Memphis Grizzlies owner Robert Pera, fresh off committing to a couple of maximum contracts worth a total of $247 million, fired off a tweet the night of July 1, 2016 featuring a black-and-white GIF of a toddler tossing stacks of cash out of a window. It was a funny, fitting image for the unprecedented NBA free-agency madness of last summer.
A year later, as the league's market corrects itself from the wild spending enabled by a historic salary-cap spike and adjusts to next season's cap and luxury tax coming in well under original projections, the stacks of cash aren't nearly as thick and windows aren't open so wide, if at all.
Pera's Twitter account has been silent this month, as this free-agency period has been a somber time in Memphis. The small-market Grizzlies, stuck in the middle as a team operating over the salary cap but determined to stay under the luxury tax, opted to let beloved face of the franchise Zach Randolph go instead of making a bid to compete with the two-year, $24 million offer he accepted from the Sacramento Kings. Fellow Grit 'n Grind mainstay Tony Allen remains unsigned.
Threatened by the luxury tax line which, like the salary cap, came in $9 million lower than projections teams used to plan entering the free-agency frenzy of 2016, Memphis has filled its roster with low-risk reclamation projects such as Ben McLemore (two years, $10.6 million), Tyreke Evans (one year, $3.3 million) and Mario Chalmers (one year, partially guaranteed veterans minimum).
The Grizzlies, like many franchises and their players, are feeling the effects of a steep market correction following the frenzy of spending last summer.
"If you're a team, you're sitting there saying, 'Well, I'm not going to negotiate off of someone else's mistake,'" a general manager from a team not linked to any of those players told ESPN. "That was the problem. Players were going to try to hold teams and agents to these comparisons. We're coming out of a bubble.
"You had faulty logic all across the league. The league and the players' association for a lack of smoothing, the teams that spent, the agents and players that thought that this was a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that was never going to end. You had a lot of parties that were guilty of a gold-rush mentality. It's always going to come to an end."
