Saturday night, I opened up our Summer 2027 Warriors cap sheet on YouTube with what sounded like a pretty simple question:
How do you get Brandin Podziemski to a number that feels good enough for him and his camp without messing up all of the optionality Golden State has worked so hard to create for next summer?
By the end of the exercise, I think we found a pretty compelling answer. Also, somewhat counterintuitively, five years might actually work better than four.
$20 million per year just has a ring to it, not because I have been told that Podziemski is asking for exactly $20 million (I have not), but when you look at the market around him, it feels like a reasonable neighborhood to explore. More importantly, it gives us a round number from which we can start building an actual contract rather than just throwing opinions around about whether Podz is “worth” this much or that much.
Ayo Dosunmu just received five years and $112 million from Minnesota, or $22.4 million per year, with a player option in the fifth season. Peyton Watson received four years and $88 million from Cleveland in his sign-and-trade, or $22 million per year, also with a player option, plus a trade kicker.
Those are the two contracts I care about most when trying to establish the current neighborhood for Podziemski. Dosunmu is another combo guard who can start or come off the bench and just played extremely well in the postseason, while Watson is longer and more defensively versatile, but landed in roughly the same financial range, not to mention he was also a non-Lottery first-rounder in the same Draft as Podziemski, at No. 30 to the Denver Nuggets, of course. Both Dosunmu and Watson came in above $20 million per year.
I am deliberately not anchoring this exercise to Christian Braun’s five-year, $125 million contract. That deal was signed under a different market context, before another season of information came in, also on the heels of a seven-game Western Conference Finals ouster against the Minnesota Timberwolves, when Denver was still legitimately considered title contenders, just one year after their 2024 championship.
I view Dosunmu and Watson as much more useful present-day markers for this negotiation, so if Podz and his representation look at those contracts and say, “We belong somewhere in this general neighborhood,” I don’t think that would be particularly surprising.
The more interesting question is whether the Warriors can get there without sacrificing Summer 2027.
That is where this gets fun. I share the details below the paywall in written form, but if you don’t mind the answers in video form (with timestamps), check out the live:
