What’s next for Blake Griffin and the Detroit Pistons
By Duncan Smith
Why a buyout makes sense for Blake Griffin and the Detroit Pistons
With a trade being unlikely, we move to the most reasonable outcome from this saga. A buyout makes the most sense for all parties involved at this point. Nobody will want to trade for Blake Griffin, and Pistons don’t need to induce anybody to do so, which means that a buyout is the easiest way for him to end up where he’d like to go in his pursuit of a championship.
The amount the Pistons buy him out for isn’t especially meaningful. They don’t have major free agency plans next summer, so trying to claw back gobs of money isn’t necessary. In essence, that’s going to be a conversation between Griffin and Pistons ownership, we can only guess what numbers will be discussed.
It’s worth noting that unless Griffin does give back some salary, the Pistons won’t be able to stretch* his 2021-22 salary. A team can only have 15 percent of their cap devoted to dead space due to stretches, and Griffin’s full salary would bring their dead cap space amount to $16,920,543, including the stretched salaries of Dewayne Dedmon and Zhaire Smith.
*Stretching is a procedure that allows for short-term salary cap relief in exchange for future dead salary cap hits. A stretched contract takes the remaining years of that deal and divides the remaining number of years by two, plus one. So a $15 million contract with one year remaining would instead be paid in $5 million installments over the next three years, rather than the entirety in that one season.
Griffin wouldn’t have to give back much to get them under that number, and stretching him would save them about $27 million next season against the cap. As they’re currently slated to be about $6 million over next year’s cap, that’s not insignificant.
It’s also not necessary. If they don’t have major designs in next year’s free agent market, there is no reason they can’t just eat whatever Griffin’s final year salary ends up being and going into the summer of 2022 with massive cap space, unencumbered by the nearly $13 million per year they would owe in dead space for a three-year span.
So the decision is to pay Griffin’s $39 million (or whatever it ends up being) all at once next season, or divide it by three over the next three seasons. It probably makes more sense to just get it over with.
As for the here and now, who does Griffin’s sidelining help most on this Piston roster?