The revitalization of the NBA buyout market is one of the CBA’s great unintended consequences

Last summer, the Los Angeles Clippers had a choice to make. With Kawhi Leonard extended and James Harden willing to return for less than the max, they could have re-signed Paul George and tried to win with a three-star model, or let George walk, and attempt to replace him in the aggregate with the money they’d otherwise earmarked for him. Star power or depth? That is the choice that the 2023 CBA was supposed to force teams to make. And yet, a year later, the Clippers have wound up with both.

When George left, the Clippers used the financial flexibility his absence generated to add Derrick Jones Jr., Kris Dunn and Nic Batum last summer. That still left them with enough financial flexibility to sign Brook Lopez and trade for John Collins this summer. They had effectively turned two good players, George and Norm Powell, into five. Depth, achieved. And then the Suns bought out Bradley Beal.

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On paper, Beal and George are at somewhat similar points in their careers. They are both former All-Stars that have seemingly aged out of their prime. George is likely the better player today, simply by virtue of his size and defensive versatility. But last season, both of them fell into the rapidly expanding pool of players that this collective bargaining agreement has created. While still valuable on the court, both are albatrosses in terms of overall team-building. It may no longer be possible to build a competitive team that pays George or Beal $50 million.

But the Clippers aren’t paying Beal $50 million. They’re paying him $5 million. The Suns are paying the rest of his salary through a buyout. While doing so was likely not a prudent long-term decision, it was one they felt they had to make, staring down both the aprons and the repeater tax. The Suns were far above the aprons with Beal on their roster. However, by dumping him with the waive-and-stretch provision, they’ve managed to get below the luxury tax line entirely as they try to reload around Devin Booker. They’ll pay for that down the line — he will now cost around $19 million for the next five seasons instead of over $50 million for the next two — but with no other obvious way of saving short-term money, they decided to take the plunge.

Beal may no longer be a $50 million player, but look at the market for small guards who can score efficiently even as defensive liabilities. Surely Beal, coming off a season in which he averaged 17 points on roughly 50-39-80 shooting while playing for a bad team, is more valuable than the Collin Sextons and Malik Monks of the world, right? Because they’re both making a shade below $19 million. The truth, therefore, is that Beal is likely worth $20-25 million. But Phoenix’s desperation allowed the Clippers to land him for a fraction of that price.

A somewhat similar situation just played out in Milwaukee. The Bucks didn’t even buy Damian Lillard out. They waived-and-stretched the entirety of the two years and nearly $113 million left on his contract to create the cap space needed to sign Myles Turner. The Bucks weren’t quite as expensive as the Suns were, but their situation was perhaps more dire. At least Beal is healthy enough to play. The Bucks were looking at more than $50 million in what was essentially dead salary this season as Lillard recovers from a torn Achilles tendon. With Giannis Antetokounmpo reportedly open to a future outside of Milwaukee, the Bucks had to do something drastic to keep him in the fold. With very limited future draft capital to trade and a top-heavy salary structure that would have complicated even lower-cost trades, this was really the only substantial upgrade on the table for the Bucks. They rolled the dice, long-term consequences be damned.

Whether they ultimately benefit from that decision remains to be seen, but as the Clippers have with Beal, someone else almost certainly will. Post-Achilles Lillard will likely fall in the same camp that Beal and George have: not nearly good enough to command a $50 million salary anymore, but an outright steal at the discount he’s likely to ultimately sign for. We don’t know who will benefit from that discount, or even when it will come, as reports have indicated that Lillard may sit out the season while he recovers. But in all likelihood, it will be one of the expensive, contending teams that the CBA was supposed to restrict. The team he has been linked to most heavily thus far, the Boston Celtics, just needed to shed $20 million in payroll to duck the second apron. Lillard for the minimum may generate enough surplus value on his own to make up for those losses.

The CBA is supposed to have safeguards against outcomes like this. During the season, teams above the first apron are not allowed to sign players who have been waived if their original salary was above the non-taxpayer mid-level exception. Of course, that restriction doesn’t apply during the offseason. That’s what could clear the way for Lillard to land in Boston. It has already allowed Jordan Clarkson to sign with the New York Knicks for the minimum. While Clarkson is hardly a peer to Lillard or Beal, he is a proven bench scorer that had a $14 million cap figure in Utah before he was waived. He is the sort of talent the CBA is supposed to prevent teams like the Knicks from freely accessing. Instead, it arguably facilitated his move to New York. After all, in a less restrictive cap environment, the Jazz might have been able to trade Clarkson for value at previous trade deadlines. They were unable to do so, and eventually decided that they just needed to get rid of him in order to clear minutes for their younger players.

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Clarkson, Lillard and Beal are all in their 30s, but they aren’t the only surprise free agents hitting the market lately. Consider Deandre Ayton, a 26-year-old former No. 1 overall pick. The Blazers clearly weren’t going to keep him beyond the 2025-26 season, when his max contract was originally set to expire, because they drafted centers in the first round in back-to-back drafts. Still, in the old world, such players were practically never bought out a year early. It made more sense to keep the expiring contract as a trade chip and have the player around if only for injury-related depth. But cap flexibility is at such a premium nowadays that Portland decided paying Ayton more than $25 million not to play for them was preferable to keeping them because a buyout unlocked the full, nontaxpayer mid-level exception of $14.1 million without taking them above the luxury tax.

The Blazers haven’t actually used that exception yet, though, and how much mileage they’ll get out of it remains to be seen. Once again, the primary beneficiary here is exactly the sort of team most of the NBA’s owners wanted to restrict: the big-market, contending Lakers. Before Ayton’s buyout, every starting-caliber center on the free-agent market was either too old or too limited for them. They explored the trade market, but found nothing available at the price they were willing to pay. Ayton’s availability, therefore, represented something of a bailout for them. After playing the second half of last season without a starting-caliber center, they get one who is theoretically at his athletic peak and coming off of a max deal… for less money than the Clippers will pay Lopez this season.

Will there be more Aytons and Lillards and Beals in the years to come? We can’t say for certain. But their presence on the free-agent market suggests a sort of collectively bargained paradox. The new CBA is so prohibitively restrictive that it accidentally, in one small way, makes life easier for the teams it intended to challenge. The Clippers shouldn’t have access to a talent like Beal for the price they paid. The same is true for the Lakers and Ayton, and Lillard and whoever signs him. These players wouldn’t become available in a less restrictive environment, and the fact that they are is ultimately benefiting the teams that are signing them more than the ones that are losing them. It is, in short, the great unintended consequence of the 2023 CBA so far.

Every CBA has a few. The 2011 CBA was intended to prevent big-market superteams such as the LeBron James-era Heat from forming by creating an incredibly punitive luxury tax. That same luxury tax played a role in the entirely homegrown Oklahoma City Thunder hesitating to offer James Harden the max, and then ultimately trading him. That led to the Thunder losing Kevin Durant in free agency in 2016, so the 2017 CBA created the supermax as a mechanism to help teams re-sign their own stars. But the supermax was so expensive that teams like the Chicago Bulls elected to trade stars like Jimmy Butler rather than give it to them. Every collective bargaining agreement finds ways to create as many problems as it solves.

And right now, the revamped buyout market seems to be one of the big ones the league is dealing with. While not every player we’ve covered directly received a buyout, all of them became free agents unexpectedly because of the cap environment this CBA created, and all of them stand to help their new teams a good deal more than they helped their old ones. It took a year of brilliant cap management for the Clippers to turn their $50 million aging star into a $5 million aging star, but it’s worth asking if the CBA is working as intended, if a competitive, big-market team can ever so easily replace one big-name player with another at 10% of the price.