, literally, give back.
"In 1999, they won the championship in New York at the Garden," he said. "They always took great care of me, and that was something I learned, how attentive they were to everyone -- to families, to agents, and I've tried to do that here [in Phoenix].
"If Tim twisted an ankle in a game, they would call me, so if Tim's family heard about it and called me, I could tell them what had happened. So they win the championship in the fifth game, and I'm right behind the bench, right behind the basket. And the players are going crazy in the middle.
"And there's Pop, sitting on the scorer's table, just watching them in the middle, not trying to be a part of it. Fast forward 17 years later, and you don't see Pop, you don't see R.C. Buford, just standing back, understanding that the players are responsible for it."
In the front of that celebration last week was Leonard, named Finals MVP.
Popovich has consistently maintained that Leonard has star potential, calling him the future face of the franchise after Duncan retires. Leonard certainly displayed some of that potential in last year's Finals against the Heat. But it was cemented in this year's series -- which was all the more impressive because it basically came in the last three games of the series; Leonard scored nine points apiece in Games 1 and 2.
But the star turn sets up, potentially, an interesting negotiation down the road between Leonard and the team.
As part of the 2011 Draft class, Leonard will be eligible for a contract extension beginning July 1 for five or six seasons. The Spurs would have until the end of October to work out the extension. If they don't, Leonard would become a restricted free agent that summer. The Spurs would still be able to match any offer he'd receive from another team.
It's a near certainty, though, that the Spurs will work something out with Leonard's representative well before then. The only question is for how much.
The Spurs picked up their fourth-year option on Leonard last fall, locking him in for the 2014-15 season at a criminally low $3.05 million for a Finals MVP. Such are the advantages for a team when a young player vastly outplays his contract. (And you wonder why players balk at rookie wage scales and maximum salaries for superstars!)
The Spurs can negotiate one of two possible deals with Leonard.
The first is the normal four-year extension for which players on their rookie deals are eligible. Under the CBA rules, a player on his rookie deal with six or fewer seasons in the league can get an extension following the fifth year of his rookie deal for up to 25 percent of a team's salary cap in the first year of the new deal (though, for reasons only known to the lawyers, the player actually receives a little less than 25 percent, even though it says 25 percent in the CBA. Don't ask why.)
The league's current cap projection for that season is $66.5 million, representing increased revenues from all areas of Basketball Related Income, including ticket sales, local television deals and other areas. (Salary cap expert Larry Coon speculated last April (http://cbafaq.com/blog/?p=304) that Brooklyn's move to Brooklyn and Barclays Center provided a huge revenue bump.)
Based on that 2015-16 cap projection, San Antonio could -- could -- offer Leonard a maximum four-year extension beginning in 2016-17. Twenty-five percent would be $16.625 million (though, as noted above, the actual outlay would be slightly less than that; for the purposes of this exercise, though, we'll work off the $16.625 million.) With annual 7.5 percent raises based on that first-year salary, Leonard could get an extension for just under $74 million. Add the existing fifth year of his rookie deal, when Leonard will make $4.268 million, and the total of the new contract would be $78.2 million. (Again, it would actually be slightly less.)
The Spurs could also offer Leonard a "designated player" extension running five years after the last year of his rookie deal. Teams are allowed to pick -- designate -- one player on their roster during the current CBA to get an extension with that crucial extra year. Once a team uses the designated player extension, it can't use it again during the length of the CBA -- though it can trade for one player who got a designated player extension from another team. This was the genesis of Minnesota's problems with Kevin Love -- the Wolves offered Love the standard four-year extension instead of the designated one, saving that for Ricky Rubio.
So far, six teams -- Chicago (Derrick Rose), Oklahoma City (Russell Westbrook), Houston (Harden), Indiana (Paul George), the Clippers (Blake Griffin) and Washington (John Wall) -- have used the designated player extension.
(There's also that 30 percent max criteria stuff in which a player on his rookie deal can get even more in an extension if he's voted to start two All-Star teams while on his rookie deal, is named first, second or third All-NBA twice or is named league MVP. Only the latter is still possible for Leonard now, and it's so unlikely that it's not really worth exploring.)
Cap room will not be an issue for the Spurs in 2015-16, when Duncan, Parker and Ginobili all come off the books. Only Tiago Splitter, at $8.5 million, is currently under contract. Of course, it's a near-certainty that Parker will get one more significant contract, and Ginobili and Duncan might still be around, too. But they'll make a lot less money than they do now. There would be plenty of room for a big Leonard deal.
