re: Pels v Blazers: that Zion guy is pretty good

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But twice now, Pels and Bucks, he’s come up on his contract year playing for teams that can’t afford to let him go because their backs are against the cap wall so they are going to have to pay him above market rate to keep him.

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“ It only takes one.

That’s what always worries NBA executives. Just one rival team that gets a wild hair and falls in love with one of your players can blow up your roster or your salary cap structure in minutes, and you can’t do a thing about it.

Boston lived that fear this week. It’s what I call the Bird rights trap, and it’s what the Celtics fell into when Gordon Hayward left for Charlotte as a result of an absurd four-year, $120 million deal from the Hornets. It’s also why players like Marcus Morris and Joe Harris signed deals that seemed extravagant relative to their talents, and why Denver tried to match an equally outlandish offer from Detroit to Jerami Grant.

Let me explain.

For a team near or below the salary cap, a situation like Hayward’s doesn’t present nearly as much of a problem. Let’s say, for instance, your team was going to be right at the salary cap this season, and you learned a player like Hayward planned to opt out of his $34.5 million deal for the coming season to sign someplace else.

No big deal — you just got $34.5 million in cap room! Signing a replacement should be relatively easy. While this example doesn’t work as well if the player is named LeBron James, as long as it’s not one of your two best players, you’ll be able to sign a replacement and get along just fine.

Teams with low salary-cap structures, in other words, are almost completely insulated from the foolishness of their rivals. If somebody wants to sign one of their players to a bad contract, they can easily pivot to a different option.

For teams above the cap, however, a situation like Hayward’s presents a different conundrum. For any player worth the midlevel exception or more, the team is in a really tight spot. First, if the player leaves, it can’t come up with a replacement of equal value. Second, even if it can come up with something of nearly equivalent value with the midlevel exception (MLE), you only get one of them … and you just forfeited your opportunity to use it on a player at another position. Use that MLE to plug the first hole and leaks pop up elsewhere.

Agents know that all too well and bluff to their advantage. Oh, you won’t go to $15 million a year for my guy? There’s this desperate team with cap room out there who will. Do you dare call their bluff? Do you feel lucky? (A few agents who truly know the cap are especially gifted at this. Though I must say, negotiating with an agent who bluffs and doesn’t know the cap, while rare, is freaking hilarious.)

It creates tremendous pressure for over-the-cap teams to overpay their non-All-Star starters in years, annual money or both. It’s no accident that the biggest overpays this week were on big-money, long-term deals for accessory players on capped-out teams: four years and $64 million for Morris; four years and $75 million for Harris; three years and $40 million for Kentavious Caldwell-Pope; five years and $80 million for Davis Bertans; four years and $52 million for Jordan Clarkson; and four years and $60 million for Malik Beasley.

For each of the teams involved, there just wasn’t a good Plan B if those guys walked. So their teams were spooked into paying top dollar to retain them.

Boston, post-Hayward, represents the other side of the Bird rights trap. Its roster is a bit like a deflated balloon right now. The Celtics used their MLE on a big man, just like they would have anyway, and another small exception on a guard, and as a result are more or less the exact same team they would have been … except without Hayward. They can’t replace him as an over-the-cap team.

It’s possible for Boston to pull off a late, dramatic save by generating a massive $30 million (or so) trade exception in a sign-and-trade with Charlotte, but even that will prove costly. The Celtics need to pony up an asset to include in the trade with Charlotte and then, almost certainly, another asset to bring a player into the exception. At a minimum, replacing Hayward in their salary structure will cost them two draft picks.

As for Charlotte, yes, it was just as goofy a decision as everyone thinks it was. Shelling out for a 30-year-old non-All-Star when it is years away from contending for anything important is … a decision. And leave me with the “we have to sell tickets” talk — it’s the wrong year for that.

Charlotte will also need to stretch the contract of Nicolas Batum, unless it can find another deal or the teams arrange a sign-and-trade. One of the oddities of free agency is that until the ink dries, the sides can tweak a deal to make it turn out much better than the original plan. In Boston’s case, it’s by harvesting a huge trade exception or a player from Hayward’s departure. In Charlotte’s, it’s avoiding a de facto $9 million a year surcharge on Hayward’s contract by not having to use the stretch provision on Batum’s.

We’ll see how it turns out. Nonetheless, in a year with few or no paying fans to please, it’s odd the Hornets didn’t choose to use their cap space as a means to hoard assets for the future. Charlotte was in a much better position to play the cap-room game a year from now, with more money and more potential free agents of a suitable age than this season, and a roster that would be further along in its rebuild from ground zero following Kemba Walker’s departure.

Instead, the Hornets turned their cap space into what is immediately one of the league’s least-desirable contracts.

Like I said, it’s the thing every front office fears, and it just came and bit Boston yesterday. Boston had its nice little plans, and then Charlotte bulldozed them when it fell head over heels for Hayward. That forced the Celtics to either pay through the nose to keep him or lose him and struggle to come up with a remotely comparable replacement.

That’s why the Bird rights trap is one of the thorniest issues front offices face and keeps execs up at night at this time of year. For 29 teams, a deal like that for Hayward was absurd. But it only takes one.”

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