Isn't Wemby's contract salary cap circumvention, too?

And why should we care? Plus, the Bam/Herro brouhaha

You can tell I made this graphic myself because it’s so good.

Salary cap circumvention, the practice of manipulating player pay in such a way as to get around luxury taxes, aprons, and cap restrictions, is strictly forbidden in every sport. For “fairness,” all teams must be on a level playing field. Part of that leveling includes paying players what they’re worth.

Since the turn of the century, the NBA has handed down only two punishments for salary cap circumvention. David Stern smacked the Wolves with a cartoonishly huge hammer (five first-round picks were initially stripped!) in 2000 for secretly agreeing to pay Joe Smith nearly $90 million if he took a couple of cheap one-year deals first. Then, in 2015, Adam Silver fined the Los Angeles Clippers (!) for offering to hook DeAndre Jordan up with a Lexus endorsement if he re-signed with the team — an offer, hilariously, that wasn’t enticing enough to keep Jordan but was large enough to invite the league’s wrath.

Victor Wembanyama

Anyway, Victor Wembanyama just signed a five-year maximum contract worth 25% of the salary cap (with a player option at the end). He eschewed the “escalator” clauses that would have raised his contract to 30% of the cap if he’d made an All-NBA Team or won Defensive Player of the Year next season.

I’m a little surprised at the discourse around this contract. A few thoughts:

1) That 30% max was not guaranteed. It’s fairly treated as fait accompli that Wemby would win DPOY and make an All-NBA team if he plays 65 games next year, but that’s a huge if. Wembanyama has played 71, 46, and 64+1 games in his three years.

(Why did I say 64+1? He actually played in 64 of 82 regular-season games, but the NBA decided that the NBA Cup Final, which doesn’t count for anything else, does count for awards eligibility — which it should! It’s all rather silly.)

In other words, Wemby's qualifying for awards isn’t a guarantee, which brings us to…

2) I’ve seen too many people say that Wemby won’t feel pressure to make the qualifying benchmark now because there’s no money tied to it. In theory, perhaps he’ll take it easier if an injury puts him on the precipice of missing the cutoff.

But from everything I know about Wembanyama, that stance misses the important point that he still wants awards. Wemby is a legitimate cold-blooded competitor. Just like last season, he will push for 65 games if there’s any chance he can reach that threshold. Removing money from the equation won’t make Wemby take his foot off the gas in that regard.

He wants to be the Greatest of All Time. The only pathway to that hallowed ground involves accumulating accolades like Xbox achievements. Both require playing games.

Pushing too hard for an arbitrary number of matches played can increase injury risk (decreasing championship odds), and that’s part of the equation here. But players like Wemby don’t view the math the same way that we do.

If he can do it all, he will.

3) As expected, the NBAPA came out against this contract, railing against the second apron (but not so much the burdensome luxury tax penalties that I believe drive far more contract hesitations than any apron). It’s the Player Association’s job to steer every player toward the biggest possible dollar amount.

But this isn’t purely about reallocating money from Wembanyama back to the Spurs’ ownership group. He’s undoubtedly had conversations with ownership and management about where the saved money (which, if he qualifies, amounts to roughly $10 million per season) could go. I — and Wemby — expect that money to be distributed to other parts of the roster, like Steph Castle and Dylan Harper’s upcoming extensions.

Wembanyama, like Jalen Brunson, Spurs legend Tim Duncan, and many other stars before him, made a decision that opens up more pathways to team success. And who is to say that won’t make better financial success for him in the long run, anyway?

Whatever marketing opportunities Brunson had before have undoubtedly doubled thanks to his legendary playoff run. That championship halo means he’s even likelier to earn bigger contracts later in his career, too. Earning a ring brings a whole host of ancillary, harder-to-quantify benefits, not least of which is the respect from fans, media, and fellow players around the league.

Winning a championship is hard. Winning multiple, for this generation of superstars, has proven impossible. As long as Wembanyama is confident that his potential sacrifice will be reinvested in the team, this is a very logical decision all around, one that could benefit all parties involved.

It would be lovely if we lived in a world with no spending constraints at all, and every player was paid exactly what they were worth. But it’s worth remembering that NBA players receive ~50% of basketball-related income from the league every year, regardless of specific player and team financial situations. Wembanyama’s sacrifice will change overall compensation to the players zero dollars.

