The picture above gives it away, but would you have thought that the first $100m contract in pro sports history would have been signed by Juwan Howard and given out by the Washington Bullets? That’s exactly what happened 30 years ago on August 5th, 1996. The story itself is pretty nuts too and has the usual sprinkling of NBA chicanery.
The story really starts a few weeks earlier at the dawning of Howard’s free agency. The Bullets offered him 7/$89m but were topped by a 7/$101m offer from the Miami Heat. Knowing that they would not match that offer, Washington renounced his rights1 to sign free agents Tracy Murray and Lorenzo Williams and make a trade for Harvey Grant and Rod Strickland. Wait a second, if this is true, then why wasn’t this article written two weeks ago? Because the NBA is always going to NBA.
It turns out that the Miami Heat did not have enough cap room to offer the deal that they did because of unconsidered performance bonuses of Tim Hardaway and a new contract for Alonzo Mourning, though that deal was not official yet (we’ll get to this). The NBA voided the Heat-Howard contract on July 31 and Howard was back on the free agency board. For some reason, the Bullets decided to then re-engage Howard and offered him an even larger contract at 7/$105m which he signed on August 5. Wait another second, how is that possible? More NBA-ing by the NBA.
Despite not allowing the Heat a chance to fix their issues to become cap compliant, the NBA went out of its way to completely manipulate the rules for the Bullets. Despite making the official move to renounce Howard’s rights, the NBA allowed Washington to undo that move (ridiculous) and void their recently signed free agent contracts if they forfeited their first round pick in 1997. Washington did so and the signing went official. Howard was the 1st $100m man in pro sports (kinda, not there yet). Wait a third second, what the hell just happened?
That’s what the Miami Heat wanted to know. They sued the NBA in Florida State Court claiming that their contract was valid and the NBA had no right to void it. The suit was later dropped when the NBA made it clear that if they won, the Heat would be fined, penalized draft picks, and team president Pat Riley would be suspended for the season.
Three things still don’t make any sense about this…
- Why did the Bullets go back to Howard? It really is baffling that the team decided to give up on Howard because he was too expensive only to pay $16m more AND forfeit a first round pick three weeks later. Not to mention they screwed over Murray and Williams by being allowed to void their contracts, though they were eventually allowed to sign with the Bullets anyway. WTF?
- Why did the NBA let the Bullets circumvent the cap? David Stern essentially gave the Bullets a do-over. Transactions were made and the NBA just said, “don’t worry about it.” This is unprecedented.2 WTF?
- You said some things back there that made it seem like you are hiding something. Something about Alonzo Mourning and “kinda”…
So, there is one little caveat to this whole thing. In Mid-July 1996 Alonzo Mourning actually agreed to the first $100m contract with the Miami Heat. The thing is, he didn’t sign it until later in August so the Heat could do their business. While the NBA successfully used this against the Heat in the Howard mess, a contract isn’t really official until it is signed. That’s why Howard is the first $100m guy and not Mourning. The NBA is so strange.
- The short version of why “rights” are important is that it is the mechanism to exceed the salary cap in order to resign your own players ↩︎
- In the current Kawhi Leonard saga, both the Clippers and the Raptors were warned that they can proceed at their own risk and the any discipline would not consider them. This is basically the opposite of the Howard situation ↩︎
Photo: Roberto Schmidt / AFP via Getty Images
Source: Michael Kain, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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