Kentavious Caldwell-Pope is the latest victim of NBA restricted free agency

Why restricted free agency is so weird and how it impacted the two-way shooting guard’s summer dreams.

As the NBA luxury tax has gotten more punitive and NBA teams have gotten wiser, irresponsible contracts in unrestricted free agency are fewer these days. This isn’t to say that there are no more bad contracts: Chandler Parsons and Joakim Noah signed large deals despite being major injury risks a year ago, and contracts for Timofey Mozgov, Luol Deng, and Solomon Hill looked dicey before the ink dried.

But compared to the mid-2000s, back when the luxury tax was just an annoyance and not a crippling factor, and when franchises were still adjusting to a high-dollar NBA where you needed accountants within the basketball operations department, unrestricted free agency has become rather safe.

It’s restricted free agency where peril truly lies.

Restricted free agency is a bizarre concept, and it’s weirder in practice. Even it’s name is an oxymoron and an accurate reflection of the tension it embodies. Players falling under the tag are both free and restricted!

Let’s go through what makes restricted free agency so dangerous for players and teams alike, and specifically how its quirks impacted Kentavious Caldwell-Pope this summer.

The restricted free agent pool is odd

The first thing to know about the trouble with restricted free agency is that the only players who become restricted free agents are good players with question marks or overachievers.

Let’s deal with the latter first. Many second-round picks or undrafted rookies sign three-year deals with team option at or just above the minimum contract level. If these prospects don’t pan out, their teams cut them loose, usually early. If the prospects do pan out, these end up being some of the most valuable contracts in the league.

But at the end of those three-year contracts, the players become restricted free agents. Having played for little salary (relatively speaking), they are hungry for a payday. Teams face being forced to pony up lest another team come in with a crazy offer. This is how the Mavericks got Parsons from the Rockets, and the Rockets got Jeremy Lin from the Knicks. Sometimes, teams are appreciative of the overachievement but unable or unwilling to pay up. This is how the Kings lost Isaiah Thomas and the Jazz lost Wesley Matthews (albeit after one year).

Then there are the good players with question marks. Really good players — future or current stars — don’t make it to restricted free agency, and if they do, their teams lock them up immediately. The best young players usually sign rookie extensions after their third seasons. Some don’t, and become restricted free agents ever so briefly after mutually agreeing to a new contract (as happened with Klay Thompson, Kawhi Leonard, and Draymond Green) or being yanked into a new max contract (as happened with Jimmy Butler). Below the star level, it’s not so simple.

Take Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, for example. He’s in the news because he is no longer a restricted free agent. But he was only ever a restricted free agent in the first place because he’s a nice player with a couple of serious flaws, and no one can agree on what he’s worth. His camp surely thinks his defensive prowess is worthy of a fat extension. Doubters question his inability to create a shot and his inconsistent shooting stroke. There are questions. There is debate.

If Caldwell-Pope could shoot with consistency, we wouldn’t be here: Detroit would have locked him up. If Caldwell-Pope weren’t such a nice defender, he might have jumped at any offer, or Detroit might have declined to extend a qualifying offer in the first place, making him unrestricted. (We’ll get back to this point.)

So we start off with a weird player pool. Now we had some hurdles from the team side.

Chasing restricted free agents is hard

Teams with restricted free agents have the right of first refusal. But they need to be given time to review contracts that their RFAs sign in order to decide whether to match it. How long should they have? A decade ago, teams had a week to decide. We’re now down to 48 hours, which seems appropriate. But that still creates a timing problem for teams extending offer sheets to restricted free agents.

Another wrinkle is that free agency in general is front-loaded: Most players want their status resolved ASAP, and take all of their meetings within the first few days of July. However, nothing can officially be signed until the moratorium ends on July 6. The Otto Porter ordeal provides a good example of the timing issues chasing an RFA creates. The Nets reached a deal with Porter late on July 4 after the player met with multiple teams over four days. The match clock didn’t start ticking until the moratorium ended on July 6. The Wizards had until the end of July 8 — Saturday — to officially inform Porter and the Nets of their decision. For four days a huge chunk of Brooklyn’s cap space was tied up in the Porter decision, despite it being pretty much a lock that Washington would eventually match.

