the good the bad and the ugly: NBA contracts

The NBA free agency period has started off and there have been some tremendous contracts, some awful contracts, and some even worse than that. Among those great contracts are that of Gerald Wallace with the Bobcats. He signed for 6 years and $57 million. That's about 10 million a year for a player who scored 18 points and pulled down 7 boards. While 10 million is a lot it's less than Vince Carter, Chancey Billups and Rashard Lewis, who we'll get to later. Additionally Wallace is only 24, I'll repeat only 24, at the end of the contract Wallace will be only 30. Really the only other good deal would be Fabricio Oberto's deal with San Antonio. While players like Jerome James are sitting on the bench making 5 million a year, Oberto will be making a little over 3 million a year, to start for a championship team.

Then comes the bad contracts. These include Jason Kapono for 24 mil over 4 years. It's not an awful contract since he'll only be 30 at the end of the contract, but you're paying 6 mil a year for a guy who can shoot and that's about it. Matt Carrol and Luke Waltons deal also fall in that bad area, as they're going to be paid way too much money well into their thirties.

But worse than the bad contracts are the ugly ones. By far the worst has to be the the Rashard Lewis contract. Now i love the idea of signing him, they had the cap space and he's an improvement over Darko so it could have been a great signing. However, they're going to pay somewhere in the range of 110 mil over 6 years for him. To do this they had to sign and trade, giving Seattle a second round pick and a huge trade exception, just so they could give him more money. This will lock up lewis till he's 33 at big time money, for a player who while good, ain't thaaaat good. Compare that to Gerald Wallace who signed for 57 million and it looks even worse. they're essentially paying more than twice the price for 2 more buckets a game. You would have thought they would have learned about these max contracts with T-mac and Hill, but i guess not.

now there are a lot more bad and ugly contracts i could talk about but I'm going to Vegas tomorrow so i won't take the time. Next post will probably be Tuesday, and if I'm lucky maybe I'll have gotten some inside scoops from the summer league... but most likely not.