The Worst NBA Free Agency Signings of the Last 3 Years
The NBA's new collective bargaining agreement might be enough on its own to scare teams straight in 2023 free agency. It makes overspending more punitive than ever, imposing severe and restrictive penalties for plunging too deep into the luxury tax.
On the off chance organizations aren't concerned enough about inking free agents to bad deals, we've got some cautionary tales from the 2020, 2021 and 2022 offseasons that illustrate the risks.
These are exclusively free-agent signings. So Rudy Gobert's five-year, $205 million extension in 2020 doesn't count. Ditto for his current teammate, Karl-Anthony Towns, and his four-year, $224 million supermax extension from this past offseason. The former deal is already catastrophic, and the latter won't age well. But they're not the focus here.
Instead, we're nominating pure free-agent signings and re-signings in this "buyer beware" exercise.
Bradley Beal: 5 Years, $251 Million in 2022
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It's not Bradley Beal's fault he's on this list. He got all that money (and the only no-trade clause in the sport) from a Washington Wizards organization that, for whatever reason, put a massive emphasis on retaining its three-time All-Star wing.
Credit him for taking what was offered, and knock the Wizards for the biggest overpay in the league.
Beal played just 40 games and posted a 53.9 true shooting percentage in 2021-22, missing the All-Star game for the second time in three seasons. Despite that, Washington still saw fit to give him the most money and years allowed under the CBA. To make matters worse, Beal later said on the No Chill with Gilbert Arenas podcast: "There were no teams in the market, free-agency-wise. I'm just being frank. There was nowhere else for me to go where I can be like, 'Oh, I can go win.' It was teams that strategically wasn't what I wanted."
Washington wasn't bidding against anyone with a real shot to poach Beal, and it went with the full max anyway. It's probably not a coincidence that the Wizards completely revamped their management structure this month.
Decades from now, scholars may still fail to understand the thinking that went into giving a quarter-billion dollars, fully guaranteed, to a player with mounting injury concerns who'd also never led his team to a 50-win season. Beal is a quality player. He's averaged over 30.0 points per game twice and even made an All-NBA team in 2020-21. But he's not the generational superstar his contract suggests.
Dāvis Bertāns: 5 Years, $80 Million in 2020
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It's difficult to overpay for shooting in the modern era, but the Washington Wizards managed to do it when they handed $80 million over five years to sniping forward Dāvis Bertāns in November of 2020.
Bertāns was coming off a 2019-20 campaign that included career highs of 15.4 points and 3.7 made triples per game. His 42.4 percent hit rate on deep shots—many of them exceptionally difficult, on the move and contested—was second among players who attempted at least 450 total treys. The season that got Bertāns paid had a slight whiff of being an unsustainable anomaly, but it wasn't overwhelmingly obvious the then-28-year-old would slip.
He'd hit 42.9 percent of his threes with the San Antonio Spurs two years prior and had never shot below 37.3 percent from deep in his career. At the time, the deal seemed like a bit of a risk. But shooting was and is a premium skill. Duncan Robinson would go on to get five years and $90 million from the Miami Heat a year later.
Bertāns hasn't matched the production that got him paid, shooting a solid 39.5 percent from deep in 2020-21 before falling off. He's hit 35.5 percent of his threes on drastically reduced volume and missed 63 games across the last two seasons, all while occupying a shrinking role and being traded from Washington to the Dallas Mavericks.
The upside is hard to see. Bertāns is entering his age-31 season with two years left on his contract, the last of which is an early termination option he won't even think about exercising. In clear decline and mostly out of the rotation, Bertāns' deal is essentially dead money.
John Collins: 5 Years, $125 Million in 2021
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At the time, John Collins' deal with the Atlanta Hawks didn't seem that bad.
Sure, the power forward had some durability issues, coming off a total of just 104 games played in the two seasons immediately prior to signing. But Collins was one of just two players to put up over 20.0 points and 10.0 rebounds while hitting 40.0 percent of his threes in 2019-20, and he showed some intriguing defensive grit during the Hawks' run to the Conference Finals in 2021.
