https://youtu.be/hbzsmC-lPcM
The accelerated free agency period that started in late November was more heart-pounding than usual due to the rapid pace at which contracts were signed and at which trades were made. Teams only had a few weeks to finalize their rosters, as opposed to a normal year, where teams have a period of several months in which to make roster adjustments, more than enough time to leisurely consider the ramifications of the contracts that they’re offering to players.
If you have any idea what Jerami Grant’s new contract with the Pistons looks like, you know where I’m going with this.
Twenty million per year? For a fringe-starter power forward whose non-existent rebounding ability makes Brook Lopez look like Dennis Rodman? Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big Jerami Grant fan. I’m happy that he’s off the Nuggets and that Paul Millsap can’t ruin his career anymore. I want to see him dunk 160 times this year as a primary offensive threat. But twenty million per year? In a vacuum, that’s definitely the worst contract handed out this off-season, and in a non-vacuum where I’m taking into account things like “fit with team” and “competitiveness of team”, it’s still the worst contract handed out this off-season.
I know it’s a bad look to rag on a player’s contract when they’ve just finished having one of the best games of their career, but the utter badness of Grant’s contract is astounding to me. The Pistons are tanking. They aren’t planning to be good. When you’re tanking, you need to have assets that can be developed, and you need to have assets that are tradeable. But now they have untradeable Jerami Grant who is probably done developing, and they have untradeable Mason Plumlee who is definitely done developing, and they had to get rid of a bunch of assets just to make all the dumb new contracts fit into the cap. If I was a Pistons’ fan, I would be drowning my sorrows in Jet’s pizza seven days a week, and I would tell the Jet’s pizza people to make my turbo crust EXTRA turbo, because the only thing that could ameliorate my turbo angst is turbo crust. And I would skip the chicken wings, because Jet’s chicken wings aren’t even that good.
And if the Pistons were committed to handing out bad contracts, the least they could have done was throw four million a year in the directions of John Henson and Brandon Knight, since both of whom are, as far as I can tell, out of the league with no hope of return. God damn it.