The Los Angeles Lakers have a lot of players who make a lot of money, Kendrick Nunn is making $5 million a year this season and he hasn't played a single game; Tarren Horton-Tucker nearly doubled his annual salary after the Lakers re-signed him with early bird rights; Russell Westbrook signed a maximum-salary contract extension when he played for the Oklahoma Thunder, and now he's making more than $44 million a year, but none of them can make as much sense to the Lakers as Malik Munch with a base salary.
Most teams would expect the low-paying players on the team to be able to play high-level basketball immediately, but the Lakers' problem is that Munch is only 24 years old, and they must want to keep him for a long time, but as he gets better and better, it has become extremely difficult for the Lakers to keep him. Munch joined the Lakers last summer on a one-year base salary contract, and according to league rules, when a player becomes a free agent after only one year on a team, the team will only get the player's non-bird rights, and while non-bird rights can allow the team to re-sign the player if the total salary exceeds the salary cap, it can only give him a new contract with a starting salary of 20% of the previous contract. While most players are happy to get a 20 percent raise, a 20 percent increase in base pay is still in the base salary bracket, and Munch is earning less than $1.8 million a year this season, and he will never stay with the Lakers for the $2.15 million annual salary that non-bird rights can get.
So how can the Lakers keep Munch? Ideally, the Lakers would have to have all of his bird rights, and when a team has full Bird rights to a player, they can pay him a contract up to the maximum salary level, but those rights require that the player play for the team for more than three years, and it is absolutely unlikely that Munch will not receive a better offer in those three years.
Fortunately, the Lakers have a compromise. If the Lakers can keep Munch on for another season, they'll get Munch's early bird rights, a middle ground between non-bird rights and bird rights. Early Bird Rights allows the team to re-sign the player for 105 percent of the player's average salary, a figure used to determine the annual salary for an entirely middle-class exception, and such a deal would also give Munch a new four-year, $50 million deal, possibly more if the NBA's salary cap rises more than expected.
Such a contract is definitely closer to Munch's true market value than a base-pay contract, but how can the Lakers convince Munch to wait an extra year at the Lakers to get the necessary early bird rights? The only feasible approach at the moment is the taxpayer middle class exception. Theoretically, the Lakers could take advantage of this exception to offer Munch a new two-year contract worth about $13 million, with the second year of the contract as a player option, giving Munch the right to become a free agent early, or if things don't go well next season, Munch can choose to stay in the team, when the Lakers will have his full bird rights.
But is that enough to keep Munch? Although xiaobian racked his brains to find a way, it is still difficult to say. The good news for the Lakers is that only three teams have real salary space this summer, namely the Detroit Pistons, San Antonio Spurs and Orlando Magic, but all three teams have hoarded multiple young guards over the past few years and don't seem to have a special need for Munch. But the Lakers need to worry about more teams offering Munch full mid-class contracts, and accepting such an offer could guarantee Munch about $45 million in salary over the next four years.
For Munch, that money is enough to change his life, as Munch hasn't gotten any big contracts so far, so once his first priority in the offseason is to maximize his income, the Lakers could be losing him. However, if he is very happy in the Lakers and wants to wear the purple and gold battle robe for a long time, if he can maintain enough patience, he still has a way to achieve the goal of making a lot of money in the Lakers. The NBA's history is not no one has done this, Bobby Portis in the offseason to stay in the Milwaukee Bucks route is very similar, and Nicholas Batum also used non-bird rights to take the base salary increase of 20% annual salary to stay in the Clippers, but like Portis, he also has the opportunity to use the early bird rights in the offseason this year to sign a contract extension in advance as an additional reward, in this way players who wait for early bird rights have the right to have the right to veto the trade within a year.
But if a team offers Munch a fully middle-class special contract, the Lakers will have little way to offer a similar contract. As long as LeBron James and Anthony Davis remain on the Lakers' roster, even if they can trade Russell Westbrook, their total salary will exceed the salary cap. Of course, there is a more unrealistic way, that is, to persuade Wei Shao to give up his annual salary of nearly $50 million to jump out of the contract and sign a compensatory long contract with the Lakers instead. If the Lakers' total salary is lower enough, the Lakers can create a full-middle-class exception worth the same $45 million, but this is not a very clever idea, because it means that Westbrook will stay with the Lakers for multiple seasons. Of course, the final decision is still here munch, if he wants to become a Lakers player, then there is always a way to open a decent contract for him, he only needs to have enough patience to wait a year to get the high salary he wants.