Pascal Siakam is, at the moment, the second-best player slated to be available in free agency during the summer of 2020. As nobody expects Anthony Davis to leave the Los Angeles Lakers, Siakam would be the league’s top target if he truly did hit the market even as a restricted free agent. Of course, that doesn’t mean he wants to go anywhere. According to Shams Charania of The Athletic, Siakam wants to remain with the Toronto Raptors. But he is aware of how valuable he is, and wants a max contract if he is going to commit. 

Siakam’s max would fall somewhere in the neighborhood of $170 million over five years. He is certainly worth such a deal based on his performance last season. He was the NBA‘s Most Improved Player, scoring nearly 17 points per game while playing excellent defense, but there are two issues he’ll need to contend with in order to secure this kind of contract right now. 

The first is, obviously, getting the Raptors to agree to give him the max. While this shouldn’t be a problem overall, typically early extensions like this come with some sort of concession from the player involved. When Giannis Antetokounmpo re-signed with the Milwaukee Bucks in 2016, for instance, he took slightly less than the max in exchange for the security of locking in the deal quickly. Nikola Jokic got the max in 2018, but he didn’t get a player option on the final year of his deal. 

Standard NBA protocol typically dictates that a player makes some sort of sacrifice to secure this much money this early in their career. When push comes to shove, Siakam certainly would get the max, but the other issue at play is timing. 

If Siakam signs a max deal now, his cap hit next summer would be his new max salary. That projects to come in at around $29.25 million. But if he doesn’t, the Raptors can game the system to create a significant amount of cap space. Siakam was the No. 27 pick in the 2016 NBA Draft. That means that his cap hold as a restricted free agent would be a paltry $7 million. So long as Siakam were to sign after the Raptors spent the rest of their cap space, making him wait an extra year could generate over $22 million in free cap space for them to spend next summer. 

The cap is expected to fall at around $116 million for the 2020-21 season. Here is what Toronto’s books look like for that season at this moment, provided they were to keep the cap hold of Siakam and no others in free agency: 

Against a $116 million cap, $36.3 million in salaries would create nearly $80 million in cap space. That is what is at stake for the Raptors. If they can get Siakam to wait, they’ll have the flexibility to completely reshape their roster next summer. The $57.5 million or so they’d have with a re-signed Siakam isn’t exactly negligible, but they also have to re-sign Fred VanVleet and potentially some of their older veterans. That would make it much more difficult to really rebuild in free agency. 

The extra cap space this strategy would produce is their best chance of doing so, particularly in a summer that does not have much cap space floating around the league as a whole. The Raptors would probably be the first choice of most of the top players on the market. 

This is a strategy that has been adopted several times by teams looking to create extra space. The most notable example came with the San Antonio Spurs and Kawhi Leonard. The Spurs made Leonard wait until restricted free agency, knowing that they could match any offer he received if it came to that, because they wanted to preserve the space necessary to sign LaMarcus Aldridge. 

The Raptors know well the potential drawback to that sort of plan. After all, Leonard was on their roster last season. There were other circumstances involved in that, but being forced to wait on his max deal certainly didn’t help. This strategy is inordinately team-friendly. They are protected because restricted free agency gives them matching rights. The players do not have such protections. If they get hurt, or are ineffective, they might lose leverage that they had initially. 

That causes teams to tread lightly when it comes to not giving out max contracts that have been earned. There are just too many examples of teams either forcing players to wait, as Leonard did, or making them find a max offer in free agency, as Gordon Hayward did, that have ended badly. When a team has a player it expects to be a part of its long-term core, most of the time it just pays him immediately in the interest of preserving the relationship. The Denver Nuggets did this with Jamal Murray this summer. It cost them significant cap flexibility next summer, but it kept their young star happy. 

The situation, as a whole, is a minefield. The Raptors are trying to thread the needle between keeping Siakam happy and maximizing their opportunity to build a championship roster around him. Any number of missteps could cause significant problems down the line, but few GMs have managed their rosters more deftly than Masai Ujiri. If anyone can pull this off, it’s him.