Bring on the chaos wave

Like a basketball slamming into a meticulously built LEGO set, reality hits hard.

Good morning. Let’s basketball.

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Cornucopia; Frans Masereel; 1900s

It’s fitting that an avalanche of contract extensions happen the night before the NBA regular season begins. It’s a marker of a transition between the offseason, when ideas and spreadsheets and future forecasting rule the day, and the actual basketball season, when all that theoryball gets put to the test.

So, you think you’ve built a legitimate contender? Cool. You can spend all summer counting your future rings and admiring the cleanliness of your future salaries spreadsheet. But will that grand plan hold up during its first cross-country trip, its first back-to-back in Florida or Texas or Northern California, its first visit to the Mile High City, its first episode of five games in seven nights? Will that cap sheet look so pretty and clean after the first losing streak and combative coach press conference and player upset with role?

These extensions, almost exclusively handed to young players still on their rookie deals, are wishcasting before we or their teams’ front office staff have seen a second of what they actually look like in Year 4 (in most cases) in the NBA. The Houston Rockets handed $291 million to Alperen Sengun and Jalen Green. In the three years since those two arrived, the Rockets are 83-163. Sengun is a potential All-Star, and Green is intriguing. But this is wishcasting, just as spending down all the team’s cap space on Fred VanVleet and Dillon Brooks last summer in a wild attempt to get the young core some win-producing veteran help was wishcasting. That wishcasting worked. (The Rockets went from 22 to 41 wins.) It doesn’t always.

It’s not just the rookie extensions, though; those are merely the last gasps of summer theoryball. Daryl Morey had a theory around rebuilding the Sixers as a star-laden contender; the reviews on how Morey leveraged almost maximal cap space into a legitimately good roster around Joel Embiid are all correct. Morey did exceptional work … on paper. Whatever good feelings Morey and Philadelphia fans have is on the table to be damaged if not destroyed tomorrow night when the new-look Sixers host the Bucks. Paul George might play or he might not. Joel Embiid seems like he’ll play, but he might not. It’s opening night, and already the worst fears about the beautifully constructed team are wafting around. It’s the most handsome celebration cake you’ve ever seen but am I certain that the pedestal it sits upon is level? Is stable? Is that cake sliding? Oh no oh no oh no let me just shove this stack of napkins under that piece and … oh no oh no oh no.

I’m not picking on the Sixers, whose team I love. It could happen to the Celtics. Boston brought basically its whole 2023-24 roster with him to 2024-25. Do you know what they can’t bring? A single one of those 64 damn wins. Those are all trapped in the past where they are no longer useful except as memories of a nearly perfect season. Perfection is hard to repeat. Ask almost any dominant champion who raced through the postseason with few challenges. It almost never happens twice. Having a season like that with a roster built like this … it’s like painting the Mona Lisa on an Etch-a-Sketch. It happened, it was great, here’s a literal t-shirt and hat commemorating it. But it’s been four whole months, get over it, shake up that Etch-a-Sketch and start over. That’s the league. That’s the prize for doing it perfectly, the team-building and the playing.

Don’t take any of this as triumphalism of real basketball over theoryball. Consider it more a healthy respect for the chaos of reality, which takes beautifully crafted plans and lights them ablaze. It works in life, it works in basketball. So when I sit here and write that the Rockets have cleared chosen a future with Sengun by giving Green an odd 2+1 contract as 22-year-old — there will be much more to say about this situation soon — I am basically tempting the Basketball Gods to have Green come out averaging 25 per game through November. We use logic and experience and various analyses to assess whether some decision is good or bad or something is going to happen this way or that. And something else almost always comes up to scramble the path.

And there is true beauty in that, in the unexpected, in the twists and turns, in the chaos that makes the reality of sports — low-stakes in the grand scheme — so addicting. I generally avoid chaos in life. I find it bad for day-to-day happiness. Sports is where I let it overcome me.

So after an offseason in which 30 general managers meticulously plotted out their paths to success, and in which 30 head coaches meticulously ran through their standard offensive sets and defensive schemes and rotations, and in which 450 or so players worked on skills or body composition or fitness to improve their lot in the greatest league in the world, and in which thousands of analysts and millions of fans created mental structures around what they believe the Thunder and the Wolves and the Knicks and the Magic and the Spurs to be … it’s time to hit all of that with a wave of chaos called the NBA regular season.

We’ll see what’s left standing in April, and again in June.

And then we’ll do it all again next year.

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Last-Minute Extensions In Increasing Order Of Involuntary Eyebrow Arching

Alperen Sengun, $185 million for five years with a player option, average annual value of $37 million (around 24% of the salary cap in 2025-26).

Moses Moody, $39 million for three years, average annual salary of $13 million (8% of the cap).

Trey Murphy III, $112 million for four years, average annual value of $28 million (18% of the cap).

Jalen Suggs, $150 million for five years, average annual value of $30 million (19% of the cap).

Jalen Johnson, $150 million over five years, average annual value of $30 million (19% of the cap).

Aaron Gordon, $133 million for four years with a player option, average annual value of $33 million (Gordon also opted into next season at $23 million). (Cap figuring on this one: about 19% in 2026-27. Sometimes the eyebrow arches due to surprise at what a good deal a team negotiates. To wit:)

Jaden Hardy, $18 million for three years, average annual value of 0.2 Jordan Pooles. (In my best Evan Huang impersonation: the HELL?) (4% of the cap.)

Jalen Green, $106 million for three years with a player option, average annual value of $35 million (23% of the cap).

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The Non-Extension That Was Expected But Is Still Causing Some Involuntary Eyebrow Arching

Jonathan Kuminga.

Please remember that after getting benched in the second half of a loss to the Nuggets last January, Kuminga’s camp told The Athletic that he, Kuminga, had lost faith in Steve Kerr and no longer believed he, Kuminga, could reach his full potential so long as Kerr was his coach. And it pretty much worked because Kerr gave Kuminga a longer rope the rest of the season. And Kerr signed an extension. And the Warriors spent the summer big game hunting in the trade market, with Kuminga as the potential bait.

This is going to be interesting.

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Schedule

All times Eastern!

Knicks at Celtics, 7:30, TNT
Timberwolves at Lakers, 10, TNT

We’re going to unleash an official GMIB Chat tonight, too.

Let’s see how that goes.

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Be excellent to each other.