How the Detroit Pistons could sign Jordan Clarkson

Jordan Clarkson of the Los Angeles Lakers is a restricted free agent, and an in demand free agent at that. How can the Detroit Pistons make a run at him?

The Detroit Pistons need a point guard. That’s been hammered home ad nauseam, but the question remains: which one? The draft is an option, although whoever falls to the Pistons at 18 will likely be less than serviceable right away for a team that expects to find itself in the playoffs and hopefully improve signficantly upon its eighth seed and 44-38 record this past season.

Free agency seems more likely. Most of what looks to be available at point guard is along the lines of affordable veterans, nothing that will excite you but enough to be an improvement on the carousel of sadness that was last season’s Steve Blake and Spencer Dinwiddie combination.

There’s an alternative to the obvious low-key options. It’s a bit outside the box, a bit forward thinking, but it might be crazy enough to work. That alternative is Jordan Clarkson of the Los Angeles Lakers.

Clarkson averaged 15.5 points per game, an astronomical feat considering he shared the floor with the ball vacuums known as Kobe Bryant and Nick Young, and did so while shooting 43.3 percent from the floor and 34.7 percent from three-point range. He just turned 24 on June 7th and is an explosive and athletic 6-foot-5 and 185 lbs.

Clarkson is likely the best player on his team (D’Angelo Russell is probably a couple of years away) and is a restricted free agent. How might the Pistons sway a young budding star away from Los Angeles?

The Pistons have the benefit of a salary cap provision named after former Washington Wizards superstar Gilbert Arenas. The so-called Arenas Rule allows a team to offer a restricted free agent a contract worth up to the non-taxpayer mid-level exception for the first two years, which this season is $5.6 million thanks to the ballooning salary cap. The second year of the contract would include a marginal raise to $5.9 million, but it’s year three and four where things get weird.

Under the Arenas Rule, a team offering a contract to a restricted free agent can offer the max to the player in question in years three and four of a four-year deal. In that third year, his salary would jump astronomically. His salary would go from $5.9 million to $22.7 million, and in the fourth year make a smaller jump to $23.6 million.

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The team currently holding the restricted free agent’s rights has the ability to match any offer presented to him, which means that the Lakers could match any deal the Pistons or any other team send his way. The Pistons (or other suitor) would have the advantage though. The offering team gets to average out the amount of the contract over the term of it, meaning that the Pistons would have a cap hit of $14.5 million in all four years of the contract.

The matching team, in this case the Lakers, does not have that ability. Their cap hit would be the actual amount of the contract on a year-by-year basis, meaning that the Lakers would have marginal cap hits in years one and two, incidentally the two years where the cap is guaranteed to explode upwards ($94 million in 2016-17 and $110 million in 2017-18), but the two years where Clarkson’s contract would balloon are the two years where there is expected to be a flattening or even decline in the cap.

It may be quite the commitment for a team that has over $60 million in cap space this year, but may not want to resign themselves to paying the punitive luxury tax for young Jordan Clarkson.

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What do you think? Would you like to see the Pistons make a move for Clarkson, or at least shove the infamous poison pill contract down the Lakers’ throats?

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