The San Antonio Spurs haven’t played a basketball game for over a month now and they still don’t know if Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobili will be back.
However, the Spurs reportedly have a plan to retain Duncan.
There are several NBA player personnel executives who believe the Spurs will offer Duncan a two-year contract that begins between $6 million and $7 million, with a partial guarantee and a player option in the second season.
If Duncan doesn’t exercise the option, he gets, say, 50 percent of that season’s salary. In effect, his salary for next season would remain over $10 million, the partially guaranteed portion of the second season’s salary remaining on the Spurs team salary after the cap explodes with the NBA’s new TV money kicking in for 2016-17.
“You can call it a ‘wink-wink’ deal if you want to,” said an Eastern Conference team executive.” It’s what they did with (Antonio) McDyess, so why not for Duncan.”
Duncan’s cap hold is slightly more than $15.5 million so such a two-year deal would drop their team salary by more than $8 million.
When it’s all said and done, I find it very hard to imagine Duncan and Ginobili retiring after losing in the first round of the playoffs.