The Knicks Get Their Guy

Finally.

Gooooooooooooood MORNING! Free agency began. The Knicks did a thing. Let’s discuss.

🗣 News & Notes ✍️

🏀 The Knicks have their point guard.

In one of the largest free agent contracts ever handed out to a player switching teams that wasn’t executed as a sign an trade (more on that in a bit), Jalen Brunson agreed to a four-year deal worth $104 million with a player option in the final season. Terms of the deal were not disclosed but it is presumed that the contract decelerates in value as it gets closer to expiration, as Fred Katz details here:

Fred Katz @FredKatz

Conventional structure for a Jalen Brunson contract of four years, $104M: Year 1: $24.2M Year 2: $25.4M Year 3: $26.6M Year 4: $27.8M If the Knicks make salaries decelerating, it’d be: Year 1: $28.1M Year 2: $26.7M Year 3: $25.3M Year 4: $23.9M Or they could do $26M a year.

Now that that big, expected news is out of the way, some cap geekery: there’s an issue with presuming this contract starts at $28.1 million and then goes down by the maximum five percent per year. In short, the math is off.

Based on the final 2022-23 salary cap total of $123.6 million that came in shortly before 6pm, the Knicks had $35.1 million in space to spend. Even assuming an ascending structure on the two-year, $16.7 million deal they gave out to new center Isaiah Hartenstein, that would means $8.15 million is due to Hartenstein next season, which only leaves about $27 million remaining for the first year of Brunson. That’s less than the $28.1 million that would be required to have his contract descend by as much as it could.

Of course, it could still be descending, but just not by the max five percent per year. That’s the implication of Bobby Marks, who tweeted that after signing Brunson and Hartenstein, the Knicks only had the $5.4 million room mid-level left to spend in addition to Mitchell Robinson’s cap hold (more on him in a bit). If Brunson’s pact was ascending and started at $24.2 million before going up, they’d still have a little over $2 million left to spend before using the room exception. It would be very uncharacteristic of this front office to leave any spending power on the table. Now that remainder could be reserved for Jericho Sims, who the team reportedly would like to convert from a two-way contract to a big league deal. Doing so using cap room and not the room mid-level would also allow the deal to be over two years in length.

Why am I spending so much time on this seemingly meaningless minutia?