The unprecedented contract negotiations of Bebe, Bruno and Embiid

In the weeks since the Raptors have been dismissively shoved into their offseason by the Cavaliers, general manager Masai Ujiri has been confronted with a pair of pretty huge fork-in-the-road decisions for his team: How will he handle the contract negotiations for Bruno Caboclo and Lucas Nogueira?

It seems like we were just treated to Caboclo’s heavily pixelated, empty-gym highlights for the first time: Ujiri selected him 20th overall in 2014 after Caboclo had popped up in nary a two-round mock. Immaculately prepared Fran Fraschilla conjured the memorable line that Caboclo was “two years away from being two years away.” Well, Caboclo should only be a year away now. If the Raptors and Caboclo do not agree to a contract by next fall, he will be available to be poached in restricted free agency in July 2018.

The same goes for Raptors center Nogueira, who made a tremendous first impression by jauntily placing his cap atop his bodacious afro as the 16th overall pick in 2013. Nogueira would be traded twice before the night was over — first from the Celtics to the Mavericks, and then from the Mavericks to the Hawks. After keeping Nogueira stashed abroad in Spain for the 2013-14 season, the Hawks dealt him to the Raptors after the 2014 draft as part of a bizarrely poopy trade. Atlanta also gave up Lou Williams and received only end-of-career John Salmons in return.

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For the 2014-15 and 2015-16 seasons, fellow Brazilians Nogueira and Caboclo were given the same unglamorous development curriculum: Summer League, D-League assignments, plenty of suited appearances behind the Raptors’ bench and Bigfoot-rare sightings in actual NBA games. (Perhaps the only video evidence of Nogueira’s 23-minute rookie season is his being late to the scene for Archie Goodwin’s dunkalicious career highlight.)

The two paths diverged in 2016-17 because Nogueira actually graduated into Toronto’s regular rotation. Well, for the most part. Averaging 19.1 minutes over 57 games, Nogueira registered an elite per-minute defensive impact, ranking well ahead of players like Joel Embiid, Luc Richard Mbah a Moute, Nerlens Noel or Nikola Jokic in ESPN’s Real Plus-Minus. Still, Nogueira got bumped out of the rotation once trade acquisitions Serge Ibaka and P.J. Tucker arrived, and remained on the bench throughout the Raptors’ short playoff run. Now Nogueira sits at the same contractual juncture as Caboclo.

How Ujiri and the Raptors approach this twin pair of negotiations will be, in a way, a very comprehensive talent evaluation. The Raptors have lived with both players for three years, putting them both through perhaps the most patient and complete development program in league history. What the Raptors don’t have, though, is maybe the most important evaluation tool: real-live NBA minutes.

Across his three seasons, Nogueira has played 1,372 combined minutes. That’s hundreds of fewer minutes than rookies like Jamal Murray, Marquese Chriss or Dorian Finney-Smith got this season alone. It feels almost impossible to put a number on how much these rookies should make in year seven, year eight of their career, but this is, essentially, the call that the Raptors must make now. While Caboclo has over 2,000 minutes in the D-League to go off of, he’s registered only 106 NBA minutes — pretty much an average week for any starter.

The Raptors aren’t the only team who have to microscope in on precious few minutes in order to make a huge call. It seems impossible, but Embiid and the 76ers are at the exact same crossroads after 786 live minutes. Since Embiid did nothing but flash genuine Hall of Fame potential in those short minutes, that negotiation is obviously going to look a lot different. Navigating those conversations will be uncharted territory, with plenty of space for the Sixers to make honest mistakes. If the team wraps up Embiid now, with an Anthony Davis-style mega-deal, they are forfeiting the opportunity to learn from another year of increasingly critical health information. But there are hardly any essential players who are even allowed to venture into restricted free agency. There’s Jimmy Butler, Bradley Beal and Kawhi Leonard — who dutifully sat unsigned for a few weeks in July 2015 so the Spurs could do some cap maneuvering — and that’s really it. It’s a tough call to make, and Embiid’s injuries meant it came up on Philadelphia quickly.

I wanted to know how this kind of decision turned out at other times in league history. In order to get there I had to zero in on a very, very specific group of players — a group of players that met all the following criteria:

• They were first-round picks. Since second-round players are given shorter contracts out of the gate, evaluating those players is an entirely different genre of decision-making. Plus, Bebe, Bruno and Embiid are all first-rounders.
• They were drafted in 1998 or sooner. This is the year when rookie contracts began to have a fourth-year team option. Prior to this, rookie deals were three years.
• They played their entire rookie deal with the same team. What we want to evaluate is a team’s ability to first identify pre-NBA talent, and then continuously develop that talent once the player gets in the league. While the Raptors did not draft Nogueira, they did, crucially, trade for him exclusively on the basis of his overseas play.
• They signed a second contract at least three seasons long. We want to see what happens when teams seriously commit to their young player. This effectively eliminates Robert Swift (who re-signed with Oklahoma City for one year after 1,157 career minutes) and Dorell Wright (re-signed for two years after 2,556 career minutes).
• Out of this group of players, I’m looking for those who played the fewest NBA minutes (regular season and postseason combined) at the time they signed — and not necessarily began — their second contract.

If Bebe, Bruno or Embiid get signed to multi-year deals before the 2018 season tips off, they will have the fewest career minutes of locked-up modern first-rounders, and by a wide margin. With Kyle Anderson completing his third season after just 2,947 minutes, the Spurs are also facing a historically quick decision even though Anderson has more minutes than Bebe, Bruno and Embiid have combined.

