Eric Bledsoe wants max contract

[tuffydahog]

This is ridiculous. A 6'1" point guard with career averages of 6.8 ppg, 3.0 apg, and 2.6 rpg wants a four year, $59 million contract.

Report: Suns' Eric Bledsoe wants max deal ArizonaSports.com

Obviously Bledsoe has potential, but give me a break. When was the last time a small point guard led his team to the championship? I cannot think of any. The only player that can think of in recent memory is Isiah Thomas. Good luck having Eric Bledsoe turn into Isiah Thomas.

One other point guard is Tony Parker, but he has had and still has Tim Duncan, Manu Ginobili, and a collection of some of the best role players in basketball history.

The players today are out of their minds. The only players that are deserving of max contracts are MVP caliber players. All other players getting max contracts are extremely overpaid. Suns better not give Bledsoe that kind of deal because it will take up way too much of their cap. I would not sign Bledsoe to anything more than what Dragic gets.

At this point, if that is what Bledsoe wants, I would trade him to at the deadline and get even more draft picks. If Eric Bledsoe is the star of the team, how are we supposed to compete with the Thunder, Spurs, Pacers, Heat, Bulls, and whoever else is out there.

 

[JahiiCarson_SqodGeneral]

He's not going to get a max from anyone......... He will go out expecting a max and get paid what Brandon Jennings got paid then we will match it.

 

[JahiiCarson_SqodGeneral]

Bledsoe will be like KJ for us a tough gritty point guard. He will be an all around stud but he's not an electric scorer but he could be a double double and triple double machine he will be worth 9.5 million a year by the end of the season IMO.

 

[JahiiCarson_SqodGeneral]

No ones gonna give him an extension. The suns will basically match every offer, it's the age of the point guard with several solid point guards, guys like Rondo don't even have a max. He will be here for a long time.

 

[JahiiCarson_SqodGeneral]

No ones gonna give him an extension. The suns will basically match every offer, it's the age of the point guard with several solid point guards, guys like Rondo don't even have a max. He will be here for a long time.

A max contract I meant for that first sentence.

 

[Davis_Mike]

Meh, he can ask for whatever he wants. The Suns did the right thing by taking the wait & see approach. If he puts up 20+ ppg 6 apg & 2 spg, he will get a max deal. By not committing to him now, the Suns have taken the safe approach. And if he does get a max offer from like Orlando, the Suns will match.

A max deal for him would be like $12 mil a season or so. It's nothing to egregious if he proves he can put up the numbers this season.

 

[Davis_Mike]

The Suns only have $39 mil on the books for next season. And that includes $6.75 mil in qualifying offers for Bledsoe, Tucker, & Kravtsov. Adding another $8.5 mil to that total if Bledsoe is given a max deal, really isn't a big drag on the salary cap.

 

[JahiiCarson_SqodGeneral]

The Suns only have $39 mil on the books for next season. And that includes $6.75 mil in qualifying offers for Bledsoe, Tucker, & Kravtsov. Adding another $8.5 mil to that total if Bledsoe is given a max deal, really isn't a big drag on the salary cap.

I dont think anyone will give him a max contract. Lin got an 8.5 million dollar contract and that was a stretch even though Lin sucks. Bledsoe has tons of potential but point guards in the NBA arent as valued as they were in the 90s. So im thinking we will easily match any offer. I see the Magic offering him along with the Lakers. The Lakers could just give him a max so I got my eye on that, hopefully the finish so bad they get a Aaron Harrison in the draft or whatever.

We better handle the restricted free agency well though. The Hornets were a mess with Eric Gordon. If Bledsoe really think he deserves a max then thats like an insult, thats what Eric Gordon felt when the Hornets offered him that 10 million dollar contract which is overpaid lmao. Thank god we fucked them.

Anyway we better handle it right keep our mouths shut and match any offer that is presented. He will understand the history and stuff as he plays more games. When he plays like the Lakers he will see how energized the crowd can get.

 

[JahiiCarson_SqodGeneral]

How did Harden get like 18 million? He was still restricted.

 

[JahiiCarson_SqodGeneral]

Andrew Harrison*

 

[Arizona_Sting]

A few things to take note of:
1. Marcus Smart, Andrew Harrison, Dante Exum = 3 more starting caliber PG's entering the draft.

