Songs of the (Indians, Browns, and Cavs) Season: While We’re Waiting…
October 7, 2015Browns still searching for anchors
October 7, 2015ESPN’s Brian Windhorst, formerly of the Akron Beacon Journal and The Plain Dealer, was a guest on on Zach Lowe’s Grantland podcast, which came out Tuesday afternoon. They devoted roughly the first 33 minutes of the 104-minute chat to Tristan Thompson’s ongoing free agency. Tuck that napkin into your collar and let’s dig in.
Among Windhorst’s first points was that he thinks it will take some external force to bring Thompson and the Cavs closer together, whether it’s an injury, a poor Cavs start, or another unforeseen circumstance.1 Between Timofey Mozgov’s reportedly being out of shape, the relatively unknown quantities of a recovering Anderson Varejao and NBA rookie Sasha Kaun, and the Cavs tough early schedule — at Bulls, at Grizzlies, versus Heat in the first four days — there’s a decent chance that the Cavs stumble out of the gate not unlike last year.
The schedule eases up a bit after those opening three, headlined by a four-game homestand and two games against both the Sixers and Knicks. And as Lowe said, it wouldn’t really matter if the Cavs got off to a poor start. “The Cavs can start 2-10,” said Lowe. “I don’t care. All they need to do is get into the playoffs and they’re going to be the overwhelming favorite to come out of the Eastern Conference.” Assuming no critical injury occurs, that will be true all season.
Windy didn’t exactly paint a pretty picture, and said that he could see the stalemate going on for months. He and Lowe made comparisons to other restricted free agents and holdouts, including Eric Bledsoe’s 11th hour signing with Phoenix last year and Anderson Varejao’s holdout in 2007 — resolved in December — with Windhorst saying that this situation is being played by different rules.
The rules are said to be different in part because Mark Termini oversees negotiations for Rich Paul’s Klutch Sports agency, which represents Thompson.2 Termini has his own agency, Mark Termini Associates, and has negotiated some $400 million worth of NBA contracts. Perhaps his most famous negotiation was that of Ohio State product Jim Jackson, the No. 4 overall pick of the Dallas Mavericks in the 1992 draft. This was in the days before the rookie contract scale and there were actually negotiations to be had with draft picks. Things were tense.
“I do not feel that the Dallas Mavericks have dealt with me in the same way other top NBA picks were dealt with,” Termini said for Jackson, reading from a statement in December 1992. “I now feel it is necessary to publicly stop all speculation that I might at some time be willing to sign with Dallas. I will not under any circumstances, or at any time, play basketball with the Dallas Mavericks.”
Jackson signed a then-major six-year, $20 million deal in March 1993, including back pay for the 54 games he missed.
Now, there are a few differences between the Jackson-Mavericks and Thompson-Cavs situation, the biggest one being team quality.3 Those 1992-93 Mavs started the season 4-50 before Jackson signed. That’s four wins and fifty losses. They went on to lose 57 games before coming from behind in the fourth quarter to claim their fifth victory over an Orlando Magic team featuring a rookie center called O’Neal. Suffice it to say they were not competing for a championship. The 2015-16 Cavs are.
And at this point, as Lowe said on the podcast, that is Thompson’s greatest remaining leverage: the idea that the Cavs need him to win a championship. With how much health, luck, and happenstance come into play, every season the Cavs have with LeBron, Love, and Kyrie should be treated with a fair bit of urgency — the team’s various injuries only illustrate that point further.
Lowe is a believer that the Cavs need Thompson to win it all. Don’t confuse this with Lowe thinks Thompson is the Cavs fourth-best player; he thinks Thompson could wind up the third big man and seventh player in the rotation. The point isn’t where Tristan is in the pecking order. The point is that every piece is vital when you have title aspirations. “You need everyone to win the championship,” Lowe said. “Every skilled player on your team is going to contribute a massively important thing at some point if you are gonna win four playoff series.”
Think of David Lee coming off the bench for last year’s Warriors or Shane Battier fighting above his weight class for the Heat. Or, if you’d like to hit a little closer to home: Remember this P.J. Brown dagger from Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Semifinals in 2008?
