The Atlanta Hawks cannot mess around and hope to bring back Dyson Daniels on the cheap. Whether it's this year or next summer, Daniels is going to get paid -- whether the Hawks pay him or someone else snatches him away.
NBA players have always been disadvantaged by restricted free agency, which allows the player holding those rights to match any contract that they sign. Given that threat and how long the process takes, it's unusual for a player to ever sign an offer sheet with another team. That gives leverage back to the team.
This summer the pain was ratcheted up to a 10 on restricted free agents. Four such players were caught in the lurch for months. Josh Giddey eventually negotiated a middle-ground deal, but Cam Thomas and Quentin Grimes accepted the one-year low-money qualifying offer rather than accept the team-friendly deals they were being offered. Jonathan Kuminga took the team-friendly deal to try and line up a trade by the deadline.
Now shockwaves of this frigid summer are reverberating out as the class of 2022 is eligible to negotiate contract extensions. For that group of players, if they fail to agree to terms on a rookie extension by the start of the season, they will hit restricted free agency themselves next summer.
Atlanta needs to re-sign Dyson Daniels
That is pertinent to Atlanta, as they have a 2022 first-rounder on the roster ready for a new deal. It's not the Hawks' own pick from 2022, however; AJ Griffin is already out of the league. Instead it's former New Orleans Pelicans guard Dyson Daniels, who went No. 8 overall out of the G League Ignite.
Daniels had a breakout season with the Hawks, averaging a truly absurd three steals per game to lead the league and finish as an All-Defense First Team selection and the league's Most Improved Player. Still only 22 years old, Daniels and the Hawks need to work out a new contract sometime in the next year.
The powerful negotiating hand of teams this summer squeezed restricted free agents and suggests that the Hawks could try to do so with Daniels next summer, confident they can extract the maximum value and keep Daniels' contract number low. The problem with that approach is that it only takes one team with cap space to blow the plan wide open by signing Daniels to a lucrative contract offer.
This summer, the only team with substantive cap space was the Brooklyn Nets. Next summer there will be at least a handful of such teams, many of whom could use a dynamic two-way guard with game-breaking defensive hands and a developing offensive bag. And as reported by Jake Fischer of The Stein Line this week, Daniels would be sought after by other cap space teams, to the tune of a deal starting at $30 million per season or more.
To this point, the Hawks and Daniels remain far apart in negotiations, per Fischer. He notes the Hawks could make a case that Daniels is not playoff-tested. Daniels' camp can argue that he just did something defensively no one has done in three decades. That's the beauty and the difficulty of contract negotiations: truth lies in the eye of the beholder.
What Atlanta cannot do is lay back and assume they hold all of the cards. Unlike this year's crop of restricted free agents, next year's will have more suitors on the market, and that means more teams to potentially sign away a rising defensive star.
The ball is in your court, Hawks.