Toronto Raptors: Grading Terrence Ross’ Three-Year, $33 Million Extension

One of the most interesting topics of this early point in the NBA season has been the recent spate of teams and players conducting extension talks. Jeremy Lamb has signed an extension that raised eyebrows with the Charlotte Hornets, and Andre Drummond has opted to wait until the offseason to re-sign with the Detroit Pistons.

Harrison Barnes of the Golden State Warriors and Bradley Beal of the Washington Wizards are other players who were eligible for extensions, but opted to not address their contracts until the coming offseason. In the cases of the Drummond and Beal, by all accounts, both situations were mutually decided by the players and their teams to allow their franchises more salary cap flexibility in the coming offseason.

One of the guys who did sign an extension this week was Terrence Ross of the Toronto Raptors, as reported by Yahoo! Sports’ Adrian Wojnarowski on Tuesday:

At a glance, that number — $33 million over three years — is a bit of a jaw-dropper. That’s quite the payout for a guy who at the age of 24 is averaging just 9.0 points, 2.6 assists and 2.0 rebounds per game in his four-year career, plays 17-25 minutes per game and isn’t even in the starting lineup.

With the salary cap set to explode the next two years, however, Ross’ relative value is set to increase as well. Next year the NBA’s salary cap is projected to increase from the current $70 million to $89 million, and then $108 million in 2017-18.

That means that in year one of his contract, he’ll be eating up about 15 percent of the Raptors’ cap, and in year two he’ll be down to just over 10 percent of the team’s total cap number.

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In spite of the exploding cap numbers, I don’t think we should give teams carte blanche to spend wildly without a better justification than the fact that they have lots of money to spend. That ultimately leads to labor disputes when owners decide they’ve spent too much, and labor disputes lead to lockouts and strikes.

We may be jumping the shark a bit in extrapolating from Terrence Ross making $11 million a year to NBA work stoppages, so let’s back up.

Can Terrence Ross making $33 million over three years be justified?

Certainly if we use Jeremy Lamb and his three-year, $21 million contract as a measuring stick, it looks like the Raptors are getting more value based on both players’ performances coming into this season. Maybe not more value per dollar, which is probably not a formula we can solve, but let’s look at it in absolute terms.

Ross eats more minutes, playing almost eight minutes more per game than Lamb over the course of their careers. He has also scored more per game, averaging 9.1 points to Lamb’s 7.1 points per game. Ross also averages a touch more in the rebounding department, with 2.6 against Lamb’s 2.1 per contest.

What might make Ross the better option than Lamb is where they differ in three-point shooting. Lamb is shooting 35.3 percent from long range, while Ross is shooting 37.3 percent, and shot as well as 39.5 percent back in 2013-14, which was also his biggest season in terms of minutes played with 26 per game.

So while Terrence Ross will probably remain the single-most excited person about this deal, judging by the new norm of salary cap machinations and the elements that teams are valuing in their players off the bench, it’s hard to call this contract a debacle.

Next: NBA Power Rankings: Week 2

Ross fills the Raptors’ need for a long-range weapon off the bench, and his hit on their cap is going to be fairly menial in the big picture. When a team has a need that they badly want to fill (or they want to make sure that something they consider a strength remains a strength), I think it’s entirely reasonable that they should spend a bit more than necessary to ensure they can achieve that.

Grade: B-