The Celtics were up one with less than two minutes to go. The Cavs got them late in the shot clock. The ball found Brown some 20 feet from the hoop, and he buried it from the left wing. 91-88, Celtics. Timeout, Cavs. The Cavs couldn’t convert on their next possession, the Celtics made their free throws, LeBron’s 45 points were for naught, and a couple series later, Boston had its 17th championship. Tristan’s skillset isn’t midrange marksmanship like late period P.J. Brown’s, but the premise is the same; you never know where that key contribution will come from.
Lowe said that he’s argued with some executives over how much the Cavs need Thompson. The case posed by said execs basically boils down to: Where do the minutes come from? The Cavs have plenty of bigs as it is. Given 96 minutes for two “big” spots per game, Lowe conservatively estimated 32 for Kevin Love, 28 for Mozgov, and 10 apiece for Varejao and Sasha Kaun. That’s 80 right there, and that’s before sliding LeBron to power forward for a few minutes.4
The counterargument is that those allotments might fly for a regular season game, but again, the regular season isn’t all that important to the Cavs. When they really need Thompson is during the playoffs, and last year’s demonstrated his worth. The Cavs were forced to adopt a wholly different playing style without Irving and Love, and Thompson allowed them to do so. Windhorst was bullish on Tristan’s defensive versatility, especially his ability to corral ballhandlers in the half-court pick and roll sets that color so much of the playoffs. Andy and Sasha don’t offer that sort of quickness.
Note that words like “value” and “deserve” haven’t had a starring role in the conversation thus far. “I don’t think you can create a scenario [in which] Tristan Thompson is even an $80 million player in a regular season setting,” Windhorst said, before going on about Thompson’s aforementioned skill set. Whether or not you’re a fan of Jalen Rose, a maxim he frequently leans on feels relevant to this discussion: You never get what you deserve, only what you have the leverage to negotiate. Passing on the qualifying offer and a chance at unrestricted free agency in Summer 2016 has hurt Thompson’s leverage, but it seems he and Rich Paul are still hoping to wring every dollar they can out of this. Waiting the Cavs out may be their best course of action.
This entire god forsaken discussion could be rendered moot if the Cavs and Thompson bang out a deal by the end of the week, but it doesn’t sound like things are heading that way. As Fear the Sword’s David Zavac has pointed out, there has been clear middle ground between the sides practically since the negotiation started. If they were close to agreeing on a five-year, $80 million deal on July 1, and the highest possible offer is for five years and $94 million, one would think that something in the $85-89 million range would be palatable. Yet here we (still) are.
There remains a minor chance that the Philadelphia 76ers or Portland Trail Blazers offer Thompson a big deal that the Cavs could match (assuming Thompson signed such a deal), but that seems unlikely. Portland is lousy with young power forwards as it is, and throwing a huge contract at Tristan doesn’t exactly fit the Sixers’ model of acquiring cheap young talent and hoping to find a star.
The elephant in the room, as ever, is what LeBron James could do. He’s largely sat out thus far, a noncommittal Instagram post notwithstanding. Windhorst described James as a passive-aggressive leader — FIT-IN subtweet, anyone? — but one pointed statement from him could flip this whole thing on its head.
A hypothetical example of such boldness, as posed by Windhorst: “If LeBron wanted to weigh in, LeBron would come up in front of the microphone and say ‘When I signed with the Cavaliers, Dan Gilbert told me that the luxury tax was not going to be an issue and that’s why I’m here, so sign Tristan Thompson because you said that wasn’t going to be an issue.'” That sort of statement strikes me as out of character for LeBron, but the point stands; if he wants to force Gilbert’s hand, he can.5
How this thing is going to play out, I don’t know. I can’t imagine that Thompson, a Rich Paul client, would sit out the entire season and lessen the title chances of LeBron, Rich Paul’s oldest and most important client. I would guess that Thompson and Paul roughly share Zach Lowe’s belief that the regular season isn’t crucial to the 2015-16 Cavs, and are hoping to exploit that to their advantage without significantly hurting the team. I sincerely doubt that Thompson thinks sitting out an entire season is the best way to boost his market value.
As much as I hate talking about this stuff, it has turned into a rather interesting card game. We often fixate on the big numbers, namely the ones with the dollar signs in front of them. But in the end, the saga of Tristan Thompson may be about the small percentage bump he adds to the Cavs’ championship chances. As Lowe said, “The margin of error for Cleveland winning the title and not might be Tristan Thompson.”
Just don’t let Rich hear that, or we’ll be talking about this for another four months.
