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2024-25 Predictions

Forecasting as much as possible about the forthcoming season

Jared Dubin

22 Oct 2024 — 4 min read

Photo by Joshua Gateley/Getty Images

Just like last year, we got a bunch of news on the day before the season started. It was a brutal Steven Adams injury a year ago. This time, it was a whole bunch of extensions for the 2021 draft class. Before we get to the predictions, I want to talk about one specific such extension, and why it’s so puzzling.

That would be the three-year, $106 million deal the Rockets gave to Jalen Green, as Shams reported yesterday afternoon. As we’ve discussed multiple times around these parts, Green has not really played at a level commensurate with this type of contract. So, it’s basically the Rockets making a bet on him living up to his draft stock, rather than remaining the player he has been through his first three NBA seasons. In a vacuum, that’s probably okay. Contracts should be based on projected future performance, not past performance. (Obviously, that is almost never how things work.)

But that’s where the structure of the deal works against the Rockets. It’s a 2+1 contract, with Green carrying a player option on the third year. So in essence, this means that even in the absolute best-case scenario that Green becomes the player the Rockets think he can be; he opts out of his deal after the 2026-27 season and becomes an unrestricted free agent that they have to give a massive deal under a dramatically higher salary cap number. In the worst-case scenario, they’ve got a highly-paid, former No. 2 overall pick who hasn’t lived up to that billing, clogging up both their cap sheet and their rotation. Basically, even if this deal ends up being a good one (value-wise), there’s almost no chance it actually works out well for the Rockets.

The only scenario where it works for them at all is one where Green plays well enough this season to convince another team with a star that he can be the centerpiece of a trade, even on that large a deal. But it’s more difficult to do something like that when the prospect who is the centerpiece of said deal is also the guy who is providing the salary ballast. Because in that case, the acquiring team then doesn’t even get one of the biggest benefits of having a young player to build around — the artificially-low cap hit that allows you to add good players around him. Whichever team acquired Green would be paying him high-level starter-ish money in the short term and then (in the best-case scenario) superstar money a couple years later. So, even this type of scenario coming to pass seems remote, because the incentives don’t really align. (And it’s all contingent on Green taking a pretty significant step forward anyway.)

Of course, it’s possible that Green just takes a leap and becomes the superstar the Rockets thought they were getting and he opts out and signs a max deal two years from now and nobody ever remembers that this happened. But that doesn’t seem like the most likely result.

Anyway, let’s get to the predictions…

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