Pritchard Extended
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Woj reporting the Celtics have agreed to a 4yr, $30mn extension with Pritchard
Boston Celtics guard Payton Pritchard has agreed on a four-year, $30 million contract extension, agents Austin Brown, Max Saidman and Mitch Nathan of
@CAA_Basketball tell ESPN. Deal is fully guaranteed.
https://x.com/wojespn/status/1711060478087336405?s=20
Boston Celtics guard Payton Pritchard has agreed on a four-year, $30 million contract extension, agents Austin Brown, Max Saidman and Mitch Nathan of
@CAA_Basketball tell ESPN. Deal is fully guaranteed.
https://x.com/wojespn/status/1711060478087336405?s=20
Did not see that coming.
Guess they're serious about him being a rotation player
Either that or the higher salary makes him easier to package in a trade next year. They've basically shipped out all their mid-tier salaries. Al and White are their only other contracts >$3mn and <$30mn.
Exactly. They needed another salary to make up for the loss of Smart and Time Lord’s.
This was my first thought.
He will be expensive at that number for a tax team down the road if he stays on the roster for the contract.
My guess is that they believe in him (dude did play real playoff rotation minutes in his 2nd year), and want to lock in a guard at what will quickly be a cheap contract if he's actually in the rotation all the time.
Also, as mentioned, lots of trade flexibility maintained.
I'm a Pritchard believer (as a role player with bigger guards/wings around him), so I like the deal.
Also, as mentioned, lots of trade flexibility maintained.
I'm a Pritchard believer (as a role player with bigger guards/wings around him), so I like the deal.
Right, but they can use him to trade for a player that makes up to $8.25mn (110% of $7.5mn). That opens up a lot more possibilities than just min salary type guys.
I think it’s a combo, they wouldn’t do it if they didn’t like him. And probably didn’t have to do 4 years of just for trade reasons.
But I do think Brad is looking at it from a few angles here. We are light on mid level contracts for trades.
The max contract thing in the NBA has made a lot of middle of the road players a lot of money. Pritchard paid like one of the top NFL RBs.
I think this is a good thing. I like PP and thought he was abused last year when he was exiled to deep bench.. imo he brings enough energy and a pretty decent 3 to offset a D weakness to contribute as a back up PG. He also becomes a $8M trade chip just in case.
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well it’s because you’re capped how much you can pay the best guys and the rest of the money has to go somewhere
And they can’t give the same contract to a free agent so if you lose your own guys you can’t replace them.
Yeah this transaction feels like its a function of the new deal. Even if Pritchard plateaus at this level of production, the market for him will likely still be liquid because of this contract.
It also works if he levels up too.
It also works if he levels up too.
Yeah this is a very good deal for both sides. He's very tradeable: reasonable salary (especially in the out years), has some NBA-level skills, could easily be a rotation player on a bad team because of his scoring. And if not, it preserves both a salary slot and a reasonable expense for an end-of-rotation guy for us.
Also raises the question of what to do with Horford's contract next year. Unless we decide we want him beyond '24-25, which seems unlikely, we may need to trade him so that we don't lose the salary slot.
Also raises the question of what to do with Horford's contract next year. Unless we decide we want him beyond '24-25, which seems unlikely, we may need to trade him so that we don't lose the salary slot.
It FEELS like a lot for his role but yeah it’s good trade fodder and the going rate for many rotation (and many non-rotation) players. If Wyc is happy to write the checks it is good basketball business.
Next offseason, won’t we be capped at salary plus $100k as a likely over second apron team?
Really? Seems like he's going to play real minutes and maybe he'll get minutes in the playoffs. At $7M-ish, that seems like good value to me.
He worked reaaaaallly hard and sacrficed a lot of growing up to get where he is. He spent hours every day working on his game and his body. As they say, to be a professional athlete, you usually got to be a little, well, different.
That's what I worry about. Maybe this is fodder for another thread, but let's have a recap here:
2018-19: We pay a small amount of tax, about $3.87M on $2.58M of overage.
2019-20: No tax, we're well under, by $14.2M
2020-21: No tax, we're just under, by $1.9M
2021-22: No tax, we're juuuuuust under, by $0.88M
2022-23: We careen into the tax by $26.M, with an estimated bill of $70.2M
2023-24: Currently looking at $16.2M over, estimated bill $32.5M. Doable.
2024-25: As of now, with only 10 players signed, we're $18.9M over, est. bill $41.5. But this will shoot up.
And now recall the tax rates:
("repeater" is a team that has paid tax in 3 of the last 4 seasons - which we will become in 2025-26.)
Let's assume for the sake of argument that Pritchard's deal is a flat $7.5M in each year. Adding that payroll onto our existing $16.2M overage means we start out paying $3.25 per dollar, for about half the salary ($3.8M worth), and the rest will be at $3.75, so average that at $3.50. So that means adding Pritchard's contract adds $7.5M to the payroll, and an additional $26.3M to the luxury tax bill.
Now, it wouldn't be quite correct to say that therefore Wyc is paying $33.8M for Pritchard's services. Any other player on the team could have their salary jettisoned to save those dollars, but it is simultaneously true that (1) but-for Pritchard's deal, we don't pay any of that money*, and (2) we could also think of it as proportionally allocated to everyone else's contract and view them as each now being ~15% more expensive. But no matter how you think about it, we need to think of each bit of payroll increase that we accept here - particularly Tatum's next deal - as coming with a 4.5x multiplier on the check actually written by Wyc.
* ...okay, most of it. We do still have a minimum-salary cap hold on us either way, $1.0M, so we can think of Pritchard as only $6.5M incremental, but all of that money is still incremental to what our current next-year payroll is, so I think it's a distinction without a difference.
