Why The Trail Blazers Can’t Afford To Let Shaedon Sharpe Walk

By the start of next week, the Portland Trail Blazers will have let the league know their future. Either they will go as far as Shaedon Sharpe can take them for a long time, or they’ll potentially be letting their most dynamic player walk for nothing at the end of the season. 

Entering the final year of his rookie contract, Sharpe and the Trail Blazers have until Monday to agree to a rookie contract extension. The team has a delicate tightrope to walk in deciding whether to resign him now or roll the dice and let him hit restricted free agency next season.  Yes, the team has invested heavily in veteran players like Damian Lillard and Jrue Holliday, but Sharpe is rapidly developing into the engine that makes the Trail Blazers run. 

On the surface, Sharpe checks many of the same boxes that recently departed Anfernee Simons filled: a dynamic scorer and volume shooter who can stretch defenses. Look at most of the Trail Blazers’ advanced stats last season, and you’ll find Sharpe and Simons right next to each other: Win shares, usage rate, offensive plus minus, and efficiency rating. There is one big difference: Simons was putting up his stats at age 25 and at the end of his rookie extension. Sharpe was doing it at just 22. 

The swap of Simons for Holliday this offseason is going to put more weight on Sharpe in the team’s offense. Holliday is capable and a fantastic defender, but is not going to give the team the nearly 33 minutes per game Simons did last year every single night. Sharpe has the opportunity before him to become the lead scoring guard that the team has been waiting for. 

Should Sharpe and the Trail Blazers not reach an agreement by Monday, he would qualify for restricted free agency this offseason. That would give the Trail Blazers the first right of refusal. If he doesn’t get a deal he likes, then he could take a one-year qualifying offer and enter free agency as a 24-year-old. There are options for both sides. However, both involve playing some chicken. If the Trail Blazers don’t lock up Sharpe by Monday, they will be at the mercy of the market. Maybe Sharpe doesn’t turn into the player the Trail Blazers hope he does, and another team enters the fray with a big offer. But if the team doesn’t lock him down now and Sharpe blossoms this season, they will be over a barrel having to match another team’s offer for him. The Trail Blazers also have other contracts to consider. While they were able to do some creative accounting work to fit in Damian Lillard this offseason, their cap situation starts getting interesting next summer. If previous trends hold, the salary cap figures to be somewhere between $162-$167 million next season, and the Trail Blazers have already filled about $130 million of that. Many projections have an extension for Sharpe winding up somewhere in the $25 million range per season, which would swallow up most of their cap space, and that’s before they work on an extension for Toumani Camara, who will almost certainly see his cap hit balloon far beyond the current $2.5 million it occupies after next season. 

That leaves the Trail Blazers stuck. Play chicken with Sharpe’s contract, and hope that he doesn’t turn into the very sort of player the team expects and needs him to be to get a better contract, or lock him up now and sort out the future later. Sharpe is almost too good not to pay, and the team’s roster is in such a strange state that they cannot afford not to pay him. With Sharpe, the team has a young balance, with Deni Avedjia, Donovan Clingan, Camara, and Yang Hansen, along with vets like Holliday, Robert Williams, Jerami Grant, and (in 2026-27) Damian Lillard. Even if Scoot Henderson never turns into the player the team would like him to be, that is a solid roster. 

But without Sharpe? The team will have put all its chips at the guard position on the hot-and-cold Henderson, and the hopes that the seemingly ageless Holliday doesn’t fall apart, and Lillard returns next year as the superstar he was. 

If the Trail Blazers can get Sharpe to agree to a 4-year deal in the $95- $100 million range, they would be foolish not to sign it. There are risks to signing him to that deal – look at how things ended between the team and Simons, but the risk of not getting it done and leaving a gaping hole in a team that is hoping to take the jump to the next level is even greater. 

Source link

Author: Hey PDX

Hey PDX Team