- Windhorst: “I think it’s going to take a third party event to bridge the gap.” [↩]
- As well as LeBron James. [↩]
- It was also 23 years ago. The collective bargaining agreement and salary cap have changed quite a bit since. [↩]
- Lowe called this line of thinking “flawed,” and I agree. Twenty minutes a game is a lot to expect of Andy and Sasha, at least until we see what both can do. [↩]
- He could conceivably force Thompson’s as well, though that seems unlikely given that 1) Thompson is his teammate, both on the Cavs and Klutch rosters, and 2) LeBron is vice president of the players union, which generally seeks to maximize its constituents’ earnings. [↩]
30 Comments
Boo Boo Kitty doesn’t add a max contract worth of percentage to the Cavs chances to win it all.
Does that make sense?
This is the thing that i do not understand. Has Jalen Rose says, It is what you can get, not what you are worth. There are no other offers close to the offer the Cavs are giving him, so that is the best offer. If there was a better offer, Tristan would have signed it. So the best deal is being offered is the one currently by the Cavs. It just does not make sense. I think they were waiting for Lebron James to voice his concerns behind the scenes and that has not happened. The deal is not getting better for him. What happens when the Cavs start 15-2? Then what happens? The current offer the cavs have presented is above market, how do we know that, because there are no other offers out there that are close. This has been poorly played by the Thompson camp.
This is certainly an opinion.
Why not just pay everyone on the team 25 mil a year since the luxury tax means nothing. (Duh!)
It boils down to the simple fact that 80 mill is ALREADY way more than Thompson is worth. If I was the owner I’d let him sit at home until he signed or retired.
I reckon a lot of people agree with this.
I think or hope through a combination of Love, Varejao, Kaun and possibly LBJ not to mention Mozgov that the Cavs have enough options to limit the loss that Thompson is creating. Of course I’d like him back but he has painted himself into a corner of unrealistic expectations and unless the Cavs bail Thompson out he’s just going to have to learn the hard way.
Sooo, we’re back to how we should, or should not, voice our opinions properly, if at all, as per the couple of Browns columns from earlier?
;P
And yes, I firmly believe the Cavs can win without him. And based on their current stance, the FO agrees with me.
Some of the rationale from TT’s camp was pretty thin. (1) Portland and Philly can act as facilitators for other teams that want TT. Possibly but that other team would have to pay to clear the cap space and then hope that the Cavs wouldn’t match. That’s awfully risky unless that other team wants the contract off the books anyway. That other team would also have to view TT as a max player and so far that just hasn’t been the case. (2) Draymond Green signed a bad contract so he can’t be used as a comparable. Perhaps but so did Reggie Jackson (from Detroit’s perspective). You either look at the entire body of comparable signings or not. (3) The Cavs need him to win a title. Arguable but TT needs to be on a team with Kyrie, JR, LBJ, and Love in order justify an eight figure contract. If you put him on a bad team, the offers would be much, much lower. I think if TT valued the money over contending he would have taken the Q.O. (4) Present market value is irrelevant due to the fact that he’ll likely have more value next summer. This is the worst argument of them all. Does TT’s agency think they are the only ones who know the cap is going up? It’s not a secret. The recent signings of comparable players factored in the fact that the cap was going up.
Why is Draymond Green’s contract bad?
He could have gotten a max contract. He’s arguably the second best player on that roster. Now if I were Griffin and they threw that in my face, my response would be “well maybe playing on a championship-caliber team was of some value to Green.” Then just let the silence hang there.
While I agree with you regarding the name calling, the truth of the matter is that the notion that because a player improves your chances at a Championship you have to pay them the max is absurd. I mean Delly was instrumental to the Cavs playoff performance and the guy can’t even get $2 million per.
I think Curry and Thompson were/are the best two players on the Warriors myself but Green obviously played an important role which is why Golden State paid as much as they did. Regardless Thompson, as you pointed out, isn’t even the Cavs fourth best option.
I’m convinced Thompson’s camp overplayed their hand and basically what we have now is someone who should try and save face by getting a deal done. Other then hoping some of his teammates get hurt (which I would hope wouldn’t be the case but this is reality) I don’t see a way the Cavs are forced to do anything more then what they already have done. LBJ instagram’s aside.
