NBA Free Agents 2011: Nick Young Signs Qualifying Offer with Washington Wizards

Nick Young has signed a qualifying offer with the Washington Wizards, which if you're a Wizards fan isn't the good news you might think it is.

Young did not get the kinds of offers he was expecting, in spite of the fact that he scored 17.4 points per game last year. Most of the reason for this was his status as a restricted free agent. 

Due to the abbreviated nature of this year's offseason, teams simply didn't have time to mess around with restricted free-agent offers, particularly when the foregone conclusion is that the original team will match any offer provided by a new team. 

This has an impact because once a team extends an offer, the money is tied up until the original team matches or declines. Should the other team match, that's three days of watching competitors sign the best-available free agents at the position and the proverbial pickin's get thinner and thinner.  

That's why players like Nick Young and Arron Afflalo didn't get the types of offers that many anticipated they would get. It's actually more of an indication to the players having value than not having it. 

So the remaining option is for Young to accept the "qualifying offer," which means that he gets paid the qualifying amount, but it's only a one-year deal. At the end of the year, Nick Young becomes an unrestricted free agent. 

That means that next year the Wizards can't match offers on him, so there's a very good chance that the young Young will have only one more year in Washington. While I can guess that there's a chance that the Wizards are going to extend the best offer next year, it would seem that if they wanted to make a long-term offer, they wouldn't have had to wait.