Brandon Roy, "The Face of the Franchise" was asked at the end of the season what he was going to do this summer. This is a man in his early 20's, the prime of life, a multi-millionaire with a baby son.  After winning the R.O.Y. his first year and making the all-star team his second he's earned the right to go anywhere in the world he chooses.

In that situation where would you go?

Hawaii (to visit TIH)? Tahiti? Rent your own private Caribbean island? Hiking in the mountains? African safari? The Great Wall of China on route to watching the Olympics? Taj Mahal? Machu Picchu? Your own villa in Costa Rica? Just lay around your home and enjoy your family?

The answer given by The Face was... Starkville, Mississippi to visit Travis.

WHA????

I've been to a lot of places in the world and in this country but I've not been to Starkville. Going there IN THE SUMMER is only slightly higher on my current list than say Mynamar, Shanghai Province, Bahgdad just outside the Green Zone, Guantanamo or Tacoma.

KP's a brave man and a risk taker but are you telling me he's going to trade away the only reason our Roy is spending his prized time taking the last train to Starkville?

What do you think?

Many of you are far better than me at analyzing historical facts and statistics and hopefully somebody will either back up or refute what I’m laying out here.

My impression is we fans tend to overvalue expiring contracts. Teams do tend to look to shed deadweight long term contracts for shorter expiring contracts and the motivations seem to fall under to three main reasons:

1)      Save on luxury tax expenses

2)      Provide flexibility so you can keep your core group of young talent

3)      Overpay for a slightly better than average veteran

I don’t see many top-flight all star players jumping teams for the money.  Rashard Lewis is one of the few that spring to mind and it’s debatable how “top-flight” he is. When players do sign elsewhere I think what you see is a low ROI. As time goes on I think you’ll see GM’s cotton on to this shying away from spending their money this way.

Memphis blew up their team and took on expiring contracts (if memory serves) but it remains to be seen how they use it.

In short, I think the value of the expiring contract is declining and will continue to decline rapidly as teams wise up and learn to avoid those mistakes in the first place – or at least the good organizations will avoid them. The poorly run organizations will continue to make contract mistakes but then there will be fewer buyers among the well run orgs for those contract mistakes.

In some ways the situation reminds me of playing Monopoly with my younger brother and trying to convince him to swap red properties for green. The greens are worth more on the surface but you tend to land on the reds more often. Eventually he wised up.

Ultimately I think teams will strive for expiring contracts overwhelmingly so they can hold on to their developing young core more than any other reason. The downside to this is you need to have a developing young core worth holding on to.

As an example, Portland now holds Raef’s contract as the all important expiring contract. Many trades proposed on this site include an expiring contract as the big attraction as to why the other team would be willing to do the trade. This next year we’ll be inundated with trade ideas with Raef’s contract being the thing that makes it irresistible. My take is they’ll see just letting his contract play out as being the best value and the bulk of the cap space created next summer being used internally.

 Am I missing something? What is the trend on the value of expiring contracts?