Here are the five quickest decisions that front offices have had to make since 1998:

Honorable Mentions: JJ Redick, Dennis Schröder, Meyers Leonard, Travis Outlaw, Larry Sanders, Jason Maxiell, Jeff Foster, Andrew Bynum.

5. Devean George

Signed after 3,096 career minutes / three years / $13.5M + fourth-year player option (exercised)

Even though I was growing up in Los Angeles right in the midst of the Kobe/Shaq three-peat, I can’t remember anybody ever talking about Devean George. What a great career, in retrospect — from Division III Augsburg college and straight into three consecutive championships, plus playoff appearances in eight of his 11 NBA seasons. Also, George’s game was so perfectly suited to playing a supporting role for superstars that there was rarely anything to discuss about his very consistent game.

George registered so few minutes early in his career only because there was limited playing opportunity for anybody at the back of the Lakers’ deep rotation. Signing this second contract allowed George to be the only non-Hall of Fame starter for the Lakers in 2003-04, alongside Bryant, O’Neal, Karl Malone and Gary Payton.

Was it the right call?: Yes.

4. Etan Thomas

Signed after 3,032 career minutes / six years / $38M

Was this entire post an elaborate ruse to discuss the career of recently resurfaced podcaster Thomas? No.

It’s hard to gauge what was an efficient or inefficient salary even just a few years ago thanks to the NBA’s annually ballooning salary cap. Today, this exact same price tag for a steady backup center like Thomas is not a problem. But this contract alone is more than double the entire career earnings of Thomas’ backup-center contemporaries, players like Jarron Collins ($15M), Francisco Elson ($12.5M), Ryan Hollins ($13.4M), Primoz Brezec ($13.3M), Melvin Ely ($13.6M), Jake Voskuhl ($12.3M) or Johan Petro ($15.8M). Scot Pollard earned almost exactly $38 million in his career, but he also retired with nearly double the cumulative Win Shares of Thomas (28.2 to 15.2).

With the Wizards from 2001-04, Thomas did not entirely distinguish himself in the battle for minutes in a big man rotation that included Jahidi White, Kwame Brown and Brendan Haywood. The same can be said for Bebe and Bruno, but how do you factor in the fact that they are fighting for minutes on a 50-win Raptors team, with Thomas on a series of sub-.500 Wizards squads? While Washington was right to project that Thomas had a viable long-term career, the huge annual value of his deal was counting on growth that never quite came.

Was it the right call?: No, although it would have been at a lower price.

3. Al Harrington

Signed after 2,946 career minutes / four years / $24M

From here on out we are looking at players who were drafted right out of high school. This is really relevant when we look at Caboclo, who was 18-years-old the night he was drafted.

After retaining most of the team that took Michael Jordan’s Bulls to Game 7 in the 1998 Eastern Conference Finals, the Pacers’ selection of Harrington at No. 25 overall a month later was a brilliant one. The lack of space for Harrington in the rotation translated to low pressure in his first few seasons, and he was an every-night player by year three. Consider the league’s most recent No. 25 overall picks: Brice Johnson, Jarell Martin, Clint Capela (a hit!), Reggie Bullock, Tony Wroten, MarShon Brooks. It’s a first-round pick, but it’s hard to find value at that spot.

Even though Harrington was nowhere near the building when it happened, it’s even more clear in hindsight that the Pacers could have rattled off a Spurs-ian, generation-long playoff streak were it not for the Malice at the Palace. Two years into his four-year deal, Harrington asked to be traded and was shipped to Atlanta in exchange for Stephen Jackson — who, off course, ended up deep in the Detroit stands that fateful night.

Was it the right call?: Yes.

2. Jonathan Bender

Signed after 2,421 career minutes / four years / $27M

Bender represents another example of Indiana’s best-laid plans crumbling to the ground after a few bad breaks. One year after Harrington was drafted, Indiana traded reliable 30-year-old sixth man Antonio Davis to the Raptors in exchange for Bender, the fifth overall pick — a trade that really, really shouldn’t have worked out for Toronto as well as it did.

Let us remember Bender for how he should be remembered: a proto-Myles Turner who could put together the following highlights reel just a few hundred minutes into his professional career.

Alas, when Bender signed this contract 2,421 minutes into his NBA career, nobody could have guessed that he would only ever play about 1,500 more minutes.

Was it the right call?: If you can truly stomach trusting the process and not the result, then yes.

1. Kendrick Perkins

Signed after 1,943 career minutes / four years / $17.9M

A few short years after playing a Caboclo-esque 35 total minutes in his rookie season, Perkins — much like Devean George — became the improbably great fifth starter on a championship-caliber team. Perkins’ descent off of his peak was swift and merciless — somehow he is still just 32 — but there was a time, not too far gone, when his single-game absence had a significant effect on an entire championship.

Plus, Danny Ainge has pulled the remarkable feat of sequencing trades so that Perkins’ modest four-year deal is still very much contributing to Boston’s current success. It goes like: Perkins was traded for Jeff Green, and then Green was traded to Memphis in exchange for Tayshaun Prince and a first-round pick (likely to convey in 2019). Prince was then traded to Detroit in exchange for Jonas Jerebko.

Was it the right call?: Yes.

Next: The Warriors might be the most volatile team ever

There are all sorts of questions here that this article has not answered. There’s a lot of confirmation bias here: what about the many similar players who were signed to their second contract by a different team? And what about second-rounders, who are burdened with lower expectations, but who can nonetheless swing a franchise’s progress. (Five of the top 20 players in ESPN’s RPM this year were second-rounders.)

Still, it seems reasonable to say that franchises can and do make good decisions on players with limited NBA experience. At the same time, we’ve yet to see a team convert a long-term development project into a vital franchise cornerstone.