All NBA contracts are not the same, as Nic Claxton, Cam Johnson deals show

When a player signs a new deal, the reporting is usually simple: X player signed an $X million deal over X number of years, but while that might tell the story of most contracts, particularly the lower paid NBA players, as NBA contracts get bigger, they get more complicated.

As Brian Lewis and Erik Slater have reported in recent days, Cam Johnson’s contract signed last summer and Nic Claxton’s, signed earlier this month, reflect some of the finer points of what’s permitted in deals under the CBA and provide details on what the Brooklyn Nets want to accomplish. In both cases, the players agreed to deals that will give Sean Marks & co. more flexibility.

In the case of Johnson’s deal from a year ago, fans initially seized on those big numbers: $108 million over four years, an average annual value (AAV) of $27 million. That seemed bigger than expected but as we noted, the devil is often in the details. To start, of the $108 million, only $90 million was fully guaranteed, the money he can literally bank. Another $4 million was in “likely” incentives, money that he could get for doing what he had done in the past. Beyond that, there were another $14 million in “unlikely” incentives that he was unlikely to achieve based on his history — more goal than guarantee.

And as it turned out, Johnson didn’t even meet all his “likely” incentives, as Bobby Marks noted back in May. Of the $4 million, he lost $1.1 million because of his disappointing season. What that means is that the cap hit for Johnson next season will be less than projected. A “likely bonus” in 2023-24 is now ”unlikely” for next season since Johnson didn’t make some of his numbers this season. So that bonus, specifically $1,125,000, goes from “likely” to “unlikely” in calculating cap space and the Nets get a little more wiggle room this summer. (Conversely, the uncertainty surrounding his numbers is reportedly concerning potential trade partners, per Bobby Marks and Jake Fischer. With so many teams so close to thresholds and aprons, they’re wary of taking on a contract that could expand if CJ meets even minimal incentives.)

There’s something else as well. Johnson agreed to a team-friendly extension. As Lewis has written, the extension goes from $25.7 million in the 2023-24 season, to $23.6 in 2024-25, to just $21.6 million in 2025-26 before rising to $23.6 million in 2026-27, the final season of the deal. That drop in the second year, the upcoming year, and the third year adds to the Nets flexibility. Then every team gets rich from the TV/streaming rights deals in 2025-26. So, in the final two years of his deal, Johnson’s salaries drop as a percentage of the cap which will rise 10% each year under the new rights deal, dropping to 13.91% and 13.85% of the salary cap in the final two years. It’s 16.8% this year.

Claxton’s new deal is somewhat similar as Slater writes Tuesday with a bit of twist. The Nets are paying Claxton up front not because they want flexibility to sign new players as in the Johnson deal. In his case, the front-loading is because the Nets are expected to be in a rebuild and much of their payroll will be low. So why not pay the veteran now. Indeed, at the moment, of the 15 Nets players on standard deals, nine are either minimum deals or rookie scale contracts. Here’s the details from Slater:

Brooklyn front-loaded the deal, paying Claxton $28.4 million in the first year and $26.1 million in the second. After trading Mikal Bridges to the New York Knicks and entering a rebuild, the Nets are not expected to be competitive in the next two seasons. They’re using that period to pay the bulk of their commitment to their homegrown center.

Then, in the final two years of his contract, Slater notes that Claxton will make a total of $45.5 million, an AAV of $22.7 million, a significant drop from the first two years. But just as in Johnson’s case, the rise in the NBA’s TV revenues will make those numbers a smaller percentage of the cap as the years go by. In 2026-27, Claxton’s deal will represent only 11.5% and 9.5% of the league’s project cap.

Claxton’s salaries will drop every year of the four years, going from $28.4 million and 16.8% of the cap in year one to $21.6 million and only 9.5% of the cap in year four. If he fulfills Jordi Fernandez’s dream of being the Defensive Player of the Year, Claxton will be a huge bargain.

As Slater notes, 10 to 11% of the salary cap this season, what Claxton will be paid in his final two years, represents the NBA’s middle class, solid players but not All-Stars, guys like P.J. Washington, Grayson Allen, Deni Avdija, Klay Thompson, Tim Hardaway Jr., Lu Dort, Zach Collins, Caris LeVert and Kevin Huerter.

FYI, there are only minimal likely incentives — but no unlikely bonuses — in Claxton’s contract. They drop too, from $852,269 in year one to $647,736 in year four.

Bottom line, of course, it’s all about flexibility, getting their salary cap in order, just like the Nets other big and small moves this summer have been: accumulating draft picks, clearing cap space for next summer, even generating trade exceptions, finding diamonds in the rough like Ziaire Williams and Killian Hayes. They will be No. 1 or No. 2 in a number of flexibility measurements come next summer. They could have as many as six picks in the top 40 and as much as $60 million in cap space, both likely the tops in the league. The $23.3 million trade exception generated by the Bridges trade is the second biggest in the league.

The goal is to make the rebuild as short as possible. We will have a front row seat on how it will work out.