Jayson Tatum has a point

Arbitrary rules and decisions limiting what young players can make despite everyone agreeing they are worth superstar money are lame.

Good morning. Let’s basketball.

Young Woman in Green, William Glackens, 1910s

Jayson Tatum, on J.J. Redick’s podcast, talks for the first time in public about missing out on $30 million due to barely missing out on third team All-NBA last season:

JJ Redick @jj_redick

Jayson Tatum on the All-NBA voting process and the rookie max extension.

The mechanics of how this works, for the unfamiliar: the so-called Rose Rule was designed by the league to help teams that draft superstar players keep those players for as long as possible. The players’ union signed on because it meant higher wages for some select players. If a player is a superstar, their second contract can be for a higher percentage of the salary cap than it would otherwise be (30% instead of 25%) … but only if they sign with their incumbent team. Trying to escape via restricted free agency means giving up tens of millions of dollars.

But obviously the league wanted to protect itself from giving these contracts to fringe cases and building high risks cap sheets. So it’s limited to “superstar” players. Which means there needs to be a concrete mechanism to define who is a “superstar” player. And so the mechanism that the league and players’ union agreed to is this:

• Make two All-NBA teams between the player’s second and fourth seasons

• Make All-NBA in the player’s fourth season

• Win MVP any time after the rookie season

• Win Defensive Player of the Year twice between the player’s second and fourth seasons

• Win Defensive Player of the Year in the player’s fourth season

For first round picks, the second contract kicks in after Year 4 in the NBA. All-NBA is by far the most reasonable, frequent path to the Rose Rule contract. Basically, you either need to make All-NBA in your second and third seasons or in your fourth season.

The wrinkle: most rookie extensions for players of this caliber are signed as early extensions after Year 3. Unless you’ve been All-NBA in Years 2 and 3, the player nor the team knows if they will be eligible for the extra money until after Year 4. This was Tatum’s situation: he made All-NBA in Year 3 but not in Year 2. He needed to make All-NBA or win MVP or DPOY in Year 4 to get the extra money. The extension he signed with Boston after Year 3 accounted for that possibility: the Celtics were willing to give him the extra money if he was eligible.

What happened is he came BRUTALLY close to making All-NBA. In fact, he ended up with more votes than one player who did end up on the All-NBA third team. But because of potential assignments and limits, that player (Kyrie Irving, who finished with 61 voting points) made third team as a guard while Tatum (69 voting points) was left out as a forward.

So to recap:

• Boston considered Tatum worth the extra salary.

• All-NBA voters considered Tatum one of the best 15 players in the league for a second straight year.

• The rules, positional limits and media votes narrowly cost Tatum $30 million.

Most media members who discuss it claim to hate the current paradigm by which they indirectly control salaries of young NBA players. Players seem to dislike it. I’m assuming teams like it, because they can sign over the higher salary but have cases like this where outside forces prevent them from cutting the check, which then allows them to spend the money on other players or pay less luxury tax.

I understand why the players’ union agreed to the system: it gave good young players more earning power, and the union over the past decade has seemed to be focused on wrangling away from individual max salaries as much as possible, a major shift from the prior era focused on building up the NBA middle class. But the system is really aggravating and disappointing in its implementation.

The easiest fix, one that teams and thus the league are unlikely to embrace: expanded criteria to qualify for the higher salary. Making All-NBA at any point during your rookie contract should be enough. Making All-Star once in your first four years should be enough. Here’s the next case coming up: Ja Morant, now in Year 3, is going to make All-NBA. He’ll need to make it again next year to get the Rose Rule contract. Maybe he will and it’s no big deal. But Memphis wants to give him 30% of the cap, and they should be able to!

The best long-term fix is to abolish individual max contracts and let players sign for the amount teams want to pay them. Let Wyc Grousbeck and Jayson Tatum, not media voters and fixed scales decided a decade ago, decide how much the Celtics pay their star talent. But the league isn’t going there any time soon.