Gambling against free agency

Now that the trade that shook the San Antonio Spurs‘ foundation is beginning to settle, it’s time to objectively analyze the trade. People much more qualified than me will break down the tape, figure out how the new pieces fit with the Raptors’ and the Spurs’ rosters and explain how it will all work, but I’m more interested in the philosophical decisions the San Antonio front office made to make this work.

Choosing to add DeMar DeRozan’s 2+1 deal, valued around $27.7 million per year, to the payroll means that open cap space over the next couple of offseasons will be minimal. There certainly won’t be a “max contract” hole to slot a glittering big free-agent name into, something that the modern NBA seems to revolve around as All-Stars circle from team to team. This has upset some Spurs fans, but I believe that it’s absolutely the right move for San Antonio. Here’s why:

The Spurs don’t sign big free agents
This is a contentious topic to discuss, because some interpret it as an attack on the Spurs or the city of San Antonio. “You’re saying NBA players don’t want to live a great city, play with great teammates, get coached by Pop and follow in the footsteps of legends like Tim Duncan??!? Nonsense!” But it’s not an attack, and it’s not inaccurate. LaMarcus Aldridge is the free-agent exception, the prodigal son who returned home to finish out his prime. But apart from LMA (it’s worth noting here, by the way, that even LMA’s signing wasn’t smooth sailing), there isn’t a single free agent worth a damn who signed in SA. Richard Jefferson earned his bad rap partly because his signing as a prominent free agent was such an oddity in San Antonio — and then he didn’t live up to the billing.

As Pounding the Rock’s Devon Birdsong points out in his excellent piece “What it costs to be a Spur,” the Spurs work because they put a premium on teamwork and downplay the individual. That doesn’t mesh with today’s league, which profits off individuality, star power and big-market rivalries while promoting personal branding and larger-than-life personalities. Essentially, the Spurs are the antithesis of the modern NBA. So while players like LeBron can have vast amounts of respect for Pop and the Spurs’ ways of doing things, that doesn’t translate into SA being players for the Paul Georges and the Chris Pauls (despite frequently being used as leverage by players in negotiations).

And at the end of the day, isn’t “freeing up cap space” a concept designed to draw a talented player to your franchise? Haven’t the Spurs just done that? So what’s better, freeing up cap space that, given the Spurs’ history in these situations, could go unused or be given away on a bad Pau Gasol-type contract, or filling that cap space with All-Star talent that’s acquired by trade instead? Instead of convincing a star player to come play in SA, the Spurs now get two years to prove to a star that staying a Spur is worth it. Door No. 2, please.

The Spurs is really good at drafting, developing and trading
Perhaps because of that lack of appeal to big-ticket free agents, the Spurs have become really good at excelling in other areas of talent acquisition. Landing Tim Duncan may have been dumb luck (with apologies to an injured David Robinson), but the front office and coaching staff has proven adept at finding talent through the draft in places other teams weren’t looking. Foreign players have found plenty of success in San Antonio, and so have project players other franchises weren’t willing to put the effort and expertise into developing. Good players “falling” to the Spurs in the draft has become so commonplace that it’s considered a eyeroll-worthy draft-night trope when announcers mention it. And, of course, the front office got good returns on the George Hill trade, among others. Why can’t DeRozan, an underappreciated All-Star derided for an archaic midrange game and harshly criticized for Toronto’s failings in the postseason, be the latest San Antonio reclamation project?

Pop isn’t getting any younger, so a Clippers-type deal with high draft picks and role players was understandably less appealing to him (even if objectively it may have been a superior offer). This trade, by contrast, gives San Antonio a draft pick to cash in on, an All-Star to elevate to the next level and a prospect to develop into something special. It doesn’t get more Spurs than that.

A lot of people expected the salary cap to keep rising after it spiked in 2016. Those people were very, very wrong. The cap was actually experiencing an anomaly, the result of the CBA not including cap “smoothing” measures.

The cap is projected to jump again
I’ll preface this by saying the cap isn’t my specialty, but part of the reason DeRozan’s salary alarms some people is because the NBA is in the throws of a bear market. The crazy money being thrown around in 2016-17 is a thing of the past but still having a chilling effect on the free agent market today, as teams still trapped with the bad deals of that offseason have very little money to offer prospective free agents in this one. That means the deals being handed to players this year make even reasonable deals like DeRozan’s from prior years look like overpays.

But that’s expected to change. The cap will go up again this coming offseason, there will be more money to spend and larger deals will once again be handed out to basketball players looking for a payday — and DeRozan’s salary will once again look less like a cap-crippling blow and more like a bargain.

Conclusion
The bottom line is this: The Spurs acquired an All-Star-caliber player that given their history they wouldn’t have been able to lure to San Antonio otherwise, managed to maintain player control over that All-Star for the next couple of seasons and get to pay him a fair wage for those two (and maybe even three) years of service. That alone makes this trade worth the price of admission, especially when you consider the limited trade value of the asset San Antonio sent to Toronto. Cap space and flexibility are fine, but in this case were the wrong moves for Pop and the Spurs.