The obvious comparison for Leonard is Paul George, who got a $90.6 million designated player exception from the Pacers last summer. George went 10th in the 2010 Draft, a year before Leonard. (By being named all-NBA third team for a second time this season, George is eligible for the 30 percent max instead of 25 percent.) George is the face of Indiana's future, just as Leonard represents San Antonio's.
But how will the Spurs handle it? Will they pay in full, or point back to their championship past, when their stars, so often, took a little less off the top? And what will Leonard say if they make that request?
"A lot of people ask me, 'How are you so successful in San Antonio?' " Parker said in 2012. "Because, I say, we did a lot of sacrifice. When you look at Manu, Manu did a lot of sacrifice to stay here. I did the same thing. Sometimes when you want to win championships, you have to do that."
http://www.nba.com/2014/news/features/david_aldridge/06/23/morning-tip-david-aldridge-mock-draft-2014-san-antonio-spurs-win-finals-pat-riley-on-heat-big-three/index.html?ls=iref:nba:specialst3a
There are -- I've seen them -- actual unretouched photos of Kawhi Leonard smiling. (See? (http://i2.cdn.turner.com/nba/nba/dam/assets/140617094751-kawhi-leonard-celebrates-finals-mvp-with-spurs-061714.story-top.jpg))
Everybody's happy in San Antonio this morning, with a fifth NBA championship in the books and the hope that Tim Duncan will return for an 18th season next year increasing. Having slayed the Miami dragon, the Spurs can now turn toward history. The only thing the franchise hasn't accomplished during the David Robinson-Duncan Era is repeat as champions.
But while that will be a difficult feat to pull off in the rugged Western Conference, San Antonio has a distinct advantage over just about every team in the league.
Miami will have to navigate the minefield of free agency with its SuperFriends all eligible to opt out. Other teams, like Chicago and Houston, have to make significant moves to clear cap space.
Yet the Spurs march along, their core group already signed for next season. And if history is any indication, San Antonio won't have much problem keeping it together.
For all the success the Spurs have had the last 15 years, their biggest achievement may well be how they've somehow managed to build and maintain a contending team, year in and out, without paralyzing themselves financially.
San Antonio has made a science out of somehow getting Duncan, Manu Ginobili and Tony Parker to take less than they'd get on the open market, contract after contract. They're not playing for the minimum; each has made more than $100 million over the years. But they've also walked away from more, doing on multiple occasions what the SuperFriends did once in 2010 in order to keep playing together.
"I don't know how they've done that," said Lon Babby, Duncan's former longtime agent and now the president of the Phoenix Suns.
"In Tim's case, it was genuinely more important to him to be in a situation where he thought he could win than anything else," Babby said. "That's the reality of it. He knew he was being well-compensated and he wasn't spending any money. That's what motivated him. He kind of invented that Miami scenario before Miami did. It just wasn't as prominent. It was a different time and a different place and a different personality."
The Spurs have two free agents from their core group to re-sign starting next week: Boris Diaw and Patty Mills. No one expects Diaw to leave, given his lifelong friendship with Parker and his total embrace of San Antonio's pass-first system. Mills is likely to return as well.
During Robinson-Duncan, the Spurs have only given out one full-blown max deal, signing Duncan to a seven-year deal in 2003 worth $122 million. Other than one three-year max extension each for Duncan and Ginobili during their careers, the Big Three have left money on the table.
But, why?
"Everybody asks me that," Parker told me nearly two years ago. "I was talking with a couple of my friends and they were asking that. I was like, I don't know. I think it's just the atmosphere here, the family atmosphere.
"For me personally, why I did it was because, deep down in my heart I know Pop will take care of me until the end of my career. So that's why I felt like I can take less now and help the team out. And we were able to sign Danny [Green] and Boris. And I know when I get a little bit older, I know Pop will take care of me. I really feel that."
It is true: the Spurs don't forget their own. Robinson now owns a piece of the team. Sean Elliott is the team's color commentator on its TV broadcasts. Numerous former players have wound up on the bench as assistant coaches, the latest being Sean Marks and Ime Udoka. Even people with no current affiliation with the team, like former forward/center Fabricio Oberto, were around during The Finals and welcomed like long lost relatives.
It starts, as so many things in San Antonio have since 1997, with Duncan.