That version of Collins was worth the money. The one the Hawks have gotten over the last couple of seasons hasn't come close. His production fell to just 13.1 points and 6.5 boards per game this past season.
The complete disappearance of Collins' three-point shot is a major factor in his devaluation, and it may owe entirely to a gruesome finger injury he suffered late in the 2021-22 season. Whatever the cause, Atlanta is now paying $25 million per year for an offense-first big man who just shot 29.2 percent from deep and doesn't have the heft to man the center spot. That's part of the reason Atlanta's multiple attempts to trade Collins and his "hindrance" of a contract over the last couple of seasons haven't yet yielded a deal.
The clock is ticking, as the Hawks need to cut salary to avoid luxury tax penalties as soon as next season.
And just like with Beal in Washington, it seems like the Hawks overspent in the first place for no reason. Collins was a restricted free agent the summer he signed his deal, but according to The Athletic's Chris Kirschner, Collins said "he didn't have any conversations with other teams in free agency. It was just the Hawks."
A clear commonality is emerging in these bad signings: spending as if there's heated competition when there actually isn't any.
Evan Fournier: 4 Years, $78 Million
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Before we begin the skewering, credit where it's due for the New York Knicks: They had the good sense to put a team option on the fourth year of Evan Fournier's $78 million contract, and they got halfway decent production (if you don't look too closely under the hood) from him in 2021-22.
Fournier fell out of the rotation entirely this past season, though, and he's now essentially $18.9 million in dead 2023-24 salary.
The fall for Fournier has been steep. He started 80 games and averaged a respectable 14.1 points on 38.9 percent shooting from deep in the first year of his new contract. Despite that offensive production, New York was 4.7 points per 100 possessions better with Fournier on the bench in 2021-22. The problem was on the defensive end, where Fournier's stints coincided with a ghastly 112.5 defensive rating, easily the worst on the team among players who logged at least 1,000 minutes.
Perhaps it's possible the Knicks can move him as an expiring contract to clear space, but there aren't many teams that would accept him for the cap relief he'd offer in the summer of 2024 alone. Chances are, the Knicks would need to attach some kind of draft equity to move off Fournier's deal.
Though a $78 million mistake isn't crippling, the fact that the Knicks thought they were signing a clear starter and instead wound up with someone they couldn't play and could only trade with extra assets attached earns the Fournier deal a spot here.
Gordon Hayward: 4 Years, $120 Million in 2020
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Gordon Hayward might have been worth $120 million over four years if he'd stayed healthy, but the veteran forward's durability has been consistently compromised since a catastrophic left ankle injury during his first game with the Boston Celtics in 2017.
The Charlotte Hornets gambled on Hayward returning to form when they agreed to acquire him in a sign-and-trade deal with Boston, but his body never cooperated. Hayward played 44 games in 2020-21, 48 the following year and 50 this past season. Though productive—16.6 points, 4.9 rebounds and 3.9 assists on a 46.9/38.1/83.4 shooting split with the Hornets—Hayward has basically performed like a solid, often unavailable role player on a first option's salary.
Compounding matters, Charlotte waived and stretched Nicolas Batum to clear the space it needed to acquire Hayward, going to historic lengths to ditch one forward for another.
Since that move, Batum has played 204 games and amassed 12.3 win shares in a key role for the Los Angeles Clippers, accumulating a total of $16.6 million (not including the money Charlotte was still paying him post-waiver). Hayward's totals during that same span: 143 games and 8.3 win shares for $88.5 million in salary.
The Hayward deal was a mistake regardless, but Batum made it look even worse by outproducing his more expensive replacement after being paid to go away.
Stats courtesy of NBA.com, Basketball Reference and Cleaning the Glass. Salary info via Spotrac.
Grant Hughes covers the NBA for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter (@gt_hughes), and subscribe to the Hardwood Knocks podcast, where he appears with Bleacher Report's Dan Favale.
