Michael Porter Jr.’s development as the long-term starter at the four doesn’t help Millsap’s case. Slotting both Millsap and Will Barton into their room under the luxury tax will be a tight fit, and in any event, the Nuggets might prefer using their midlevel exception (MLE) to bringing back Millsap at his age. The question is whether Denver can afford to bring him back. While he doesn’t stretch the floor from the four spot as much as you might hope (34.3 percent from 3 last season and career), he’s still strong enough around the basket and on the glass at 6-foot-7 to be a net positive. Paul Millsap is 36 years old, but he can still play. Alternatively, that money could be put toward a point guard, with Chicago already linked to a couple of the free-agent point guards we mentioned earlier this week.
The latter depends in part on Chicago’s other cap room scenarios, but the Bulls could have enough room to do a renegotiate-and-extend arrangement with Zach LaVine if they let Markkanen walk.
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He’s a potent inside-outside threat who hit 40.2 percent of his 3s last season and nailed 58.2 percent of his shots inside the arc, pouring in 25.6 points per 100 possessions overall.Ī restricted free agent, Markkannen is likely to have interest outside Chicago and may only have tepid interest from the Bulls. Markkanen is a minus defender and doesn’t rebound nearly enough for a player of his height, but despite those deficiencies, there’s a lot to like. One of the offseason’s top mystery men, Markkanen has never quite blasted off in Chicago and proved a difficult fit in particular with Nikola Vucevic. Tier 2: More than midlevel but less than max However, something in the neighborhood of $100-110 million strikes me as a likely endpoint. A max deal for Collins would be four years, $125 million, and I don’t see that one happening sans an outside offer sheet. In the end, it’s strongly in the interests of both parties to get a long-term deal done. The Spurs are rebuilding around their young guards and will have max cap room, but will only have one big (lumbering center Jakob Poeltl) in the pipeline and are losing Rudy Gay, Trey Lyles, Gorgui Dieng and DeMar DeRozan to free agency.īarring a toxic offer sheet from the Spurs, this may come down to a staring contest between Collins and the Hawks. The teams with max cap room either don’t really need a power forward (New York) or aren’t trying to win this year (Oklahoma City) - with one possible exception: San Antonio. Of course, rival teams trying to grenade Collins out of Atlanta are unlikely to parse such distinctions, which is why overpays on offer sheets can happen in restricted free agency.įortunately, Atlanta is in a pretty good position when one sizes up the market. John Collins, Hawks (restricted): $26,142,092 (third overall)Ī max contract for John Collins would start at $28 million a year right now, BORD$ suggests he’s almost but not quite worth it. Let’s break it down: Tier 1: Max players 1. From that point, however, several role-paying stretch fours will hit the market, and a slew of veterans will be available for smaller exception money. In the case of our power forwards, you’ll find one young star who could get a lot of interest at or near the max, and then not much else until we get into exception money. I outlined those changes here, where I also go into the top 20 overall players in this free-agent market. To help answer that question, I have a tool called BORD$ (Big Ol’ Rating Dollars), and it’s designed to answer a simple question: How much value can we expect a given player to deliver for next season? I based this on two variables: the expected quality of the players’ minutes and how many minutes we’d expect the player to play on an average team.Ī complete summary of BORD$ is still available here, although I tweaked some of the input variables since a year ago.
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This is part of our series that will break down every position in the free-agent market, and of course, any examination of free agency starts with one question: What, exactly, are these players worth on a contract? And which ones should teams target first? The bad news is the pickings get slim pretty quickly after that, with Atlanta’s John Collins as the only power forward guaranteed to eclipse a $10 million annual salary. If you’re in the market for an elite power forward, the good news is that you only have one phone call to make.