Now is the Time for the Pistons to be Aggressive in Free Agency
By Tim Thielke
"Stan Van Gundy made a bold and unprecedented move this past season. I’m talking about waiving Josh Smith. Teams don’t straight up cut their highest paid players with several years remaining on their contracts. Because even if the player is totally useless, it only diminishes the team’s flexibility to make him actually untradeable as opposed to merely undesirable.Of course, that did open up a possibility that otherwise the Pistons wouldn’t have — to stretch Smith’s contract. Van Gundy proceeded to do that as well. That means the Pistons are on the hook to pay Josh Smith until 2020."
"So that is probably additional motivation for Van Gundy to be aggressive. But that’s not why he should be. Smith’s waiving and stretching is a sunk cost. If Van Gundy signs a bad contract, that’s still worse than not signing one at all because it compounds the mistake. Much like how Dumars had to use his cap space in 2012 to justify giving away a first rounder that eventually became Noah Vonleh just to unload Ben Gordon’s cap hit one season sooner. Nevertheless, signing Smith into that cap space compounded the error"
"the NBA’s 2015 free agency is a unique edition. The year-to-year rise of the salary cap between the summers of 2015 and 2016 is set to be one of the largest if not the largest in a major American sports league. That means that any contract signed in the summer of 2015 is relatively a lot richer to start off than it will be very shortly. The players know it, the agents know it, the front offices know it. General managers all around the league will be trying to land contracts that may not be immediate bargains but will soon turn into them. Players and agents will be trying to negotiate higher contracts given the common knowledge that they will seem cheaper quite soon. But front offices have one key advantage: there is only so much cap room to go around.From the perspective of the CBA, this summer is just like any other. And every year, most teams spend just about all the money they can on free agents. The fact that those free agents could justifiably command larger salaries doesn’t change how much money teams are capable of offering. Next year, everyone will have tons of cap space. This year, something has to give. Either a bunch of free agents sign short term deals hoping to cash in on the rising cap next summer or a bunch of free agent contracts are going to be relative bargains compared to most free agencies in NBA history."
"I’m not advocating signing stupid contracts, but this is the summer to overpay a bit (and by overpay a bit, I mean underpay over the duration of the deal) in order to get a long-term deal. And some free agents will just have to take that because there aren’t enough dollars around to overpay them all by a lot. But speed is essential, because some other team could really kill Detroit’s ability to do this by offering Reggie Jackson a contract. He is certain to make a lot more than $5.5 million per year, which means that if the Pistons keep him around, as soon as they have him on a new contract, a lot of cap space is getting flushed down the drain."
Next summer, the Pistons will be competing with everyone to sign free agents. This summer, they’re only competing with a subset of the other teams. It’s time to pounce.