I went into Friday’s livestream planning to make an argument I’ve made in this space before: that one Wardell Stephen Curry II should probably wait to sign an extension, if the goal was to give Golden State the most flexibility possible entering the summer of 2027.
Then, somewhere in the middle of walking my co-host Dean Chambers through my mock cap sheet (about the 22:00 mark, updated timestamps can now be found in the Description of the embedded video below), and thanks to a live chat commenter, we were informed the news broke that Curry had actually signed — two years, $116 million, with a player option in Year 2, and a first-year salary around $55.7 million.
That means his second-year salary, if opted into, is the maximum 8% year-to-year raise per Bird Rights. The 1+1 strategy means Curry can opt-out and once again figure out a new number depending on the circumstances in Summer 2028 — yes, that’s still “optionality”!
And with the 35-year-old Kawhi Leonard recently inking a two-year, $115 million deal that also has a second-year player option, that means Steph’s contract is on par with another aging, active future Hall-of-Famer who is still earning market value — Toronto used 5% as Kawhi’s year-over-year raise, which means Steph will make less than him in 2027, but more than Kawhi in 2028, should both players opt-in. I have often said, NBA contracts tend to mimic trends in real estate comps and Series A investments in venture capital.
Oh, and did you notice? Steph’s total contract value is exactly $1 million more than Kawhi’s!
Start to love cap sheets, my friends. Just like you see in your neighborhood when it comes to real estate’s Multiple Listing Service aks “MLS” or Crunchbase for entrepreneurs seeking VC funding, every player’s contract in the NBA is linked to every other contract (Gary Trent, Jr. notwithstanding). It’s the web of life.
Curry’s 2027-28 cap figure is well above the roughly $40 million placeholder I’d built into the spreadsheet as a conservative stand-in — also ironically and perhaps not surprisingly, the difference is roughly the same value as what a Non-Taxpayer Mid-Level Exception (NTMLE) free agent slot would be. 👀
So we did the only thing you can do in that situation: stopped talking about the hypothetical and started rebuilding the real thing on-air:
The slot didn’t disappear
My original spreadsheet was built around a specific question: could the Warriors still create a full 35% maximum salary slot for an entering free agent (or sign-and-trade, à la Walker Kessler) in the summer of 2027 — something in the neighborhood of $61.6 million against the NBA’s projected $176 million cap — while keeping some recognizable version of this roster intact?
Getting there required a stack of assumptions layered on top of Curry’s number: Brandin Podziemski’s salary slot around $20 million, Jimmy Butler and Draymond Green both around the non-taxpayer mid-level exception (NTMLE), and Kristaps Porzingis carried at just his $3 million guarantee rather than his full $20 million salary.
Swapping in Curry’s real number was the obvious stress test for all of that. My instinct, live on air, was that something else would have to give — Podziemski’s number, or Jimmy’s, or Draymond’s, or the Porzingis assumption. What Dean and I actually found, working through it in real time, was closer to the opposite: the max slot held. The margins got tighter and the remaining assumptions started carrying more weight, but the basic premise of the spreadsheet survived.
Where the pressure actually lands
If the slot survives, the more useful question becomes what has to be true for the rest of the sheet to work — and that’s where the conversation moved toward the market for older players generally, not just Butler and Green, specifically.
My placeholder numbers for both of them were built around the NTMLE (roughly $16-17 million), which I’d treated as a conservative, middle-of-the-road guess. Looking at where the league actually seems to be heading, I’m not sure it’s conservative enough.
The compression in what teams are willing to pay veterans past age 35 has gotten harder to ignore, and Dean and I brought up LeBron James as close to the extreme case, alongside DeMar DeRozan and Russell Westbrook — who obviously up and retired as the rebuilding Wizards were the only ones to offer him anything, and a vet min at that — players whose markets have thinned out well before their production fell off a cliff.
Some of that is about the era more than any one player: Oklahoma City has handed the league a working blueprint built around young, cost-controlled talent and real flexibility. San Antonio is building something similar around Victor Wembanyama and, with the benefit of three consecutive Top-5 picks (Stephon Castle and Dylan Harper after Wemby) — now no longer possible with the new anti-tanking rules — plus the 2026 Draft class described as “epic” by our very own annual livestream deep-dive guest, Eric Guilleminault of NBADraft.net, only made that approach look more attractive to more front offices.