2. All of those 3 will be taken by "bad" teams that need a PG. So say the Magic, Jazz and Bucks each get one of them.

3. Once those 3 teams get PG's I can't think of one team off the top of my head that will have PG as a need. The market won't be as strong as Bledsoe wants it to be for him.

 

[Tunasauce]

Let's let Bledsoe play out the season and re-evaluate what he deserves.

 

[Davis_Mike]

How did Harden get like 18 million? He was still restricted.

(13)$13,701,250 (14)$14,728,844 (15)$15,756,438 (16)$16,784,031 (17)$17,811,625

It's a % increase of the 2013-14 max amount($13,701,250) that eventually gets him to about $18 mil in 2017-18.

 

[Davis_Mike]

My original number was off was by about $1.5 for max contract rookie scale extension for year 1. Still, by looking at Hardens contract, it looks like it scales up by 7.5% of year one for each year of the contract.

That would mean we would add about $10 mil more for 2014-15 to the $39 mil already committed to the cap that year if we signed him to a 5 year max deal. If he proves he can consistently get it done this year, I have no problem matching a deal for him even if it's max.

 

[nogicat]

Glad they didnt give it to him
let him play for a season
Two games is not enough but he has looked good

 

[FORKWDEVIL]

Point Guard

There will NEVER be a PG like KJ or Nash in PHX.

 

[GMATCa]

Bledsoe cuts a similar profile to K.J. athletically and in terms of stop-and-go, change-of-pace/change-of-direction, straight line drive moves to the basket. His scoring game is not dissimilar to K.J.'s (although Johnson hardly ever shot threes until his ninth and tenth seasons in the NBA), nor is Bledsoe's defensive talent dissimilar.

However, Bledsoe is frequently out of control, whereas K.J. was almost never out of control. Outside of the first two games of the 1993 NBA Finals, when Chicago's clinical defense flustered Johnson a little and disrupted his normally unshakable rhythm, I struggle to think of any times when he proved out of control (and I've watched many older games in recent years). Bledsoe will force matters a little too often, whereas K.J. almost never forced matters, thus allowing him to combine explosiveness with efficiency unlike any small guard in NBA history. And Bledsoe's court awareness is a little inconsistent, whereas K.J.'s court awareness was off the charts. Thus Bledsoe can sometimes be a little indecisive in instantly rifling through his options, and on other occasions a little too casual.

Fortunately, there is empirical evidence to back up my observations (that's the good thing about sports; sound analysis and effective use of data will usually back each other up). Despite a very impressive statistical start that has seen Bledsoe average 22.0 points, 8.7 assists, 6.3 rebounds, 2.0 steals, and 11.0 free throw attempts (All-Star numbers), his assists-to-turnover ratio through three games is 1.44:1.00. And for his career, Bledsoe's ratio is hardly any better: 1.55:1.00. Conversely, Kevin Johnson's career assists-to-turnover ratio was 2.97:1.00, including 2.995:1.000 as a Sun, despite playing in a less advantageous era for point guards.

Now, I expect Bledsoe's assists-to-turnover ratio to improve from the current 1.44:1.00 this season, but the question is whether it will at least be more like Stephon Marbury's career mark (2.54:1.00), or whether it will be akin to Allen Iverson's (1.72:1.00).

That said, we're also talking about a league that is now designed for quick point guards, thus rendering their job far easier than in K.J.'s day. With the amount of three-point shooters and three-point shooting, the wide floor spacing, the modern defensive three seconds rule, the abolition of hand-checking and forearm-checking, and the general embrace of D'Antoni principles leading to the optimization of the pick-and-roll/pop and transition choreography, a quick point guard with reasonable intelligence becomes effective or enhanced almost automatically. Thus an All-Star in Steve Nash became an MVP; thus Eric Bledsoe, who may have profiled as a middling or perennial backup point guard twenty years ago, could become an All-Star.

These days, wherever a point guard goes on the floor and even if he gets into trouble, he tends to have options. He can bail himself out more easily, find a spotted-up shooter more easily, and opposing defenses cannot help (or help and recover) very easily, having to constantly surrender something. The end of the Oklahoma City game constituted a case in point: with the court spread so widely, with the modern defensive three seconds rule, and with legs more tired in the fourth quarter and thus unable to cover as much hardwood defensively, Russell Westbrook and Eric Bledsoe both started blowing to the basket at will. That result partly stemmed from their exceptional explosiveness, but also from rules, strategies, and spacing concepts designed to open the floor like never before.