Duncan, famously, spurned Orlando's six-year offer in the summer of 2000 to remain in San Antonio, signing a three-year deal for $32.6 million, the most the Spurs could offer. It was the closest Duncan ever came to leaving the Spurs, so enticed was he by the idea of playing next to Grant Hill. Desperate entreaties from Robinson and Popovich saved the day.
"It was close. It was extremely close," Babby said. "It was David Robinson calling and saying, 'What are you doing? We just won a championship.' And it was his belief in Pop. But we engaged in the process. It wasn't just for show. And they were sufficiently worried."
After winning another championship in 2003, Duncan finally cashed in, for the maximum $122 million. But in 2007, Duncan negotiated a two-year extension to follow the last three years of the max deal. As the invaluableMark Deeks points out here (http://www.sbnation.com/nba/2014/6/5/5782398/san-antonio-spurs-roster-nba-finals-2014), Duncan could have signed a three-year extension for more than $76 million, or a two-year extension worth almost $49 million. Instead, he took a two-year extension for $40 million.
Parker and Ginobili have given the Spurs similar hometown discounts.
Parker got a six-year extension in 2004 for $66 million -- outstanding money for a then 22-year-old who had split time with Speedy Claxton in the 2003 Finals a year earlier. (That same summer of '04, Steve Nash signed with the Suns for five years and $65 million, a better average per year than Parker, but not ridiculously more.)
But Parker chose to sign another extension in 2010 rather than test free agency. Back then, he was 28, a Finals MVP, a three-time NBA champion and a three-time All-Star. If ever a guy could have been wined and dined and gotten the max, it was Parker. Yet he chose the security of a four-year, $50 million extension that runs through next season. Again: not chump change. But he didn't hold the Spurs hostage for the absolute max.
In 2012, James Harden signed a max deal with the Rockets after being traded by Oklahoma City. And I wondered why Parker never demanded the max from the Spurs.
"On the one hand, you can take less money like I did, like what Manu did, and stay with a winning team," Parker said then. "Or you can do your own thing and be your own man, like [Tracy] McGrady, and try to be a superstar and want to make the All-Star team, and [Harden] decided to do that. I wish him luck. Both ways, you can't go wrong. It depends who you want to be."
Ginobili has been even more generous. After getting his first big deal, a $52 million extension in 2004, he took a three-year extension for $39 million during the 2009-10 season rather than play out his existing contract and try free agency later that summer. Now, at the time, Ginobili was coming off an injury-plagued few seasons, and taking the security of a deal with people you knew may have been the smart move.
Yet after showing he could still play at a high level again, Ginobili signed a two-year deal with the Spurs for $14.5 million last summer.
"He could have said 'Herb, I don't want this. I don't want to take half of my salary,' " Ginobili's longtime agent, Herb Rudoy, said Sunday. "He never said that. He said 'I'll sign this.' For the good of the team. Years ago, he could have gone to Denver or Utah for a lot more money, but he never even thought about it."
By taking less, Ginobili allowed the Spurs to be able to comfortably sign free agent guard Marco Belinelli, who helped San Antonio stay atop the West during the regular season, while Parker and Leonard missed significant time with injuries.
Rudoy credits Ginobili's presence on the celebrated Argentina teams -- the "Golden Generation" -- that won Olympic gold in 2004, the silver at the World Championships in 2002 and a bronze in the Beijing Games in 2008, as part of the reason Ginobili so values team over individual accomplishments. The other part, Rudoy said, is Buford.
"R.C. gets a lot of credit for it," Rudoy said. "He has really paid attention to the psyche of all his players."
Babby also cites the Spurs' organizational approach as central to understanding why players, literally, give back.
"In 1999, they won the championship in New York at the Garden," he said. "They always took great care of me, and that was something I learned, how attentive they were to everyone -- to families, to agents, and I've tried to do that here [in Phoenix].
"If Tim twisted an ankle in a game, they would call me, so if Tim's family heard about it and called me, I could tell them what had happened. So they win the championship in the fifth game, and I'm right behind the bench, right behind the basket. And the players are going crazy in the middle.
"And there's Pop, sitting on the scorer's table, just watching them in the middle, not trying to be a part of it. Fast forward 17 years later, and you don't see Pop, you don't see R.C. Buford, just standing back, understanding that the players are responsible for it."
In the front of that celebration last week was Leonard, named Finals MVP.
