Would Chris Paul pay to play in NYC?
CP3 would have to forego tens of millions to team up with Melo and Amare in New York
By John Hollinger
ESPN.com
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AP Photo/Mary AltafferConsider Chris Paul and Carmelo Anthony just ships passing -- there's little chance they play together.
We've been hearing since the infamous wedding toast of last summer that
Carmelo Anthony,
Amare Stoudemire and
Chris Paul want to play together for the Knicks. We're two-thirds of the way there. Melo and Amare are already Knicks, and CP can become a free agent after the season and sign with New York. Looks like a slam dunk, right?
Not so fast.
It appears the only realistic way that Paul can end up in Gotham would be if he is willing to take a massive pay cut. He would likely make about 60 percent as much in New York as he could make in New Orleans and, even in the best-case scenario, forego tens of millions of dollars compared to playing in other markets.
Let's quickly follow the salary-cap logic involved in Paul moving to the Knicks as a free agent:
? The current salary cap is at $58 million with the players taking a 51.1 percent share of BRI.
? Next year, the players' share goes down to 50 percent, likely offsetting any increase in BRI itself. In other words, one can reasonably expect next season's salary cap to be right around $58 million.
? The Knicks have $39.5 million committed just to Stoudemire and Anthony. (And before you ask, they
cannot renegotiate their contracts downward.)
? Even if the Knicks got rid of
everybody else and just had those two on the roster, the 10 "cap holds" for minimum salary players would occupy another $5 million in salary cap space.
? That means the Knicks have an absolute minimum of $44.5 million committed.
? Which, in turn, leaves the Knicks with an absolutely best-case scenario of a $13.5 million starting salary for Paul.
Paul will make $16.4 million this year and would be opting out of $17.7 million in 2011-12. Should he opt out next summer, a new five-year contract with the Hornets would start at $17.177 million and pay him as much as $22.3 million by the end -- a total of $98.8 million. In comparison, over the life of the maximum allowable four-year deal with the Knicks, he could get only $57.6 million.
So if Paul really wants to go to New York, he can go -- as long as he's willing to give up, at a minimum,
forty million dollars to do it. (The same, incidentally, applies for
Deron Williams or
Dwight Howard.)
In fact, even this scenario seems optimistic as far as Paul's New York earning potential; it would basically involve New York giving away
Iman Shumpert,
Toney Douglas, and
Landry Fields, not to mention whatever players the Knicks sign this offseason or draft next June. The Knicks would have only the "mini" mid-level and a bunch of minimum contracts to use to surround Paul, Anthony and Amare -- they'd have vastly less, in other words, than even the Heat had to work with last summer.
Should the Knicks keep Shumpert and Douglas around, New York would have just $11 million for Paul's starting salary, and the total value of the contract would be half what he could get by staying a Hornet; even compared with leaving the Hornets and signing with another team for the full maximum, he'd be leaving about $30 million on the table.
Around this point, Knicks fans will point out that a free-agent signing isn't the only way Paul can end up in New York. He could also try to force a trade, and that wouldn't be as financially damaging. Paul's potential earnings improve somewhat if he wants to do a sign-and-trade or an extend-and-trade, although they still lag behind what he can make by staying.
Alas, there's one little problem with that: The Knicks would need something worth trading. Sorry, New Yorkers, the Hornets aren't giving away their superstar for
Chauncey Billups' expiring contract and Douglas. They can't even trade a draft pick, as their 2012, 2014 and 2016 first-round picks are all owed to other teams and the league forbids teams from trading picks in consecutive years. In other words, if New Orleans decides to pre-emptively trade CP to avoid losing him as a free agent, there's a zero percent chance of his landing on the Knicks to join Amare and Melo.
Moreover, if the Hornets are convinced CP is leaving, it's hard to imagine them passively waiting around for Paul to ditch them in the summer. Especially after that whole LeBron thing two summers ago.
This is why I argued the Knicks overpaid in the Anthony trade with Denver rather than being patient and signing him outright over the summer -- they have no assets left to make a deal for Paul, and yet from a financial standpoint, trading for Paul is the most realistic route to bringing him on board.
Or rather, they do have one asset if it's important enough to them: They could trade Anthony for Paul.
No matter how you slice it, it seems somewhere between highly unlikely and virtually impossible for Paul to end up with Amare and Melo on the Knicks. He can't force a trade there, he'd take a financial bath signing there as a free agent, and the Hornets aren't going to sit idly by and lose him for nothing. The CP-to-New York talk to match Miami's Big 3 makes for fun conversation for this winter, but the Knicks lost hope of this happening the day they made the Anthony trade.
Paul in New York probably ain't gonna happen, unless we trade Melo or Amar'e.....which is not gonna happen either, so we better focus on the supporting cast for Melo and STAT and try to turn STAT into a half decent defender.
Maybe Deron Williams is desperate enough by the summer of 2012 to sign for the mid level exception
Other than that, we'll need a PG next summer...
