The Jalen Duren contract standoff is down to its final hours. The Detroit Pistons have a five-year, $200 million fully guaranteed offer sitting in front of their 22-year-old center, and Duren has declined it so far, skipping media day Monday and the start of training camp, ESPN’s Shams Charania reported. Sign it and he is paid roughly $40 million per season.
There are not many centers in the NBA who are getting more than $35 million per season. Even at just 22 years old, Detroit would be taking a big gamble by going there. Duren has the potential to be an elite center, but there is a real chance the Pistons end up overpaying him in the long run.
The Deadline Detroit Is Staring At
Duren has until Thursday, Oct. 1, to accept a one-year, $9.6 million qualifying offer, a route that would make him an unrestricted free agent next summer. As a restricted free agent he is eligible for as much as five years and $287 million, which is why the $200 million number has not closed the gap. If the deadline passes without an agreement, Duren stays a restricted free agent, the two sides can keep talking, and he can sign an offer sheet elsewhere up to March 1 with Detroit holding matching rights, as CBS Sports laid out.
A $40 Million Jalen Duren Contract Puts Him in Rare Air
If Duren signs at that number, he joins a very short list of centers. PistonPowered counts Nikola Jokic, Joel Embiid, Karl-Anthony Towns, Domantas Sabonis, Rudy Gobert and Alperen Sengun as the centers already above $35 million per season. The list runs a little longer than that once Anthony Davis is included, whose Dallas extension carries a $58.5 million average, per Front Office Sports. Either way, the company is thin.
Jokic has won three NBA MVPs and a Finals MVP, Embiid has one MVP, Karl-Anthony Towns just won an NBA championship with the New York Knicks, Sabonis has been an NBA All-Star three times, and Gobert has won four Defensive Player of the Year awards. Sengun is arguably the best player on the Houston Rockets and he still has a lot of room to grow.
Duren will need to become one of the top seven to eight centers in the league if he is going to be getting paid $40 million per season. He is closer than that framing suggests on the regular-season side: in 70 games last season he averaged 19.5 points, 10.5 rebounds, 2.0 assists, 0.8 blocks and 0.8 steals, made his first All-Star team and landed on the All-NBA third team.
Paying Him Could Be Risky
Aaron Kellerstrass of PistonPowered thinks it could be very risky for Detroit to pay him big money. He wrote:
“Outside of Sengun, all of these players are guys who have proven themselves and done big things in the NBA, and they mostly did them before they got those big contracts they currently enjoy.
Even though Duren made All-NBA (a fluke of injuries), does anyone consider him one of the top 7-8 centers in the league? Is he an MVP candidate? A DPOY candidate? A guy who can be the best player on a playoff team? Maybe someday, but right now the answer to all of those is no.”
Duren is going to have to be the second option behind Cade Cunningham moving forward, and he cannot afford another postseason like the last one. His production fell to 10.2 points and 8.5 rebounds across 14 playoff games, roughly half his regular-season scoring. That is the version of Duren a $40 million salary cannot survive.