Popovich has consistently maintained that Leonard has star potential, calling him the future face of the franchise after Duncan retires. Leonard certainly displayed some of that potential in last year's Finals against the Heat. But it was cemented in this year's series -- which was all the more impressive because it basically came in the last three games of the series; Leonard scored nine points apiece in Games 1 and 2.
But the star turn sets up, potentially, an interesting negotiation down the road between Leonard and the team.
As part of the 2011 Draft class, Leonard will be eligible for a contract extension beginning July 1 for five or six seasons. The Spurs would have until the end of October to work out the extension. If they don't, Leonard would become a restricted free agent that summer. The Spurs would still be able to match any offer he'd receive from another team.
It's a near certainty, though, that the Spurs will work something out with Leonard's representative well before then. The only question is for how much.
The Spurs picked up their fourth-year option on Leonard last fall, locking him in for the 2014-15 season at a criminally low $3.05 million for a Finals MVP. Such are the advantages for a team when a young player vastly outplays his contract. (And you wonder why players balk at rookie wage scales and maximum salaries for superstars!)
The Spurs can negotiate one of two possible deals with Leonard.
The first is the normal four-year extension for which players on their rookie deals are eligible. Under the CBA rules, a player on his rookie deal with six or fewer seasons in the league can get an extension following the fifth year of his rookie deal for up to 25 percent of a team's salary cap in the first year of the new deal (though, for reasons only known to the lawyers, the player actually receives a little less than 25 percent, even though it says 25 percent in the CBA. Don't ask why.)
The league's current cap projection for that season is $66.5 million, representing increased revenues from all areas of Basketball Related Income, including ticket sales, local television deals and other areas. (Salary cap expert Larry Coon speculated last April (http://cbafaq.com/blog/?p=304) that Brooklyn's move to Brooklyn and Barclays Center provided a huge revenue bump.)
Based on that 2015-16 cap projection, San Antonio could -- could -- offer Leonard a maximum four-year extension beginning in 2016-17. Twenty-five percent would be $16.625 million (though, as noted above, the actual outlay would be slightly less than that; for the purposes of this exercise, though, we'll work off the $16.625 million.) With annual 7.5 percent raises based on that first-year salary, Leonard could get an extension for just under $74 million. Add the existing fifth year of his rookie deal, when Leonard will make $4.268 million, and the total of the new contract would be $78.2 million. (Again, it would actually be slightly less.)
The Spurs could also offer Leonard a "designated player" extension running five years after the last year of his rookie deal. Teams are allowed to pick -- designate -- one player on their roster during the current CBA to get an extension with that crucial extra year. Once a team uses the designated player extension, it can't use it again during the length of the CBA -- though it can trade for one player who got a designated player extension from another team. This was the genesis of Minnesota's problems with Kevin Love -- the Wolves offered Love the standard four-year extension instead of the designated one, saving that for Ricky Rubio.
So far, six teams -- Chicago (Derrick Rose), Oklahoma City (Russell Westbrook), Houston (Harden), Indiana (Paul George), the Clippers (Blake Griffin) and Washington (John Wall) -- have used the designated player extension.
(There's also that 30 percent max criteria stuff in which a player on his rookie deal can get even more in an extension if he's voted to start two All-Star teams while on his rookie deal, is named first, second or third All-NBA twice or is named league MVP. Only the latter is still possible for Leonard now, and it's so unlikely that it's not really worth exploring.)
Cap room will not be an issue for the Spurs in 2015-16, when Duncan, Parker and Ginobili all come off the books. Only Tiago Splitter, at $8.5 million, is currently under contract. Of course, it's a near-certainty that Parker will get one more significant contract, and Ginobili and Duncan might still be around, too. But they'll make a lot less money than they do now. There would be plenty of room for a big Leonard deal.
The obvious comparison for Leonard is Paul George, who got a $90.6 million designated player exception from the Pacers last summer. George went 10th in the 2010 Draft, a year before Leonard. (By being named all-NBA third team for a second time this season, George is eligible for the 30 percent max instead of 25 percent.) George is the face of Indiana's future, just as Leonard represents San Antonio's.
But how will the Spurs handle it? Will they pay in full, or point back to their championship past, when their stars, so often, took a little less off the top? And what will Leonard say if they make that request?
"A lot of people ask me, 'How are you so successful in San Antonio?' " Parker said in 2012. "Because, I say, we did a lot of sacrifice. When you look at Manu, Manu did a lot of sacrifice to stay here. I did the same thing. Sometimes when you want to win championships, you have to do that."