When negotiating contracts, players and their agents will look around the league for comparisons, which is what is going to happen with the Detroit Pistons and Jaden Ivey. Ivey’s camp is going to point to Immanuel Quickley as the baseline for Ivey, which is not great for the Pistons.
There is a similar situation brewing with Jalen Duren, whose camp is going to point to some of the recent contracts signed by centers as the minimum for JD, which could end up being a disaster for the Pistons.
Ivey’s management team will reference the ridiculous contract the Toronto Raptors gave to Immanuel Quickley, which could be worth as much as $162 million over five years.
Quickley is a nice player, but is he worth $32.5 million a season? Most people would say no considering he doesn’t even average 20 points a game and is arguably the 3rd or 4th-best player on his own team.
You could say the same about Ivey, who missed most of last season with a leg injury, has yet to average 20 in a season and is arguably the 3rd or 4th-best player on the Pistons’ roster.
Unless Ivey blows up and answers every question hanging over him next season, the Pistons must avoid the Quickley scenario.
2nd Contracts are based on faith, but the Detroit Pistons can’t have too much
Second contracts are the riskiest in the NBA, as the player still hasn’t reached their peak and you are still acting on some amount of faith giving them a big deal.
It worked out with Cade Cunningham, who made All-NBA after signing his big extension, but Cunningham had already shown far more than Ivey has at this point.
There hasn’t been much movement on extensions for Ivey and Duren this summer, and the Pistons may be content to let them ride out their final years, go to restricted free agency and get a deal done from there.
What they can’t do is give either one of these players a massive Quickley-like deal before they know for sure they can be part of the foundation moving forward. Duren is closer to answering that question than Ivey at this point, especially after the Pistons took off as a team in his absence last season.
If Detroit can lock Ivey into a team-friendly or short-term extension right now, it might be the smart thing to do, as that price tag will only go up if he has a big season, but they can’t go into Quickley territory or they could look up in a few years and wonder why they are paying a 17 ppg scorer over $30 million a season.