But it could change his individual compensation, paying him below what he could have been making. Which…hmm.

Gary Trent Jr.

It’s funny that Wembanyama’s sacrifice is explicitly legal, while Gary Trent Jr.’s contract is explicitly illegal. Wemby is potentially leaving money on the table he will never be able to get back; Trent was basically just delaying earnings that he eventually realized (if the league doesn’t void his contract, that is).

Let’s back up. I was at Summer League when the Shams tweet broke, announcing that Milwaukee had awarded GTJ a four-year, $64 million contract. The incredulous guffaws from the media section were audible throughout the arena.

Low-level salary cap circumvention is a much more common thing in the NBA than most people realize. Think of all the whispers around players sitting out for a year for tanking purposes and then being rewarded with eye-popping offer sheets, all the handshake deals honored even after a player has a down year. Really, I can think of only one prominent example of a rumored premeditated deal not being followed through.

Milwaukee probably should’ve been the second. This whole situation is insane. I said Trent was “certainly worth more than a minimum deal” at the time of his initial signing in Wisconsin two years ago, and he went on to shoot nearly 42% from deep while averaging a whopping 19 points in Milwaukee’s five playoff games (including two separate 30+ point outbursts).

His reward? $3.7 million the next season, another seemingly shocking underpay. Of course, the 2025-26 season went terribly for everyone in Milwaukee, culminating in Giannis literally asking for an investigation into the team. Trent’s play dropped off a cliff; even while the team was still trying to win games, he eventually fell out of the rotation. His three-point shooting fell to 36%, and his two-point shooting remained below-average. His defense went from overrated to straight-up bad. Without Giannis around, and with a bevy of younger and/or better shooting guards on the roster, the Bucks seemed primed to let Trent walk to another team for something around the minimum.

Instead, he was lavishly rewarded.

There is simply no basketball reason to justify this. Even a one-year, prove-it deal for $10 million would require a reading of Trent’s play charitable enough to convey sainthood; to get four years of midlevel money is ridiculously out of left field.

Truthfully, I don’t really care about this. We’re not talking about the Kawhi Leonard situation, in which a team allegedly paid someone off the books. That’s a far worse offense. Trent’s contract, on the other hand, is simply a deferred payment. If a player is willing to forgo current earnings to maximize future ones, is it really that bad of a thing? The Bucks are paying the piper now, after all, and Trent’s (more than) being made whole.

I understand that in a luxury-tax-and-apron world, this sets a bad precedent, and the league will need to come down on the Bucks (and perhaps Trent). I get it, I do. Fairness, competitive integrity, etcetera. In truth, though, I kind of admire the creative accounting and the trust that both sides had in the other. After all, the money is still being counted against the salary cap eventually.

There’s an argument that this isn’t as bad as having superstars take less than they’re worth, right?

Bam Adebayo and Tyler Herro

While I mostly wanted to talk about the fascinating financial decisions of the last few days, the Bam Adebayo/Tyler Herro altercation is worth discussing.

Adebayo and Herro are interesting players, particularly in the context of Heat fandom. I’ve always felt that both have been somewhat unfairly maligned (for different reasons) by large parts of the fanbase.

Still, it’s indisputably true that Adebayo has been raised up by the organization as a pillar of HEAT Culture, while Herro has spent years as trade bait. Both are All-Stars, while neither has ever made an All-NBA team. I can somewhat understand Herro (a well-known hard worker behind the scenes) feeling put out by the praise the team has always lavished on Adebayo.

Unfortunately, he let it fester in the wrong ways. Badmouthing former teammates ain’t a great look, especially to random fans online, and especially when said teammate is objectively better.

Even more unfortunately, Adebayo responded in the worst way possible. Putting hands on Herro (particularly in front of a bunch of Herro’s teenage AAU players) is the wrong decision no matter what Herro said, and frankly, most of what we know transpired has seemed relatively minor and restricted to on-court complaints. I’d expect Adebayo to be annoyed, but not nearly to this degree.

While the story has understandably titillated the online masses, as someone who grew up in South Florida, I’ve found it all to be a little bit of a bummer.