That’s fine for the Nets, who need to keep chasing free agents given their draft situation. But it’s too big a hurdle for most teams. This ties in with our next point.

The RFA team pool is weird

It’s not just the waiting that hurts. It’s the fact that in chasing restricted free agents, teams have to clear cap space first without knowing if they’ll get to keep the player they are chasing. You can’t extend an offer sheet without the space or salary cap exception to absorb it.

This is different from chasing unrestricted free agents. The Celtics, for example, recruited Gordon Hayward, an unrestricted free agent. Once Boston landed him, the team proceeded to clear space by trading Avery Bradley, rescinding Kelly Olynyk’s qualifying offer, and renouncing a few free agents. Had Hayward been a restricted free agent, the Celtics would have had to clear the space before Hayward signed the offer sheet ... and then risked losing him to an incumbent team match while already having lost the assets it traded or cut free.

As such, the only teams that get into the restricted free agency business are those with already existent cap space. Few teams are willing to perform cap sheet gymnastics just to submit an offer sheet, and rightly so.

One more minor twist: RFA offer sheets must be at least three years in length. So teams with one year of cap space to burn aren’t in the game. This is why the Lakers weren’t available to RFAs — L.A. wants to retain its cap space for next summer.

Player value is tied up in extremes

All of this contributed to Caldwell-Pope’s weird July — one that isn’t over yet. Few teams were in the market for restricted free agents in the first place. It was believed that it would take a big contact to pry KCP away from Detroit — this likely turns out to have been not true — and of course Caldwell-Pope isn’t going to sign a contract less than what he believes he’s worth.

The relatively free market that exists in NBA free agency doesn’t apply to RFAs: There is a structural bias toward hefty, cumbersome contracts or no contracts at all. Reasonable RFA offer sheets are few and far between only because there is no point in an outside team offering a reasonable contract — it’s just going to get matched! If you really want the player — like Brooklyn with Porter — you need to go for big dollars and annoying contract terms. (Porter will reportedly get paid half his annual salary each Oct. 1. Given that his salary is around $25 million per year, this is pretty annoying to the folks writing the checks.)

Furthermore, if the player is willing to take a reasonable deal, he’ll just agree to it with the original team and bypass the games. If the original team values the player highly, they’ll likely make a generous offer to avoid the contract trickery that restricted free agency brings.

Caldwell-Pope thought himself worthy of a Porteresque offer sheet. Whether he’s right or wrong, through the first week of free agency no team with interest in chasing restricted free agents agreed. NBA norms would dictate that Caldwell-Pope continue searching for a rich offer as more cap space dried up. We’d get a threat from his agent about taking the qualifying offer in an attempt to pressure the Pistons into offering a deal. Either some stalking horse team would make an offer to force the issue (the ol’ Enes Kanter resolution), Caldwell-Pope and the Pistons would find middle ground, or he’d take the qualifying offer after giving up on the 2017 market (the Greg Monroe doctrine).

Stan Van Gundy, who runs the Pistons, doesn’t do norms. He decided that with Avery Bradley in tow, he had no interest in retaining Caldwell-Pope at the price he is likely to command and rescinded the qualifying offer (making KCP an unrestricted free agent) and renouncing the Pistons’ Bird rights (meaning KCP will not be re-signing with Detroit even as an unrestricted free agent).

Van Gundy’s rash move may have been foolish — we’ll see how Caldwell-Pope pans out, but renouncing valuable players you could still extract value from is usually a bad idea — but it had a huge impact on how the player’s summer will wrap up. There are two routes: A one-year balloon contract with a team preserving cap space for 2017 (hello, Lakers) or a more reasonable, closer-to-market-value multi-year deal (perhaps with the Hawks).

Getting out of restricted free agency has its benefits. But Caldwell-Pope’s foray into the market was damaged heavily already. What a weird system.