It pays to be patient. That is the financial lesson of the NBA’s offseason, which saw the biggest pay raises go to players who turned down contract extensions and gambled on themselves. Among the top 11 pay increases this summer, five went to players who felt like they were being lowballed by their teams — and proved it when they cashed in with bigger deals as restricted free agents this summer. Chicago’s Jimmy Butler, Orlando’s Tobias Harris, Detroit’s Reggie Jackson, Oklahoma City’s Enes
Does Markieff Morris want out of Phoenix? According to a tweet Thursday from The Burns and Gambo Show, who hold the Valley’s sports radio drive time slot, Morris wants nothing to do with the Suns and hasn’t talked to any team member – player or staff – since the season ended. The tweet doesn’t cite a source, either within the Suns or close to Morris. At the same time, Morris’ offseason silence would allow Suns staffers to easily draw some conclusion about
Amar’e Stoudemire moved into very exclusive company this summer. By accepting the veteran’s minimum of $1.5 million in signing as a free agent with the Miami Heat, Stoudemire became just the second player in NBA history to take a $20 million pay cut. Last season, Stoudemire was on the books for $23,410,000, the final season of the five-year deal worth about $100 million he signed with the New York Knicks in 2010. That was the summer that the Knicks tried to position
Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey has never been shy about making a splash, and he did so again Sunday night by agreeing to a deal with the Denver Nuggets for troubled guard Ty Lawson. With Patrick Beverley re-signed and Lawson used to playing starter’s minutes, will Morey reenact Tom Hanks’ famous, “Houston, we have a problem” line from Apollo 13 at some point next season? Time will tell. For now, Morey is thinking more along the lines of, “Houston, we have
The day dawned without a single word of disgust on Mark Cuban’s Twitter account. No even an emoji … even a simple one, like a frowning face. Today is the day after DeAndre Jordan reneged on his verbal commitment to the Dallas Mavericks and instead decided to return to the Los Angeles Clippers, keeping Lob City intact and making the Mavs’ decision-makers go back to the drawing board and their analytics tables to debate the relative merits of JaVale McGee and
The salary cap rose to $70 million for the 2015-16 season, an increase of 11 percent and nearly $7 million from a year ago, the NBA announced Wednesday night. The cap for next season originally was projected around $67.1 million. Shortly before free agency began, however, CBS Sports reported that the number would be at least $1 million higher and perhaps as much as $2 million higher. In fact, it is $3 million higher, the sort of anecdotal information that will
Last summer, we ran a post detailing which players received the biggest raises in salary from the previous year. The list was made up of three types of players. A. Players who received maximum salary deals as their second contracts, such as DeMarcus Cousins. B. Former first-round picks who received sizable contract extensions, although not necessarily max deals, such as Larry Sanders. C. Second-round picks who had been making near league minimum and signed new deals, such as Lance Stephenson. The latter category has
Twenty teams already are into their offseason and will be joined by two more this weekend. That means those teams already are looking at a free agent market that will be the last as we have come to know it. The projected salary cap for teams this summer is $67.1 million with a projected tax line of $81.6 million. The cap is rising more than 6 percent from last summer’s $63.065 million, which is actually a smaller increase than the jump