Every year, July 1 is known as “Bobby Bonilla Day,” the day each season the New York Mets owe a deferred payment to their former player. The Milwaukee Bucks honored his legacy by taking on the largest amount of dead money in NBA history.
The Milwaukee Bucks waived guard Damian Lillard, who had two years and $113M left on his contract. While Lillard is unlikely to play for most if not all of next season as he recovers from an Achilles tear, the manner in which the Bucks cleared his salary off the books means Lillard will be on their salary cap for the next five seasons.
In order to sign center Myles Turner, the Bucks used the NBA’s stretch provision, which allows teams to extend a salary over multiple seasons. For Lillard’s contract, that will be five seasons, meaning that the Bucks will be charged $23.6M per year through the 2029-30 season. For context, that’s only $400K more than what Fred VanVleet is getting to start at point guard for the Houston Rockets.
That kind of extended financial commitment was what the Mets ended up with when they parted ways with Bonilla before the 2000 season, deferring his $5.9M salary that year. Instead of his regular paycheck, Bonilla got it spread out over 25 years, beginning in 2010, at an interest rate of 10%. The Mets will still be cutting Bonilla a check until 2035.
The Mets agreed to the deferral in part because their owners wanted to invest more money with Bernie Madoff, who was actually running a Ponzi scheme that got him sentenced to 150 years in prison.
The only previous parallel in the NBA came when the Detroit Pistons decided to release forward Josh Smith outright early in his second year of a four-year, $54M contract. Like the Bucks with Lillard, the Pistons paid Smith’s full salary. They also used the stretch provision, which spread the remaining money over the next six seasons, which is how Smith remained on the Pistons cap until three years after his retirement. The Pistons had only a single winning season in that time.
For their part, the Bucks will have Lillard’s salary on their payroll until Lillard is 39. They have to hope they can find some real bargains, because their salary cap has a $23.6M hole in it for five more seasons. As for Lillard, he can commiserate with Bonilla about how sweet it is to be paid for not playing.
