The Summer of Star Movement Isn’t Over Until Bradley Beal Says It’s Over
Beal reportedly has no plans to accept the Wizards’ lucrative extension offer. Could he be the next star to hit the trade market? And if so, what will his trade market look like after several teams paid heavy prices to load up on superstar talent?
On Friday, just as they said they would, the Washington Wizards offered Bradley Beal a contract extension to pay him as much money as they possibly could, for as long as they’re able to. Beal didn’t immediately sign the new contract, just as his agent, Mark Bartelstein, said he wouldn’t, because there was no reason for him to.
Time is on Beal’s side. The extension offer will stay on the table until October 21, the start of the 2019-20 NBA season. Waiting also preserves more, and more lucrative, contract options in the future. Beal’s got two years left on the rookie-scale extension he signed in 2016, so the longest extension he could sign would be for three years and $111.8 million. Waiting until next summer would allow him to tack on an additional year and bring the total value of the extension to $154.6 million through 2025, according to salary cap guru Albert Nahmad.
The numbers will skyrocket even further if Beal makes one of the three All-NBA teams this season. (He just missed the cut in 2018-19, finishing seventh in voting among guards, just behind Kemba Walker.) That would make him eligible for the designated veteran player extension, a.k.a. the “supermax,” which would allow him to earn up to 35 percent of the salary cap and add another year onto the end of the deal. Based on current projections, Beal could be looking at a five-year, $253.8 million payday next summer to stay in Washington ... if, that is, he decides that’s where he wants to be.
While Beal is “grateful for the gesture” of the Wizards offering him a max extension at their earliest opportunity, according to David Aldridge of The Athletic, and while “amiable discussions” between Bartelstein and a restructured Washington front office led by just-promoted general manager Tommy Sheppard will reportedly continue this week, that still leaves the nettlesome matter of the Wizards being very bad, even with Beal putting up historic numbers in an effort to carry them. (Only 12 guards in NBA history have averaged 25 points, five rebounds, and five assists per game for a full season. Beal became one of them last season.) Washington will carry a top-10 payroll for what is projected to be a bottom-five team this season, and the pain isn’t likely to end there.
The franchise’s fate is inextricably linked with fallen hero John Wall, who inked a supermax deal of his own in the summer of 2017. Wall has lost more than half of the past two seasons to injuries, and will likely miss all of the 2019-20 season—during which he will make $37.8 million—after rupturing his left Achilles tendon. Wall can’t provide value on the court right now, and his contract is arguably the worst in the sport. That’s left Sheppard limited to on-the-margins moves as a wheel-greaser for other deals—taking flyers on Moe Wagner and Isaac Bonga to help the Lakers facilitate the Anthony Davis trade, taking on Davis Bertans to help the Spurs take a run at Marcus Morris (which, whoops)—at a time when the Wizards need a much more significant overhaul to aspire to being anything better than an also-ran.
Maybe Wall’s rehab goes off without a hitch, he comes back in 2020—at age 30 on opening night, after missing a season and a half to the most devastating injury a basketball player can suffer—and he beats the odds to play up to a contract that will still owe him $132.9 million (presuming Wall picks up his $47.4 million player option for 2022-23). Maybe the combination of Beal and a healthy Wall, plus growth from recent draftees and wise usage of the financial flexibility to come when Ian Mahinmi’s deal expires, will give the Wiz a fighting chance at getting back to playoff contention before too long. In an Eastern Conference with few sure things, and in an environment in which flattened lottery odds increase your chances of landing a top pick even without a bottom-of-the-barrel record, as Wizards owner Ted Leonsis recently asked, “Why can’t this be quick?”
But maybe that’s too many maybes for an ascendant All-Star who’s just about to enter his prime, and who sees just how many “obvious questions remain” about the Wizards’ plans and possibilities. After battling injury issues early in his career—issues that, at one point, had Beal expecting playing-time restrictions for the rest of his career—nobody has played more minutes than Beal over the last three seasons. How long will he want to keep shouldering that kind of burden for a team with such limited prospects? Time is on Beal’s side, but in an ever-accelerating league that has grown short on long-term goals, it’s also of the essence.
