1:49pm: Wojnarowski, in his full story, pegs the value of the three-year extension at nearly $45MM, so it appears as though Parker is getting the max of $43,335,938.
1:21pm: The extension covers three seasons, reports Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo! Sports (Twitter link). That takes it through 2017/18.
12:55pm: The Spurs have signed Tony Parker to a multiyear extension, the team announced via press release. It’s the third extension that Parker has signed with San Antonio over the course of his career. He’s set to make $12.5MM this year in the final season under the terms of his most recent extension. It’s not immediately clear just how long or lucrative Parker’s latest deal is.
There’d been no public talk that the extension had been in the works, as is typical with the San Antonio organization. The news of Gregg Popovich‘s extension earlier this month was similarly sudden. Still, the notion that Parker intends to stick around the Spurs for a while longer is certainly no shock, and the same was the case with Popovich. Parker has been confident that he would remain in San Antonio and told close associates that he had no desire to relocate his family, tweets Jabari Young of the San Antonio Express-News.
Parker’s salary for this season had been only partially guaranteed for $3.5MM, according to Mark Deeks of ShamSports, but as expected the Spurs kept him past June 30th, when the salary became fully guaranteed. The maximum value of an extension that the Creative Artists Agency client could have signed would be $43,335,938 over three years, as Deeks points out via Twitter. That’s much less than Parker could have received if he signed a new contract as a free agent next summer. Just how much a new contract could have given him won’t be known until the NBA sets its maximum salaries next summer, but based on this year’s max for a player of Parker’s experience, he likely would have been eligible for five years and much more than $100MM.
That helps explain why most veterans don’t sign extensions, but Parker and his Spurs teammates have a long history of hometown discounts. Parker lowered his annual pay with his last extension instead of going for the significant raises for which he was eligible.
The 32-year-old point guard is the youngest of a star trio also composed of Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobili, but even Parker is beginning to advance out of his prime years. He, like the other Spurs mainstays, remains a strong producer, even though his 29.4 minutes per game this season were his fewest since he was a rookie. He averaged 16.7 points and 5.7 assists this past year, another All-Star season that culminated in San Antonio’s fifth championship in franchise history and fourth with Parker in tow.
Photo courtesy of USA Today Sports Images.