Gay will earn only a little more than Alec Burks, and less than Ricky Rubio. Getting him for that money as the cap jumps from $63 million now into the $90 million range -17 might end up a steal. Getting the Sacramento version of Gay for $13 million under the current cap environment is a fair-ish price, even if you’re not the biggest fan of his game. That is really the best-case scenario for the Kings’ notion of buying low on overpaid players: Gay has played well, and the Kings will bring him back for about $6 million less per season as the salary cap is primed for a mega-leap. The Kings rode those good vibes Sunday, inking Gay to a three-year, $40 million extension, according to Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo and confirmed by several league sources. Damn near everything has worked for the Kings over the first 10 games of the season a bunch of us are going to have to swallow some royal crow if Darren Collison keeps pushing the pace, getting to the line six times per game, dishing dimes, and keeping DeMarcus Cousins happy. They admitted it.Īnd guess what: It has worked so far. Gay earned nearly $18 million last season, and held a mammoth $19 million player option for 2014-15 - an option he would probably take, given the decline in his skills. He was a broken brick machine in Toronto last December, when the Kings swapped four rotation players for him after the Raptors could find no other willing suitor. It takes some guts to admit that: We will think about players on contracts that make our peers snicker. They couldn’t tear down, again, since they want to be competitive by the time they move into their new arena in 2016.Īs part of that competitive-or-bust mantra, the Kings targeted players that the rest of the league considered overpaid, their GM, Pete D’Alessandro, told me over the summer. The Kings have been almost amazingly forthright in discussing their path to becoming relevant for the first time since the Rick Adelman era.