Yesterday the Sixers and Quentin Grimes ended their contract stalemate by agreeing to a 1-year deal. LOL! What a vanilla way of saying the Sixers drew their line in the sand of not paying a penny over the minimum they had to pay Grimes, lowballing him in order to pay the least amount of luxury tax possible. The reality is that the Sixers alienated one of their better players to save a few cents in billionaire Josh Harris’s $12b net worth.
First off, they didn’t really agree to a deal. The Sixers extended the $8.7m restricted free agent qualifying offer to Grimes at the beginning of the offseason. He had until Oct. 1 to accept the offer, which he did. In that time, the sides were supposed to work out an extension. They didn’t. There is one reason why. Josh Harris is a cheap mother f***er.
The reporting around the situation was that Grimes wanted $20m+ per season while the Sixers were offering the same $8.7m restricted free agent tender plus the max 8% raises for 3 years after, totaling roughly $39m. That total was reported a few days ago by Grimes’s agent and apparently didn’t budge in the subsequent days. That was the Sixers best and final offer. Grimes apparently tried to meet in the middle with a 2/$34m contract, but the Sixers said no. The Sixers only other offer was kicking in an extra $100k for Grimes to waive his no trade clause. He declined that offer.
The Sixers made no good faith offer that was above the QO. Why? If the team is offering $8.7m and the player wants $20m, wouldn’t there be some ground in the middle reasonable enough to at least offer? $15m per year is slightly more than any other team could have offered him. Doesn’t that seem like a very obvious middle ground between the parties? So, why wasn’t that offered? Two words: Luxury Tax. It always comes down to the luxury tax with the Sixers.
The NBA luxury tax kicks in at $187.9m this year. From that number, tax penalties go up every $5m. The Sixers were at $185.9m before the signing. With the Qualifying Offer out there, the minimum payroll they were set to carry this year was $194.6m. The tax bill on that is $10.5m. Any additional dollar would be met with harsh tax penalties. A $15m salary would be a $23.75m tax.
It would be semi-defensible if this were the only time the Sixers cheaped out, but we all know that isn’t true. Earlier this summer, Guerschon Yabusele signed a 2 year deal with the Knicks that started at $5.5m this season. As a tax payer, the Sixers could have offered him a starting salary of $5.7m. They didn’t. The reasoning was that they did not know how much money they would need to pay Grimes. That makes sense…except we now know that was total bullshit. If they never intended to offer Grimes more than the qualifying offer, then they simply didn’t offer Yabusele at all because they didn’t want to pay more tax. Keeping them both would have cost $22.25m in luxury tax. They could have done it.1
Let’s keep going. Last year, the Sixers signed Kenyon Martin to an inflated salary of $8m with the intent of using him in a trade later in the year. The extra money would help for salary matching purposes. The only problem was that the Sixers were dreadful last year and weren’t buyers. Instead, they traded Martin along with 2 second round picks to Detroit for nothing (cash). Why would they do such an obviously stupid thing? Well wouldn’t you know it, the Sixers were about $7.7m above the tax line last year. By making the trade, they missed the tax by $300k. I understand saving money on a worthless season, but they traded future draft assets to do it!!! That hurts the team much more than it hurts Harris’s wallet.
Back in 2023-24, the tax threshold was set at $165.3m. Where did the Sixers finish? $164.5m. If you remember, that was the year they traded Pat Bev, Danuel House, and Jaden Springer at the deadline. The year before, missed it by $700k. That year was basically trading Matysse Thybulle for Jalen McDaniels in seperate deals. You have to look back to 2021-22 for the last time the Sixers paid the tax. Don’t expect it to happen this season either. We are currently about $8m over the threshold. Expect Kelly Oubre to get traded for nothing at the deadline in order to duck the tax again. Good for you Josh!
What happens next? For Grimes, he is playing on his 1 year deal with a no trade clause. If he chooses to waive that no trade clause for the Sixers, the acquiring team will not be able to use Bird Rights to resign him (weird but true). If he stays with the Sixers, then we can use Bird Rights to resign him. For anyone else but the Sixers, he would be a true free agent. So, in the end, this makes sense on the Sixers side. They will be able to offer him more than anyone next offseason. Will Grimes want to come back? Maybe, but the Sixers will have to pay for it. Would Josh Harris rather keep the talent or not pay the money? We know the answer to that.
- Technically, the Sixers would have needed to guard against a large offer sheet for Grimes. But, is that really true? If they had no intention of ever going too high on Grimes, then they never would have matched the offer sheet. ↩︎
Philly Front Office 
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