Basketball
The modern NBA equivalency is this: a supermax-contracted star traded for purely financial reasons. We’ve seen a series of players move on for ostensibly non-basketball reasons over the past few years, the latest being Boston Celtics star Jaylen Brown’s shocking trade to the Philadelphia 76ers.
Celtics general manager Brad Stevens stated clearly that he wasn’t comfortable, in this age of the hardest of soft-caps, with two players making 70% of the salary cap. He has a point. It’s simply too difficult to build the requisite depth around your tentpole stars required to make deep playoff runs.
Brown, for all of his obvious ability, isn’t Jayson Tatum, so he had to go. Paying multiple max salaries is now a Sixers problem.
Brown, though, isn’t the last player — and the Celtics are not the last team — to face this issue.
Basketball Will Donovan Mitchell be the next star player traded?
The Cleveland Cavaliers extended star guard Donovan Mitchell to the tune of $273 million through to 2031, when Mitchell will be 34 years old. On its surface, this is a success. Mitchell wasn’t drafted to Cleveland, nor did he choose to be traded there. Having now signed two extensions, it’s a testament to what that organisation has built that a perennial All-NBA talent has chosen to stay in Ohio.
Mitchell’s an elite scorer, but his lack of size, defense and playmaking requires particular talents around him. Cleveland has that with the elite passing of James Harden and the dynamic rim protection of Jarrett Allen and Evan Mobley. That group, though, creates its own cap crunch. Allen’s $28 million annual deal is a reasonable rate.
The 36-year-old Harden, a free agent after declining his player option, will surely require a bag to come back. Their role players — Max Strus, Sam Merrill, Dennis Schroder, et al — are all on market value deals. Most pertinently, Mobley’s current $50 million per season deal runs out in 2027, at which point he’ll likely sign his own ‘super-max’ extension. That’s when the Cavs will face their own cap realities.
Mitchell and Mobley are neither as talented nor as accomplished as the Tatum/Brown duo were. If Boston doesn’t feel that committing two-thirds of the cap to that pair was prudent, it’s unlikely that allocating a similar percentage to Mitchell/Mobely will be either. Given Mobley’s age, size and versatility, he will be the player Cleveland chooses to build around of the two.
So, assuming Mitchell gets moved at some point through his extended deal, what could the Cavs expect to get for him? At a generously listed 6-foot-2, Mitchell is small, and the aforementioned lack of playmaking or defense make hm a touch one-dimensional. Small guards rarely age well, especially ones as reliant on athleticism as Mitchell. His shooting should see him age better than other high-scoring mighty-mites like Allen Iverson, Calvin Murphy and Lou Hudson. It’s extremely unlikely that Mitchell will provide anywhere near the production to match an expected $70-75 million annual salary in the last couple of years of the deal.
To that end, the much-maligned return Boston received for Brown might be a fair expectation for, say, a 32-year-old Mitchell. A versatile, if ageing star and a couple of middling first rounders (let’s add in a pick swap for good measure) is far from what Cleveland paid to acquire Mitchell, and with just a single meek conference finals exit (at this stage) as their peak, the Mitchell era might be seen as a failure. For a team who have — LeBron James aside — struggled for relevancy, it was still a worthy gamble.
Of course, we’re not at that point just yet. Cleveland has a two-to-three-year window in a wide-open East before the cap realities of Mitchell’s extension become urgent.
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