Yeah, I’m not trying to demean everything he did to get where he is, but he got a pretty fortunate contract here due to the circumstances imo. Though maybe he’d have made more with a better shot elsewhere.
Ditto. I think this contract will age well. The guy plays hard and is a better passer than he gets credit for. He can play point guard on the second unit (as he's doing tonight, e.g.).
And now he can just go out and play without worrying about his contract situation. I think he’ll be a real asset for this team during the regular season.
I would guess 2024-25 won't shoot up from around where you have it now. My guess is Jrue opts out of his contract, and signs a long term deal starting at a lower number. Probably around enough to fill the back of the roster with minimums to leave it around where it is projected now.
Also, don't worry about the repeater tax. It's an owner created boogeyman for the fans.
Say in 2025-26, Wyc is willing to go a maximum 15M into the tax as a repeater team. Just to do round numbers to make the math easier, let's project the tax at 200M
So if he's willing to go 15M into the tax as a repeater, the total would be
215M in salaries, 43.75M in tax penalties for a total spend of 258.75
If he were a non-repeater team willing to spend that same 258.75M, the outlay would look like this
218.53M in salaries, 40.2225M in tax penalties for a total spend of 258.75
So the difference between repeater, and non-repeater, would be you'd have to spend 3.53M less in salary. That's assuming the owner actually has a red line number.
I'd bet my house most fans would think that repeater tax is much more draconian than having to cut your salaries by less than 2%
I'm not sure I've ever seen a bigger gulf between a player's performance when the games don't really count (preseason/summer league/last week of the regular season) and when they do than Pritchard. He goes from legitimately the best player on the court to a decent 8th man, it's really something.
I suppose someone can argue that he's going up against less skilled players, but I think a big difference too is that in games like tonight he's actually getting enough minutes to get comfortable, and into the game flow. Last year, during the regular season, he was mostly in for 2- and 3-minute stretches, and if he missed a three-point shot or two, he was on the bench for the rest of the game.
That's your delta between teams trying hard to defend and those who aren't imo. Pritchard feels like a player whose energy is part of their skill set. He is always pushing tempo so it probably creates an advantage vs lesser defenders or in games where D isn't being emphasized. Or maybe its what @Imbricus posted.
Two reasons for this. (1) When games don't count, the ball is in his hands and he's getting more shots. It's way easier to get in a rhythm when you have the ball and can set guys up. (2) Real NBA games have real NBA size. PP really struggles when players are bigger, particularly when driving.
It looks like PP really worked on his shot. The key to his minutes will be efficiency on low attempts.
I mean he's always flashed in regular season games. I think the lack of a regular role hasn't been great for his development. I honestly do expect a career year from him (though I don't expect him to be the preseason version of himself).
I think having 3 coaches in his 3 years, the last being an inexperienced coach, who iced him last year, hurt PPs development.
The NBA salary system makes my brain hurt. It's astonishing that paying a fringe player more money makes it easier to trade him later on.
The post you quoted was a little bit misleading as the Cs won't be able to aggregate players next year in a trade assuming they are over the 2nd apron.
I don't think the extension was really about PP's trade value. While it's generally true that having a higher salary means that BOS could (ignoring base year compensation issues) get a more highly paid player back, and that higher paid players are better than lower salaried players, PP is earning approximately 3.0% of the cap this year and assuming he plays the 4th highest guard minutes (counting JB as a guard), he likely still be super valuable at 5% of the cap.
And even at 5% of the cap, it seems like there's enough interest around the league for PP that BOS could always find someone to take him. However, getting value for PP is going to be tricky because of his pretty unique skillset whether he's a 3% of the cap or 5% of the cap.
I agree with this. I think they just believe in him as a rotation player.
If they were thinking of him as a trade piece, they'd be better off having him at 3/30 than 4/30. Or like 3/36 with the 3rd year half guaranteed.
Has anyone seen the terms of the extension? Sportstrac has it starting at $6,696,429 (4.71% of the cap) and increasing by 8% every year. If the salary cap goes up by 10% every year, by the end of the contract, he'll be making 4.39% of the cap.
It would be interesting if they decided to work out a flat or declining contract.
It would be interesting if they decided to work out a flat or declining contract.
Teams that are way into the tax rarely do declining contracts, since it frontloads the tax bill (and the apron thresholds). If you backload the contract, you can always move it later (is the thinking).
Obviously for teams way under the tax, frontloading makes more sense for the same reasons.
Agree conceptually but with the various extensions kicking in down the road, they might have wanted to minimize the repeater tax. In addition, a declining contract is easier to deal down the road.
But you're right, it's probably just the standard 8% raise. I just hadn't seen any firm numbers and wondered (out loud) why.
there was a good note around here recently about how little the "repeater" tax, really costs a team in hard dollars. It's not as punitive as the headlines sound.
For a team that's going to paying the repeater tax, it seems to me from a logical perspective that if PP's contract were declining (as opposed to increasing), the overall tax bill would be reduced but I don't have the time (or inclination really) to run the numbers to see whether any savings would be worth the effort.
I will stick to the hoops side of this deal. This kid needs to play. He plays his ass off and can falt out win a game with his shooting. If he can just hold his own on D. I love how sound his game is. He makes great decision when he drives, and has developed an in between game. Porzingis and Holiday will do much more with his soft penetration passes than Smart and Rob. The Cletics have also amassed a group of athletic defenders Brissett, Stevens, Walsh, (I expect one will pan out) that are good cheap change of pace guys from the undersized shooter.
I will make a bold prediction that is PP survives to the the playoffs there will be a "Pritchard Game" where he goes off and wins it for the Cs.
I will make a bold prediction that is PP survives to the the playoffs there will be a "Pritchard Game" where he goes off and wins it for the Cs.