What About Letting our Expiring Contracts...Expire?

After all the marquee guys get signed to offer Brendan Haywood the kind of money you are talking about. I think given the economic climate (and who knows what the economic picture looks like 2010) I think you will see teams offering big money to the can’t miss players (the ones guaranteed to fill seats and sell team paraphernalia) and not much to players not in that category.

I don’t think Haywood will garner any offers above the MLE when he’s a free agent. The club should be able to keep him on a four year $6mil per annum type of deal.

My first preference would be to couple the expiring contracts with some of the youth, and send them to a team that could give the Wizards instant cap space — a team below the cap, or one with non-guaranteed contracts, or for a player with a team option — Try to improve the financial flexibility, and then spend some MLE money on someone.

Second preference is to let the expiring contracts expire in 12 months and have the flexibility then.

Third preference is to couple the expiring contracts together with some of the youth for some quality veterans (like a Kirk Hinrich). The attractiveness of this option all depends on what player you can get back in return, so my interest in it veers wildly.

Sorry; gut reaction.

Especially since we’re not a huge market team and our owner isn’t as loaded as some other teams’, it might be a good idea in the long term for us to get back under the luxury tax. I mean, not three months ago we were having serious debates about whether or not we’ll sell a top-five draft pick just to avoid paying the tax. And yeah, Caron, Dominic McGuire, and Brendan Haywood are going to be due for new contracts in the next year or two (I think Caron is a free agent in 2011), and at least one of those guys is going to get a raise. Even if we don’t re-sign Nick Young, we’ll most likely have to pay out big bucks to keep Javale. Granted, that’s three years down the line, but if we pick up someone with a long-term deal, it could really hurt us.

Ideally, I’d like to just let James and Thomas expire next year and keep our cap flexibility in case we’re in the middle of a championship run and someone important gets hurt midway through the season. If we’re dead-set on paying the tax and trading those two, I’d want us to try to sign someone who expires the same year as Caron, no later.

Haywood has shown improvement and the league rewards 7 footers who are still getting better. Darko is getting 7.5 next year. Even in ‘adjusted’ numbers Haywood can do better than that. Washington can still afford him. When is he eligible to sign an extension?

I can take Tim Thomas for a year. He can setup in either corner or wing and spread the floor. Heinrich and Crittendon would split back-up PG minutes.

I figure Miami and New York would both be interested in him. They’ll each have $10M+ in cap space after signing a max free agent (presumably Wade and Lebron respectively). They’ll each be in “win-now” mode and they each will lack a starting-caliber center. A team like Minnesota will also be interested. The Love/Jefferson combo won’t work because neither guy can defende the paint. They’ll probably trade one of them for a star-caliber perimeter player and then look to sign a guy like Hawyood to man the middle.

Hawyood must be retained so we need to keep the cap figure under control during the Summer 2010 free agency period. What we don’t want is a bunch of other teams with cap room circling around us like vultures waiting to pick off Haywood and/or DMac because we’re unwilling to pay a hefty luxtax fee. The way things stand now, assuming we land the #3 pick (and keep it) and we keep our 20ish pick next year, we’ll have a payroll of about $65M. The luxtax will probably be somewhere in the $65-68M range. That leaves us with just $0-3M to sign Haywood, even if we don’t trade for a veteran this summer.

If we, for example, trade Etan + #3 for Hinrich and the #16, we’d end up with a payroll of $71-72M next summer (well over the luxtax) before resigning Haywood. Abe would have to pay double to match any Haywood proposal. He might save as much as $20M by allowing Hawyood to walk. Given the way this organization has undervalued Haywood in the past, I don’t want to give Abe that temptation.

If we want to trade our pick for a veteran, we need to make sure the “filler” in the trade is Stevenson and/or Songaila – not Etan or James.

By the way, this argument also applies to DMac. DMac isn’t as important as Haywood (and he won’t cost as much to retain), but he’s a guy I’d prefer to keep around. Basically, a trade of our pick plus Etan for a veteran really amounts to us trading Haywood + DMac + our pick for a veteran. That better be a damn good veteran.