Conversely, the other day, I was watching the first quarter of Game Four of the 1990 Western Conference Finals, Portland at Phoenix. At one point late in the period, Kevin Johnson turned the corner off a pick-and-roll with Tom Chambers from the left wing, and as K.J. approached the basket from the left baseline, none of his four teammates were more than fourteen feet from the basket. Moreover, of those four teammates (Chambers, Kurt Rambis, Mark West, and a second-year Dan Majerle), none of them had attempted more than 1.1 three-point field goal attempts per game that season or had shot higher than .279 on threes. The court and the paint, as was often the case in those days, proved compact, contracted, and packed with bodies, resembling a rugby scrum or a dense maze.

Being a point guard and running a pick-and-roll offense was thus much more arduous and difficult in those days. The pick-and-roll has long represented a basketball staple, but unless you possessed the best dribble-pass-shoot guards in the league (Kevin Johnson in Phoenix, John Stockton in Utah, Mark Price in Cleveland, or the three-headed monster of Isiah Thomas, Joe Dumars, and Vinnie Johnson in Detroit), running streams of pick-and-rolls, especially from the point, made little sense because the lack of court spacing and the rules limited the play's efficiency. Now, however, the widely spaced pick-and-roll/pop, along with the transition game where wing players tend to run to the three-point corners rather than in curls that clog the middle (one of D'Antoni's chief innovations), optimizes the point guard's space and thus his job. There has never been a better time in history to be a quick, ball-handing NBA guard, and if Kevin Johnson were playing now, I think that he could have become the second player in NBA history, after Tiny Archibald in '72-'73, to lead the league in both points per game and assists per game simultaneously. I don't think that K.J. would have won the scoring title because I don't believe that he would have wanted to shoot the ball often enough to do so, but today's rules and spatial trends could have engendered that result.

The point for the purposes of this topic is that someone such as Eric Bledsoe can exhibit questionable decision-making throughout a game, but still pass for 14 assists and still prove functional as a facilitator because there are three-point shooters and space everywhere and the defense is thus stretched too thin to both 'cover and recover,' so to speak, or even to cover in the first place. On Sunday night, Bledsoe's handling of half-court sets and passing actually reminded me of Chris Paul, whom Bledsoe obviously learned from the last two seasons. Paul is one of the major assists guys in NBA history, but he is a fairly conservative passer, with many of his assists coming off safe perimeter passes. The upside is that Paul commits very few turnovers and posts stunningly impressive assists-to-turnover ratios. The downside is that for all his brilliance, in eight NBA seasons as a starter entering this year, Paul has never run a top-three offense in terms of points scored per possession, and his offenses have sometimes been middling-to-subpar in terms of offensive efficiency. The analogy, perhaps, would be to a quarterback in football who runs his offense conservatively, controls the balls, throws very few interceptions, but leads his team primarily to field goals rather than touchdowns (because jump-shots, even if open and with the extra point of threes, won't tend to produce the same efficiency rates as scores of layups and dunks). Paul may run a top-three offense this year, but for comparison's sake, in the nine seasons that Kevin Johnson started the majority of his games, the Suns finished in the top-three in Offensive Rating (points scored per possession) six times, and never finished lower than seventh in those nine years, always in the top quarter of the league. In contrast to Paul, K.J. would take more risks and sometimes buzz passes by the slightly turned heads of defenders in order to create easier opportunities for teammates. (The contrast also stemmed from K.J. possessing longer arms than Paul, more like Rajon Rondo, which enabled him to create and exploit unexpected passing angles, plus the fact that in his era, there was less court spacing and three-point shooting, and thus more of a need to pass in tight spaces.)

