Market Adjustment: Good NBA big men are bargains right now
August 27th, 2018
It took nearly a month of free agency to do it, but the last big free agency name was eventually taken off the board at the end of July. The Houston Rockets finally agreed to re-sign free agent centre Clint Capela to a deal reported to cost them only five years and $90 million, of which only five years and $80 million is guaranteed. My use of the world “only” there was very deliberate. That is not a lot of money for a player of some calibre, and who is a roughly ideal fit for what the Rockets are doing with their team. It is considerably less than the maximum salary of five years and $147,710,050 (or four years and $109,509,175 with another team) that he could have signed for, and it is a lot less than Houston probably expected they could get him for when headed into free agency. In a tough free agency period in which they lost Trevor Ariza to the Phoenix Suns and Luc Richard Mbah A Moute to the L.A. Clippers, and given a maximum contract to Chris Paul that will be of questionable value in the back end, the Rockets needed to win on this one, and they have done. In large part, this was due to their patience. Taking this full month allowed the relative impatience of the competition to take effect, and as the other cap space teams spent their money up, Capela quickly ran out of bidders. The Rockets have been significantly aided in this quest, though, not only by Capela’s restricted free agency, but also by a flat overall market for ‘big men’. Positional distinctions are increasingly hard to do these days. Still, with that disclaimer in mind, here is a list of all the new contracts given out to veteran ‘big men’ in […]
Sham’s 2010 NBA Draft Night Recap, Part 1
June 27th, 2010
Over the course of the last nine months, I have watched somewhere in the region of 700 NCAA games. I have done this partly because of a deep-rooted affinity for Jay Bilas, but also in anticipation of the NBA Draft. Draft Night ranks somewhere near Christmas Day and Metanoia Day1 as the best day of the year, and the only thing that can rival Draft Night for excitement is Draft Day. If you’re a basketball nerd, you will know why this is the most exciting thing ever. And if you’re not a basketball nerd, you should stop reading right now, because it only gets worse from here. Included in that 700 games are about 140 different teams. For reasons that perhaps a psychotherapist is better equipped to explain, it is my life’s pursuit to know about every player in male professional basketball.2 This is of course an impossible task, but if you can pigeon hole them early while they’re still amateurs, then you can get somewhere close to it. This, therefore, is where the NCAA proves invaluable. And given that you never know where the quality is going to come from, I tried to watch everyone. (Lafayette versus Lehigh was a particularly low point, as were the two Morgan State versus South Carolina State games. I think one would have sufficed there. And while I still have Yale vs Princeton stored up and ready to watch, I’m not sure I can manage it.) The reason I was able to watch all these games is because of the way ESPN have risen to power in the world of British basketball. For several months, ESPN was nothing but a competitively-priced amateur basketball cow. Multiple games a day, I imbibed that milk. Past drafts, and therefore past draft diaries, have not seen me […]
