Richard Jefferson Re-Signs With Spurs For Four Years, $39 Million

There was just something a little too convenient about Richard Jefferson’s extension with the Spurs. To recap: the rapidly declining Jefferson was owed an onerous $15 million this coming season; this salary would have pushed the Spurs well over the luxury tax threshold and made bringing over Tiago Splitter a much more fiscally painful proposition.

But then...mirabile dictu, Jefferson opted out of his contract! I repeat: a 30-year-old small forward coming off the worst season of his career decided against picking up his $15 million player option. This was either inexplicably insane or insanely inexplicable. Or perhaps Jefferson simply enlisted the inestimable Eddy Curry as his financial advisor. Regardless, what could have possibly motivated Jefferson to turn down a cool $15 million after sputtering through the past year in San Antonio? His rationale was that he hoped to secure a long-term contract, in part due to the uncertainty of a new CBA next summer. In an interview with Fanhouse, Jefferson mentioned that he hoped to land a four-year, $40 million deal if he indeed opted out of his current one.

In a summer filled with scores of exorbitant contracts handed out to marginal players ($20 million for Darko?), Richard Jefferson’s $39 million extension with the Spurs hardly sticks out. Sure, we expect better of the R.C. Buford and Gregg Popovich brain trust, but hey, bad contracts happen to good GMs from time to time, right? And besides, perhaps San Antonio is just hoping that Jefferson hasn’t really entered the “precipitous decline” portion of his career, and will regress to the mean after a down year. That’s more or less the case that Kelly Dwyer over at Yahoo!‘s Ball Don’t Lie makes:

That’s certainly plausible. But isn’t it ignoring an equally compelling possibility; the elephant in the room? Consider the facts. Jefferson rather inexplicably opted out of the final year of his deal that would have paid him a ludicrous $15 million. It was as if he suddenly started taking financial advice from Eddy Curry. The rationale Jefferson and his agent gave was that he wanted to sign a long-term deal before the current CBA expires next summer. That makes a glimmer of sense, but it assumed that whatever presumptive gains he’d make in Years 2-4 of any deal would outweigh his losses over the next season; a dubious proposition at best. Until that is, the Spurs even more inexplicably decided to keep Jefferson for $39 million, with only $8 million of that coming in 2010-11.