The Miami Heat have had an overtly obvious goal for the 2021 offseason, create enough salary-cap space to sign a max free agent, specifically to sign Giannis Antetokounmpo. However, the Heat recently signed Bam Adebayo to a Max Contract extension earlier than they could have, which makes it a little more difficult to sign Giannis next year.
On the daily Locked On Heat Podcast, host David Ramil spoke with NBA Salary Cap expert Keith Smith about Bam Adebayo's contract extension and how it affects Miami's ability to sign Giannis Antetokounmpo if he were to become a free agent next offseason.
David Ramil: Obviously, the larger view here, especially for Heat fans, is how Bam Adebayo's contract extension impacts the team's ability to sign a player like Giannis Antetokounmpo or another max level player. I know it cuts into the salary cap situation for Miami pretty significantly and basically makes it a non-possibility, correct?
Keith Smith: I don't want to call it a non-possibility, but what it does is it makes it much harder to get there. Let's talk about what they did before this extension with the guys that they've resigned. Goran Dragic, Meyers Leonard, and then Avery Bradley all got two-year deals, or what I call a one-minus-one because it's a one year deal with a team option for the second year. What that means is that they're essentially on the same timeline as Andre Iguodala who signed an extension last year. So what the Heat can do is wipe those contracts completely off the books next season with no worries…
So once they decline all of those options they would only have Bam Adebayo, Jimmy Butler, Tyler Herro, KZ Okpala, and Precious Achiuwa. Then, unfortunately, the other piece of money that's definitely going to be on the books is Ryan Anderson stretched salary of $5.2 million. There's nothing you can do with that you got to work around it. So if you're the Heat, you were sitting there with max space of about $60 million for the 2021 offseason so they ate into that by $13-18 million for Bam. Let's be optimistic and say Bam reaches all sorts of incentives so that's $18 million. That's going to knock the cap space down to about $42 million, then they're going to knock off $4 million because they're clearly going to keep Tyler Herro, that knocks it down to $38 million. Then let's say they decide to let Kendrick Nunn leave, but they're going to keep Duncan Robinson, that's $2 million, now we're down to $36 million range. They'll have a draft pick next year so that draft pick would be on the books as well, plus whatever else they did to kind of fill out the roster. So you're already really easily down to about $36 million in cap space. That's in the range of Giannis' number, but then you get to look at it as that would leave you with is Giannis, Jimmy Butler, Bam, Tyler Herro, Duncan Robinson, and young guys.
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