“Washington is where I’ve been the last seven years, going on eight,” Beal told reporters last month. “It would be great to play in one place forever. But at the same time, you want to win and make sure you’re in a position to do so.”
Even if Beal decides to pass on the extension, Sheppard told ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski last week that the Wizards don’t plan to entertain trade talks for the two-time All-Star. Instead, they’ll focus on building the organization around him over the final two years of his current deal in an attempt to convince him to stick around beyond 2021, when he’ll hit unrestricted free agency. For now, Beal sounds content to see how those developments unfold; he said before free agency opened that he wanted to take some time to evaluate how the new front office operated and what additions the Wizards made. If the evaluation process leads him to decide he’d like to ply his trade elsewhere, though, he could follow in the footsteps of the many other stars—Davis, Paul George, Kyrie Irving, Jimmy Butler, Chris Paul, Kawhi Leonard, et al.— who have exerted their influence to find a new home before they could reach the open market.
As difficult as it would be to entertain trading away the lone bright spot in what has become a benighted era in D.C. basketball, it’d be even more painful to fail to build a credible contender around Beal and then watch him walk in two summers with nothing to show for it. Consigning the franchise to even more short-term misery would be tough. But doing so while recouping young talent and future draft capital is a hell of a lot better than finding yourself in the same boat as Charlotte.
The Hornets locked themselves into salary-cap stasis by spending big in the summer of 2016 to chase consistent competence, sputtered off the line in subsequent seasons, missed their chance to kickstart a rebuild by trading their own All-Star guard, and then saw Walker sign with the Celtics. Now they’re eyeball-deep in the rebuild they’d put off, only without any additional assets to potentially help move things along. Like Walker, Beal is the only chip his franchise can cash in to restock the coffers in an effort to build the next competitive iteration of the team down the line. The longer the Wizards wait to put him in play, the less time he’s still under contract at a below-market rate, and the lighter the return they’re likely to score.
After weeks of marquee names changing addresses, Beal and Kevin Love might be the biggest potential difference-makers a team could reasonably expect to swing a deal for, and Beal’s less expensive, nearly five years younger, a bona fide top-of-the-floor creator, and a capable defender who’d fit into just about any perimeter configuration. He’d make a ton of sense alongside Nikola Jokic in Denver, perhaps for a package including an established young player like Gary Harris, a lottery ticket like Michael Porter Jr., and a couple of future first-round picks. The Celtics reportedly viewed Beal as a target if they lost Kyrie Irving in free agency, but that was before they landed Walker; would Danny Ainge view Beal as enough of an upgrade on the status quo to offer up something like Jaylen Brown, Marcus Smart, and future first-rounders?
We’ve just seen multiple star players net massive trade hauls. George landed the Thunder five first-round picks, swap rights on two more, a quality vet on an expiring contract (Danilo Gallinari), and a prospect with All-Star potential on a rookie deal (Shai Gilgeous-Alexander). Davis got the Pelicans three recent first-round picks (Brandon Ingram, Lonzo Ball, Josh Hart), three first-round picks, and swap rights on another. Russell Westbrook, once thought a nearly unmovable deal, got OKC two first-round picks and swap rights on two others. But George carried with him the promise of a commitment from Leonard, Davis is arguably the best big man in the sport, and Westbrook represented an opportunity to get off Paul’s similarly onerous contract while potentially maximizing Houston’s competitive chances for the remainder of James Harden’s deal. Beal, on his own, might not elevate a suitor’s ceiling to quite the same degree.
He might also, however, be the best option left on the board for a team that considers itself one big move away from making real noise in a post-Warriors-dynasty NBA. Is that combination of scarcity and opportunity compelling enough to convince a bidder to make the kind of multiple-picks-and-young-pieces offer it’d likely take to get the Wizards to change their minds about standing pat on Beal? Or will teams that think they could get Beal prefer to keep their powder dry and wait the Wizards out, knowing that every day he doesn’t sign that extension or otherwise commit to a long-term future in D.C., he gets one day closer to free agency, and his price tag drops a little bit more?
It’s a complicated calculus that faces Sheppard and Co., with no easy answers and plenty of uncertainty on all counts. For now, all we know is that Beal’s got an offer on the table, and he’s going to let it sit there. On that, and on everything else, time will tell.