Draymond and Crowder are the latest with late-career NBA contract woes

Thirty-two is a weird age for professional athletes, particularly NBA players because it’s about that time that doubt starts to creep in. Unless you’re a freak of nature like Tom Brady, 32 is generally considered the end of an athlete’s peak years. Injuries that took a week to heal a few years ago might keep you out for a month now. If you have a bad week when you’re 25, it’s a slump. Have a bad week when you’re 32, and your position starts showing up on the list of needs for your team in mock drafts.

This has financial ramifications as well. Except for superstars, most players either end their careers by getting released or by signing a series of one-year, bargain contracts with whatever team has an opening. This is why you see so much drama around players who are approaching this age. Like Jae Crowder. Like Draymond Green.

Age plays an increasingly bigger part in an NBA team’s decision to extend or re-sign a player.

Both Green and Crowder are still playing at a level that makes them candidates for multi-year contracts when they hit free agency after this season, but they are both at an age where it will likely be the last such deal they get. That’s why Crowder was so loath to accept a secondary role in Phoenix’s rotation because it’s hard to convince anyone you deserve a big contract for playing fifteen minutes a night.

And, while nobody has publicly given a reason for Green’s punching Jordan Poole during practice last week, the fact that Poole got an extension from the Warriors and Green hasn’t doesn’t seem completely irrelevant. What both players can’t help but know is that the list of teams who have given multiyear deals to guys in their age group and gotten their money’s worth is a minuscule proportion of the overall total. The Rockets paid John Wall over $44 million to sit out last season because they didn’t think he would help enough to justify depriving their prospects of playing time.

Kevin Love played in fewer than half the games in the first three years of the extension he signed with Cleveland. Russell Westbrook has been traded three times since signing his max extension. Multiple GMs will get twitchy just thinking about how much money they paid Kemba Walker not to play. Bradley Beal’s newly signed max deal has been widely panned even before he has played a game under it.

Is there a solution to these late-career contract issues between NBA players and teams?

Part of this is just ego, more than worrying about financial security. The size of a contract is considered a measure of respect. Players who are anywhere close to star status feel like they deserve a max contract, both in years and salary. Productive non-stars (like Crowder) feel like a few more years of security is their due for playing the right way for a decade, and when it doesn’t work out that way, the natural inclination is to feel like your efforts aren’t appreciated.

That often leaves teams choosing between keeping a player happy and doing what makes sense. Is there a fix for this? Much of the NBA’s CBA negotiations center around saving teams from their own bad judgment, so it wouldn’t be that much of a stretch to try to fix this through negotiations. The problem with that is that every fix comes with a workaround.

For example, it wouldn’t be too surprising to see a future NBA CBA limit contracts for players in their 30s to two or three years. Then you would see players timing their contracts so they hit free agency at age 29, at which point they would want the longest contract they could possibly get, and we would go through this whole drama a few years sooner.

The upside to that is that an NBA contract signed at 29 has a better chance of being worth the money than a contract signed at 32. That might not eliminate the drama and the bruised egos, but it could give teams and players that are inclined to be reasonable a way to do so.