As for the Knicks, it’s really hard to say that they have a blueprint and I’d be shocked if anyone in DubNation thinks a fully healthy Warriors roster can’t take a fully healthy Knicks roster to six or seven games, but the consensus by observers is the second apron is ultimately going to leave one of the Knicks’ guys off the team — after all, Lu Dort, Aaron Wiggins and Isaiah Joe are all now former OKC Thunder players, so not even the most revered GM in basketball, Sam Presti, could duck it — and I will write more about Karl-Anthony Towns as a quiet target for that Warriors max slot on that 2027 cap sheet, in due time.
With my mock now slashing the salaries of Jimmy and Draymond well below a NTMLE, that does not mean either of them stops being useful, particularly in a playoff series where experience and physicality tend to matter more, not less.
It means a market that is willing to pay for that usefulness may be smaller than it used to be and if it is, Golden State may end up negotiating from a stronger position in 2027 than my original mock assumed.
Two unresolved variables
Podziemski’s extension looks different to me now, too. Before Curry signed, I had Podz penciled in around $20 million, and Dean and I were prepared to role-play the actual negotiation on-air. Once the real Curry number was on the sheet, committing to that figure ahead of time felt a lot less appealing. Not because Podziemski isn’t worth it, but because he’s one of the few pieces left that Golden State doesn’t have to lock in immediately. Another season gives everyone more information. If he has a big year, his price goes up, and that’s a fine outcome, too.
Plus, restricted free agency has tended to give franchises more leverage, with players generally taking less money, although there are extraordinary exceptions dependent on if there’s a market for their services. Think Cleveland and Peyton Watson — nice little haul of $22 million average annual value (AAV) which the Podz camp can certainly boast as a comp — while also earning a starting spot on a contender in the Cavs.
Thankfully, the culture of Golden State probably won’t end up with a tense standoff as we are observing from afar with Jalen Duren and the Detroit Pistons. Somehow, there was nary a peep to how Porzingis accepted that second partially guaranteed year of $3 million — against $20 million fully guaranteed? Wow! 🤯 No ultimatum that KP reach this metric or that, as the Pistons have reportedly asked for weight benchmarks of Duren. Just a super-quiet no-nonsense figure of $20 million followed by only 15% of that being guaranteed next July 7th, 2027.
Not to mention, on the previous livestream I researched SpoTrac.com and found that Brandon Williams can be cut by Opening Night — that piece about the Graham Ike two-way contract and its implications (like, what does that say about KP?) is right around the corner, by the way. Plus now we know, Georges Niang and Charles Bassey can be waived by January 10th, 2027, as well, if the ship is sinking and some space needs to be cleared for a drastic makeover. Warriors brass has been hard at work with these safety valves.
Yes, those also fall under the label “optionality”. Sorry if that struck a nerve, Warriors Twitter.
But back to Podz and possibly becoming a restricted free agent (RFA), the likes of Jonathan Kuminga, Bennedict Mathurin, and Cam Thomas — the former two on contracts well below what Yossi Gozlan of Third Apron and his co-host Sam Quinn of CBS Sports have previously thought they were worth, and the latter actually currently contract-less — show us how restricted free agency might become a hot topic at the next CBA bargaining table between the NBPA and the league, as Gozlan and Quinn have often opined, recently.
In a cold business world, the chess move could be for the Warriors to just not extend Podz because a majority of the most recent RFAs have ended up with below-market contracts, thereby taking advantage of what I would call a “unintended quirk” of the current CBA and maybe getting him on a discount in the long-term — all of this sounds kind of silly as I write it, I must admit. Just pay the kid what he’s actually worth and let’s move on.
As I mocked in the 2027 cap sheet, I think he is worth and would be okay visually with the figure $20 million AAV, especially if a starting two-way 6’7” starting wing like Watson on a contending team like Cleveland is making $22 million (AAV). Incidentally, cap sheet aficionados who keep a pulse on market values have expressed to me recently that Podziemski probably shouldn’t get more than the NTMLE. Again, I think there is something psychological about that $20 million line (I mean, a “2” in tens unit is certainly more attractive than a “1”).
Similar to BP, the 6’4” Ayo Dosunmu comes off the bench for Minnesota, so he is perhaps an even better comp for Podz and will be paid $86.5 million in the first four years of his five-year contract, while Watson will be paid $88 million over four years.
I do think, thanks to Gozlan and Quinn’s podcasts, that Christian Braun’s $25M AAV contract is now considered a bad and outdated contract. Whether BP’s final number comes out to $20, 21, or 22 million AAV for Podz, I don’t think a couple million is going to put the 2027 cap sheet in jeopardy. After all, back in the day, the Warriors found a taker for Andrew Bogut, and let Harrison Barnes and Festus Ezeli walk in order to welcome Kevin Durant onto the books.