“I can’t imagine that Thompson, a Rich Paul client, would sit out the
entire season and lessen the title chances of LeBron, Rich Paul’s oldest
and most important client.”
Nice point here Will.
Also, applause to you for keeping up this conversation on both WFNY and Twitter fronts… I’m exhausted of it.
What makes Thompson’s insane position worse is the Cavaliers paid out a bonanza this past summer and are so far into the luxury tax that they can never be accused of not ponying up. On top of that you have JR Smith. The knucklehead opted out of his deal which I thought was crazy but even he had the sense to know he was far better off remaining with the Cavaliers then he would be leaving so he sucked it up and got a deal done.
Personally I wish I could say I’m surprised by what is going on with Thompson but I’m not, He never struck me as the brightest bulb in the bunch and lets be real up until last year his career has been pretty mediocre. If anything it’s been up and down. The real up not coming until this past season and that’s only because of LBJ and injuries to both Varejao and Love. I’d say $16M a year for that is quite fair.
“I can’t imagine” are the most important words of that sentence.
“I can’t imagine that Thompson, a Rich Paul client, would sit out the entire season and lessen the title chances of LeBron, Rich Paul’s oldest and most important client. ”
Boy this is ringing in my ears now.
I couldn’t agree more, although I think the people who are being stupid about this are actually Thompson’s agents as they’re the ones driving him to sit out… this is their M.O. (as Windy talks about in the podcast). From my view, the Cavs have all of the leverage right now. They theoretically have plenty of pieces to make the playoffs in the crappy Eastern conference regardless of whether Thompson plays this season. If he wants to play a game of chicken, the Cavs are going to win.
This situation reminds me a lot of the scene in The Big Lebowski where Dude, Walter, and Donnie confront the nihilists outside of the bowling alley and when they’re told that there is no money, one of them whines “but his girlfriend lost her toe!” That was a long way of saying that Thompson’s agents seem to have no ground to stand on, but are holding out simply because “we want the money Lebowski”. There are so many reasons as to why Tristan Thompson should not get a max contract and will not get offered a max contract by any other team and that what he has been offered is more than fair, but here are these idiots holding out to get more money for no good reason whatsoever. The Cavs currently have Love, Mozgov, Varejao, Kaun, and even LeBron for a handful of minutes per game to run at the 4 and 5. If they want to go small, they can get by with James Jones or Richard Jefferson at the 4. So congrats Rich Paul, your client’s only recourse other than signing is to sit out for the entire season and waste a year of his prime.
And who knows…maybe Austin Daye, Chris Johnson, or Nick Minnerath may step up and be a servicable minute-eater.
I completely forgot about Austin Daye, and I agree. This is the first I’ve heard of a Chris Johnson or Nick Minnerath, but perhaps?
Kevin Love is literally a power forward 🙂 I would also call Austin Daye a power forward in today’s NBA… or at least on this Cavs team if he is going to get any minutes at all.
Lets also remember the Cavs also have a trade exception too.
The agents are behind it but at the end of the day Thompson is the one making the final decision. We’ll see what happens. I just feel like the Cavs have never treated him badly or wrongly if anything they made him a very nice offer at 5 years $80M. I understand it’s Thompson’s right to want/ask for more but the fact that no other team has ever made an offer should be ringing in his head. I mean JR Smith of all people understood that and I’d like to think Thompson is at the least as smart as Smith. Although I do have my doubts.
That would be epic.
Use the trade exemption to secure a PF, and let YouKnowWho continue to hold out.
It could be why Griffin added it. It would make for nice insurance if the current players can’t fill the need and/or Thompson continues to be unreasonable. Then as you said let him watch on TV or buy a ticket like the rest of us.
What does it feel like to turn down 80 million? I’d like to know.
Personally, I thought 52 over 4 was a very fair offer, if Tristan really believes hes worth as much as Kyrie, hes a lunatic.
Great summation. Now I won’t have to listen! Windy gets on my nerves ever since he left to cover LBJ in Miami. He has been so heavily ESPN-ized, that everything is negative and WHOAMG THE BIGGEST DEAL EVAR!
While I often don’t like what Lowe has to say, I think he does a fine job.
Hi Tracey…If Dan Gilbert started doing this, do you think we could afford Tristan?
Me thinks you vastly overrate how good Green is.
That’s a point I keep making as well. Does TT honestly believe he’s a better player (and deserves more money) than KI?