 

[GMATCa]

Again, on Sunday night, Bledsoe's playmaking reminded me of Paul's, but the problem is that even with that safe, conservative style, he still committed 8 turnovers. If you're committing 8 turnovers, then you can't be utilizing a conservative passing style that helps lead to your team shooting just .400 from the field (albeit .378 on threes in a whopping 37 attempts). Conversely, if you're employing a conservative passing style, you can't be committing 8 turnovers. Worse, not only did Bledsoe tally 8 turnovers, but the Suns totaled 23 as a team. You might live with a high turnover game from your point guard if his presence and command of the offense reduces turnovers for the players around him. For instance, in Game One of the 1994 Western Conference Semifinals at Houston versus the number-two team in the NBA in Defensive Rating (points allowed per possession), Kevin Johnson recorded 8 turnovers. However, he played all 48 minutes, and with K.J. commanding the offense, the rest of his teammates combined for just 3 turnovers as the Suns actually posted fewer turnovers than the Rockets in winning the game.

Phoenix Suns at Houston Rockets Box Score, May 8, 1994 | Basketball-Reference.com

But when you commit 8 turnovers and your teammates total 15 more, then you're not quite commanding the offense consistently enough. To be sure, Bledsoe was playing with limited and meager offensive talent around him, which explains some of the turnovers, the preponderance of jump-shots, and some of Bledsoe's conservative passing style. Basically, he was surrounded by three-point shooters and little else. But those three-point shooters also opened the floor for him and gave him kick-out targets and bailout options at almost every turn, so their presence could have also reduced his turnovers. That reduction did not happen in part because Bledsoe was indecisive a little too often, forced plays a little too often, proved out of control a little too often, and made dubious reads a little too often. Someone that I know once wrote that back when Jason Kidd was a young point guard for the Suns, this observer could tell that compared to Magic Johnson, John Stockton, and Kevin Johnson, Kidd forced his game more, meaning that he forced more shots and forced teammates into tougher positions (i.e. worse shots and more turnovers). As a result, compared to Magic, Stockton, and K.J., Kidd constituted a vastly more inefficient offensive player (much worse field goal percentages and True Shooting Percentages, worse prime assists-to-turnover ratios) who ran vastly more inefficient offenses (defined by points scored per possession). On Sunday night, I don't feel that Bledsoe forced shots (although he settled for a few too many three-point attempts), but he did force some teammates into difficult positions, which helps explain why not only did he commit 8 turnovers, but his teammates layered 15 more turnovers on top of his 8.

All that said, the 14 assists showed that there's enough court awareness to work with, and the space and concepts of today's NBA (especially the Suns, who possess any number of perimeter-oriented power forwards) will give him the best possible chance to succeed. Phoenix can use this season to evaluate Bledsoe and determine whether he would be worth a max contract, should he receive that offer next summer. At some point, you need to invest in somebody, and Bledsoe is the most talented young guard that Phoenix has featured in a long time, maybe since fifteen-plus years ago when Jason Kidd and Steve Nash were sometimes starting together in the Suns' back-court.

04/15/1998 NBA Box Score at PHO - basketballreference.com

04/19/1998 NBA Box Score at HOU - basketballreference.com

Phoenix Suns at San Antonio Spurs Box Score, April 29, 1998 | Basketball-Reference.com

He could already be one of the best scoring guards in the NBA, and Bledsoe can pile up assists, rebounds, and steals as well. His turnovers and volume of three-point attempts show that he is a work in progress, but to lose him would represent a step in the wrong direction. A maximum contract for a restricted free agent wouldn't be as onerous as a maximum contract for an unrestricted free agent, and the Suns could always trade Dragic if they needed to facilitate fiscal flexibility. Either way, given the way that Phoenix has cleared salary obligations elsewhere on the roster, I don't think that signing Bledsoe to a max deal would prevent the Suns from remaining an active player in free agency should the right front-court free agent come along.

 

[JahiiCarson_SqodGeneral]

Bledsoe looks like a superstar right now early in the season. His 3pt shot is actually not that bad. I feel like he was just cold to start the season. He is so good on the break, and can get to the line. We need to get rid of the Morris twins all there doing is chucking and guys like Archie wont be able to develop with that. I like everyone on this team but the Morris twins.

 

[JahiiCarson_SqodGeneral]

I still wanna see how the Dragic and Bledsoe back court works before we go trading Dragic. I feel like Dragics 3 point shot isn't good enough for them to play together. But Dragic use to have a solid 3 point shot early in his career in Phoenix and for sometime in Houston. Lets see if he can get it back.