Nick Collison

Nick Collison
PF/C, 6’10, 255lbs, 36 years old, 13 years of experience

Barely used any longer, and played only 128 minutes all season. Stuck a couple of jump shots, made a couple of reverses, grabbed some defensive rebounds and threw some bounce passes, all of which he has long been wont to do. Still smart. Just can’t run much any more and seemingly no longer worthy of playing contracts.

Player Plan: Expiring $3,750,000 contract. Still time for one more cap-bending extension, but it seems unlikely. Any contract at all seems unlikely, to be honest. Probably done.

The idea of a one-club man is a romanticised ideal in sports, yet one increasingly impossible to achieve in this heightened free agency era. Even Paul Pierce eventually got traded. However, it does occasionally happen, and Luol Deng is one of the few true veterans in this league to have spent his whole career with one team. Indeed, the only players to have been with their current teams longer than Deng has been with Chicago are Kobe Bryant, Dirk Nowitzki, Nick Collison, the Miami duo of Udonis Haslem and Dwyane Wade, and the Spurs trio of Parker, Ginobili and Duncan, while Jameer Nelson and Anderson Varejao are the only other 2004 draftees to have never left the team that first signed them. This kind of longevity, then, is rare - usually, one party is sufficiently disgruntled with the other by now to have moved on.

NBA contracts are only renegotiable if

a) they're going upwards, and
b) the team has cap room.

Because teams so rarely have cap room, and because it rarely behooves teams to pay their already-under-contract players more money, it almost never happens. Indeed, before this season, I could not name you a single occurrence of it happening; it probably has at some point, yet that's a testament to how rare it is. However, in this modern, sabermetric, MIT-laden internet-era NBA, executives are far more cap creative than they used to be. Therefore, this barely-used strategy has been used twice far already this season. Washington used their leftover cap room to increase Andray Blatche's salary, almost doubling his pay over the final two seasons of his contract and simultaneously tacking on a three year extension. Rather than chancing losing him on the 2012 open market, the team tied him in for five years for a total of $35,730,997, tying down a productive young player for a significant period of time. The Thunder themselves later one-upped this move with a $17.55 million extension for Collison that deliberately, humorously and yet craftily made him the fourth highest paid centre in the world ($13,670,000), behind only Amare Stoudemire ($16,486,611), Dwight Howard ($16,647,180) and Yao Ming ($17,686,100.)