I have various tabs open with Coon's FAQ, wikipedia's "NBA Salary Cap", storytellerscontracts, and Google as well as an excel spreadsheet that I'm putting to work on this, and I just want to make sure I have a few things right.
LeBron's salary for the 2009-2010 season is $15,779,913. The maximum starting salary of his free agent contract is 105% of this, which is $16,568,909. While the Cavs can sign him for six years with 10.5% raises, it looks to me like other teams can sign him for five years with 8.0% raises (I had not realized the incumbent team's advantage was quite so substantial). Without blinding you with five years of numbers, I'll summarize by saying the the fifth year of a LeBron max extension with another team would be $21,870,959, and the extension would work out to be "5 years, $96.1M" (the Cavs could offer him six years at $125.5M). The preceding is the paragraph I'd like feedback on if not correct. What follows is conjecture on my part.
I'd like to correct myself. I went back to the FAQ and crunched a few more numbers and it turns out LeBron's maximum contract simply by virtue of having seven years of service in the NBA is slightly greater than the value you get by taking 105% of the last year of his contract.
It's complicated, using a "salary cap" slightly different from the "actual" salary cap, and the only purpose of the first "salary cap" is for taking 30% of it to get these max figures. The former cap is 48.04% of BRI while the "actual" salary cap is 51%.
Anyway, his max salary, based on the $62M cap, is $17.52M. If the cap is a big greater than this, so is the starting salary, but our room under the cap actually increases faster, so this is a nice conservative estimate. Over a five-year deal it works out to something very slightly greater than $100M.
(the above is quoted from my amendment posted below; I wanted the content of the original post to reflect accurate information, thus the edit.)
For Blazer fans, the big variables to consider that makes this situation hard to pin down are 1) what will be the starting values of Roy's and Aldridge's extensions? and 2) what exactly will the salary cap be? I've somewhat conservatively projected a salary cap of around $62M, two years after the current cap of nearly $59M.
For both extensions, I looked around the league. For Aldridge, Josh Smith's deal jumped out at me. They seem comparable in terms of position, numbers, star status, and team value, and both teams are young and on the upswing of rebuilding. Smith's extension was for 5 years, $58M with a starting value of $10M (maximum raises were not used). By starting at $9M in the interest of preserving cap space, but using maximum raises, I created a 5 year, $54.45M extension. For Roy, I bit the bullet and went with approximately a maximum deal; I think Roy is every bit as talented and as valuable as Deron Williams. The starting salary for max extensions changes every year and was frankly too complicated for me to figure out, but Deron's started $13.758M, so I inserted a round figure of $14M for Roy one year later. Over five years, Roy's extension is worth $84.7M.
The other Blazers under contract for the 2010-2011 season are Przybilla at around $7.4M, Webster at $4.8M, and this year's crop of four rookies for a total of $11.5M. If we're talking about pursuing LeBron James, I think we'll put our other free agents on the back burner, so I'm letting Blake and Outlaw walk and not worrying about a Sergio extension at this point. Assume also the Channing and Ike are long gone. I wasn't quite sure what to do with Koponen and Freeland, but even if they both sign next year, storyteller provides us with figures suggesting their salaries would add to about $1.8M. Even if we leave them overseas, this might be a prudent figure to include due to the two drafts between now and the 2010 UFA signing period.
Using all of those cap hits and a salary cap of $62M, the Blazers could be under the cap by $13.55M, almost exactly $4M short of what it would take to offer LeBron the maximum allowable. Accepting a five-year deal at that number would net him $81M rather than $96.1M; that's asking a lot. However, just by leaving our euros overseas and trading out of the next two drafts (deferred for future picks), we could increase our max offer by nearly $2M starting, and now we're getting close. We could fail to pick up Batum's first option to make it the rest of the way. If the salary cap is closer to $65M, this all actually becomes pretty easy.
Of course, as much as I hate to say it, the obvious solution is to move Przybilla for an expiring deal or trade exception before the time comes. Dropping that $7.4M, combined with some of the prudent measures detailed above, would allow us to make a max offer and still have $4-$8M to play with in the meantime for rookies and role players.
At the end of the day, we are left with the following skeleton of a roster, eight players making $56.8M for the 2010-2011 campaign.
PG - Jerryd Bayless
SG - Brandon Roy, Rudy Fernandez
SF - LeBron James, Martell Webster, Nicolas Batum
PF - LaMarcus Aldridge
C - Greg Oden
Somewhat humorously, we could probably fill out the roster with cheap role players and not even pay luxury tax in Year 1 of this uber team. After that, it would be time to start ponying up as Oden begins to get paid.
Perhaps the coolest part about all of this is that our team doesn't have to do anything extreme to plan for it. The way I see it, Frye and Diogu will walk anyway, Blake and Outlaw will play out their team options, and no one looks particularly tempting in next summer's free agent market. Furthermore, none of it depends on Darius Miles.
I'll leave you with this: "...I go out and I play hard and that's loyalty," James added. "It's hard because it's a business. (The) franchise is going to do what is best for the player, it always comes back on us. I am going to look bad. If a franchise decides to give up on a player, it's OK. So we have to do what is best for us." --LeBron James
