Mobile Menu
HEADLINES

Players Eligible For Veteran Extensions

August 4th 2014 at 11:55am CST by Chuck Myron

Tony Parker signed a veteran extension on Friday with the Spurs, but don’t expect a lot of others to follow his lead. Last week, we listed the fourth-year players who are eligible for contract extensions of up to five years. The criteria for those players are fairly simple: If you’re still playing on the rookie-scale deal you signed as a first-round draft pick and you’re entering the final year of that contract, you’re extension-eligible. Kyrie Irving became the first of those players to ink an extension with his current team when he re-upped with the Cavs.

For veteran players like Parker, the criteria are a bit more convoluted. As Larry Coon explains in his invaluable CBA FAQ, veteran contracts of less than four years cannot be extended. However, longer deals can be extended in the following scenarios:

  • If a player is on a four-, five-, or six-year deal, it can be extended three years after it was signed.
  • If a player previously signed a contract extension, his deal can be extended again three years after the extension was signed.
  • If a player previously renegotiated his contract, his deal can be extended three years after the renegotiation was signed, if his salary was increased by more than 10%.

There aren’t a lot of players are eligible for them in any given year, considering the specific circumstances required for a veteran extension. That’s especially true this time around, since the 2011 lockout pushed free agency into December that year. Thus, the work-stoppage also delayed the start of the three-year waiting period for players who signed new deals that year. There’s an unusually large group of players who’ll become extension-eligible in December and January this year, and that, too, is a product of the lockout.

Veteran extensions can be for no more than four years, which includes the current season, meaning a player in the final year of his deal could only add three new seasons. As such, top extension-eligible veterans such as Joakim Noah are far more likely to wait until free agency, where they can maximize their earnings. On the other hand, many other extension-eligible players like Joel Anthony and Travis Outlaw essentially have no chance of receiving new deals from their current teams, which are just waiting to clear those salaries.

Still, somewhere in the middle, there are a handful of players that we can reasonably expect to at least discuss the possibility of a contract extension with their respective teams at some point before next June. Here’s the list of veteran players currently eligible for veteran extensions:

In addition to the players listed above, several players will become eligible for veteran extensions sometime before next June. Here’s that list, along with the dates they become eligible to sign a new deal:

ShamSports and Storytellers Contracts were used in the creation of this list.

Retweet 0 Share 0 Send via email0
View Comments (1)