It wasn’t the best weekend for Wisconsin sports fans. Joel Stave and Josh Gasser suffered season-ending injuries, and the Badgers lost a game to Michigan State they didn’t trail until the final play of the game.
A couple hours later, however, I was at ease with what had transpired. As much as I hate the cliché, injuries are a part of sports. Every team suffers them; it’s only a matter of which players. What if Wisconsin had lost its starting quarterback during last season’s Rose Bowl run? And it wasn’t as though the Badgers ever put Saturday’s game out of reach—I’m sure Bucky has won plenty of games it wasn’t “supposed” to win.
Later that night, however, the Oklahoma City Thunder traded James Harden to the Houston Rockets. That’s when my weekend truly went sour.
I like college basketball immensely more than the NBA, for a few reasons in particular. I’ve always thought there’s more passion in the college game, and not simply because college players (allegedly) aren’t paid. They’re 18-22-year-old kids playing a game they love during the best years of their life.
The crowds are more intense because thousands of raucous 19-year-olds stand for 40 minutes cheering for their team and trying to distract the opponent. The students are always clad in team apparel, if they haven’t painted their chests instead.
Most importantly, college hoops gives us the best week of the year (conference tournament championships) and the best postseason in sports (the NCAA tournament) every March.
Despite my affinity for college basketball, the NBA had been growing on me recently. We’re watching LeBron James—who plays the game like no one we’ve ever seen—enter the prime of his career. Kevin Durant, who won three consecutive scoring titles by age 23, led the Thunder to the NBA Finals (which it lost to Miami).
The league’s top two players had met in the championship, and both teams had a roster that made it a favorite to return this season. Beyond the intrigue from those individual players, however, was the excitement of following Oklahoma City.
The Thunder is the only professional sports franchise in Oklahoma, and its fans showed as much in recent seasons. There may be no NBA venue that had a better home-court advantage than the Chesapeake Energy Arena, with everyone wearing a blue or white t-shirt, even if it meant throwing it on over a shirt-and-tie ensemble.
I had followed Durant, Westbrook and Harden since college, and I felt like I was following a college team while watching them play together for Oklahoma City. All three were all-stars under the age of 25, and two of them—Durant and Russell Westbrook—had already been locked up long term. If Oklahoma City locked up Harden, the Thunder would have been incredibly fun to watch for at least the next five seasons.
Oklahoma City General Manager Sam Presti ruined all of that—and reminded me why I hate the NBA—when he traded Harden Saturday.
Under Harden’s current contract, he’ll be a restricted free agent after this season. That means if he doesn’t sign an extension before Oct. 31, he can’t do so until next summer. If the Thunder had kept him but not extended his contact, any team in the NBA could make Harden an offer in the offseason, but Oklahoma City would get to keep him if it matched that offer.
Harden’s market is such that he would inevitably receive a maximum contract offer from any number of teams, and that’s where things got complicated for the Thunder.
Each NBA team is only allowed to sign two players to five-year deals, and Oklahoma City already used its allotment to lock up Durant and Westbrook. Therefore, it could offer Harden a maximum contract of four years, $60 million. A slew of other teams who hadn’t used both of their five-year contracts could offer Harden five years, $78 million. Nonetheless, Harden and his agent were willing to take the four-year deal to stay with the Thunder.
But Presti wouldn’t give it to him.
I’m not exactly sure what his final offer to Harden was. I’ve heard it was four years, $53 million. I’ve heard it was $55 million. Either way, it’s damn close to that $60 million maximum.
Oklahoma City’s team salary was at a point where committing $60 million over four years would actually have cost more than the $5-7 million extra to give Harden the maximum, as it would have put the Thunder over the NBA’s tax level of $70.307 million. Teams must pay a $1 tax for every $1 their salary exceeds the tax level.
NBA contracts are structured so that a player’s salary is at its highest in the final year of the contract, so Oklahoma City’s tax would’ve jumped each of the next four years. The front office could have cut and traded players to get below the tax level, but I don’t want to speculate on restructuring the Thunder’s roster.
While one could argue Harden was greedy to decline an offer relatively close to the maximum, Presti ultimately determined he would rather lowball Harden and avoid a tax than get creative adjusting his roster to avoid it.
Regardless, that greedy storyline is nonexistent in college hoops; the sport simply isn’t about the money. I know, I know, some college basketball players are probably paid to play for their school. Let’s just not go there for now.
By the time you’re reading this column, the first three games of the 2012-’13 NBA season will be in the books. Harden will soon sign his five-year, $78-million extension with Houston, if he hasn’t done so already. And college basketball still trumps the NBA by a mile.