And as an NBA insider told me yesterday, Podz “had a great year” and “has a great agent”, so it remains to be seen. The legendary Bill Duffy is BP’s agent, by the way.
“It will definitely be interesting,” my league source said of the impending Podziemski extension, which has a deadline of October 19th to get done, otherwise he becomes a RFA next summer.
Ergo, Porzingis remains the strangest and probably the most consequential, line on the spreadsheet. The $3 million figure isn’t a projection of his value. It’s the guaranteed portion of his 2027-28 salary if the Warriors move on.
If he stays healthy and looks like a $20-million two-way player, that’s the best-case basketball outcome, but it also means finding another $17 million somewhere else on the sheet — whoa, there’s that NTMLE number again! — skipping that mid-level benchmark, letting a veteran walk, adjusting Podziemski’s number if he hasn’t been extended already, or reconsidering the max pursuit altogether. Those aren’t bad problems to have, but they’re real ones.
What still has to happen
Curry had said, at the Eat.Learn.Play event a couple of days before the livestream, that he wanted to give the front office room to make moves rather than pushing for every dollar available to him — and then he signed for less than the max:
I’d argued he should wait longer, and he didn’t, which I’m comfortable admitting on the record here. It’s possible his side had already run something close to the same math Dean and I were doing live: enough to compensate the best player in franchise history fairly, while leaving Mike Dunleavy, Jr., Joe Lacob, Kirk Lacob and the front office room to reshape the roster around him.
None of what follows is a prediction. Whether the veteran market keeps compressing, whether Podziemski’s number moves up or down, whether Porzingis stays healthy, and whether Golden State is good enough this season for any of it to matter — all of that gets decided somewhere other than a spreadsheet.
But the specific thing we set out to test Friday night, whether Curry’s real contract would eliminate the Warriors’ ability to create a max slot in 2027, held up. That’s the part of the exercise I’d stand behind.
One thing for paid subscribers: both cap sheets referenced in this piece — my original mock with Steph at $40 million, and the version Dean and I rebuilt live once the real $55.7 million number hit — are attached, beyond the paywall below, plus a bonus of a working Google spreadsheet.
Adjust any of the assumptions yourself: Podziemski’s number, Jimmy and Draymond’s contracts, what happens if Porzingis plays his full $20 million deal, the NTMLE slot for a free agent there. One thing we didn’t do, as explained in the live, is mock up a cap sheet that goes up to the second apron — as we’re not sure if a cap space team has ever done that before. Certainly getting to the first apron is realistic and has a real-world comparable this off-season: the LA Lakers. I’ll look into the machinations of their signings and report back later on that. Credit to Gozlan for the heavy lifting on that Lakers dissection.
All in all, it shouldn’t be too hard to shed needed salary if you want to surround that max player with another free agent, especially at that NTMLE level. Scrambling to create necessary space has been executed by GSW before with, as I mentioned, KD, but also Andre Iguodala when he joined as a free agent, too.
There are two excellent behind-the-stories from Tim Kawakami (around the 2022 Finals) and Anthony Slater (back in 2019) for The Athletic, which inexplicably makes it hard to find links to their paywalled articles — so you’ll have to go hunt for those yourselves, possibly sifting through their bylines.
In any case, those stories described Bob Myers and Dunleavy holed up in a hotel suite, working the phones to make all the maneuvers that ultimately turned the KD slot into D’Angelo Russell and then into Andrew Wiggins.
I think it’s fair to say, next summer is gonna be a fun ride. There is no doubt in my mind. And I have been saying this since June.
My Lakers buddy Mark even told me that their roster makeover around Luka Doncic this past July “felt great, like clothes shopping for a new school year.”
And we haven’t even had our first practice of this season which gets to happen before we even hit the summer shopping spree!
But I know how the brain can click into survival mode and certain segments of Dub Nation might automatically default to the worst-case scenario of Steph being sidelined due to the knee and other old or injured guys having to hold the fort, thereby leading to a sub-.500 campaign again. Suddenly the best-case scenario is a Play-in berth where our old guys will surely underperform if they even make it to the second Play-in games a nary 48 hours after the first one.
Well, I encourage you to finally recognize what’s happening around you — the word “doomscrolling” has reportedly been around since 2018 — and choose love instead of fear. Dean and I have said on every off-season livestream that Western Conference playoff seeds 3 through 6 are up for grabs if all players on all teams are healthy.
If you enjoyed these high vibes
“Wut?” you ask. “But Warriors Twitter told me MDJ is a bum and Joe is a terrible owner?!”
Well, I’m glad you found LetsGoWarriors.
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