1 contract every NBA team would want back
By Ian Levy
Every NBA team makes mistakes, some bigger than others. If each team could take a mulligan on a contract from the past few seasons, here’s how they’d likely use it.
Every NBA team faces the same challenge — building a contender out of a collection of draft picks, hundreds of millions of dollars and the legacy of whatever deals are already on the books. From those circumstances, they craft the best trades, extensions and free-agent signings they can muster and mistakes are inevitable.
Sometimes they overpay. Sometimes they gamble on potential that is never realized. Sometimes bad luck with injuries turns a smart contract into a disaster. Sometimes they find themselves signing the wrong player, or the right player at the wrong time. Sometimes it’s just about how a reasonable contract shut the door on some future opportunity that might have worked out better.
Luckily, hindsight is 20/20, giving me the confidence to second-guess the decision-making of every team’s GM and point out their biggest mistakes.
Here is the one contract every NBA team would like back if given the chance:
Atlanta Hawks: John Collins
Over the past two seasons, the Hawks paid Collins roughly $48 million to play in 125 of a possible 164 games, averaging 14.5 points and 7.1 rebounds. To his credit, Collins did his best as the Hawks increasingly slid him into a role for which he terribly suited — stationary spot-up threat from the corners, defending 3s and 4s — and destroyed his trade value by constantly shopping him without actually agreeing to any number of reasonable deals.
In the end, the Hawks sent Collins to the Utah Jazz for Rudy Gay and a future second-round pick just to dump the final three seasons of his contract. There may not be any direct, long-term consequences of the decision to sign Collins to that five-year, $125 million extension back in 2021. But they spent a lot of money on a player whose potential they squandered, stubbornly holding out for a dream trade until all that was left was a salary dump. In retrospect, they probably could have gotten a lot more value for their money by just spending it somewhere else.