Jaylen Brown Officially Got His Rookie Extension, The First One Handed Out By Danny Ainge Since 2009
(Yahoo Sports) – Jaylen Brown and the Boston Celtics are on similar footing.
During the first portion of negotiations, the No. 3 pick in the 2016 draft led his extension talks.
Brown never signed with an agent after being drafted from the University of California. He has since hired Jason Glushon, a veteran agent who represents Philadelphia forward Al Horford and New Orleans guard Jrue Holiday.
As Marc Stein of the New York Times noted in his latest newsletter, the Celtics rarely issue extensions to their rookies, with Rajon Rondo being the last to receive one in 2009.
But even with history not on Brown’s side, the Celtics have extended the 6-foot-7 swingman an offer of four years and $80 million, league sources told Yahoo Sports.
But Brown believes in his ability to one day be a star and is pursuing a bigger offer, sources said. Next season the Celtics will have another major decision: figuring out if Jayson Tatum is worth the rookie-scale max.
Should the 22-year-old Brown go the restricted free-agency route, he could end up being one of the top players on the market in July. Whatever he decides to do, he seems content and at peace.
OK so the first shocking part of this whole thing is that Danny Ainge finally gave out a rookie extension for the first time since Rajon Rondo. He’s a GM that has proven time and time again he has no problem letting things play out and allowing the market to dictate the price for his pending restricted free agent. It happened with Avery Bradley, it happened with Kelly Olynyk, it happened with Marcus Smart, the list goes on and on. Ainge will always prefer flexibility over anything else. so it’s a little surprising that the first player in a decade worthy of getting an offer was Jaylen Brown.
The other shocking part was that Ainge thought Jaylen would accept 4/80M. No chance, not in today’s market. Even if you think $20M is too much for Jaylen to begin with, remember we live in an NBA world where Terry Rozier and Malcolm Brogdon are $20M a year players. At the very least this is the floor of where Jaylen is going to end up. However, this is just a little bit different of a number than the full max Jaylen said he wanted, and it’s far less than what he’s going to get this summer. You don’t fault Ainge for trying, but he had to know there was no way Jaylen was going to sign at a discount before the market even tells him what he’s worth. If things go bad he’ll at least have this contract to fall back on.
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But due to the slim picking in the free agent market this summer combined with a number of teams having legit space to throw at young players, there’s no doubt that there is more money out there to be had for Jaylen. Also, just because 4/80M was Ainge’s offer does not mean he won’t go above that in RFA and match someone’s offer. If it’s 4/100M from someone, I bet that’s a number Ainge matches, especially if Jaylen plays well this year. I feel like he’s going to end up in the 20-25M range when it’s all said and done and I feel like for what Jaylen’s ceiling might end up being that’s a fair price and also is still a moveable contract if needed.
All I know is this new version of Ainge has me shook. I had just accepted the fact that he was never going to offer anyone a rookie extension ever again, and now I’m pretty sure we can take to the bank he’s going to do the same thing with Tatum next year. That’ll probably be a full rookie max extension, and remember that’ll also be the last year of Gordon Hayward’s max in the event he picks up his player option this summer. I’m just happy we don’t have to go into the season with Jaylen worrying about his contract, and now that he has this in his back pocket he can just focus on having the best year of his career. Maybe that’s Ainge’s thinking all along, in an effort to make as little distractions as possible. We all saw what happened when guys like Mook and Terry were playing for their next contracts, now we don’t have to worry about that with Jaylen and he can focus on doing shit like this