I think people have (sort of) posted this and understand this, but just to reiterate, OKC just signed Perk to the exact same deal that the Cs could have offered him.
My understanding is that it wasn't an issue of the Cs having the capability of offering the years and dollar amount, but rather DA didn't WANT to offer this extension.
Now if Perk had hit the open market and gotten a huge offer from a team under the cap then that is another story, but the Cs could have offered Perk four years and $35 mil. They decided not to.
Well no, that's not true, actually. We could have offered that much in the summer, but we couldn't do this deal as as extension. The most the Celts could offer was $23.4 million. Since the Thunder had cap space, they could offer more.
Thanks much for the clarification but I have to ask why this is the case. I thought the CBA as currently constructed is meant to encourage free agents to remain with their current teams by allowing them to offer more years and more dollars than other capped teams.
Why would the Cs be able to offer more money to Perk after the contract expires rather than before?
There are rules to signing current players under contract to extensions, versus signing free agents. Under the current CBA, non-rookie deal guys can only be given a 10.5% raise over their existing salary on an extension. In the summer, though, using "Bird rights", the team would have been able to give their own free agent a larger deal.
OKC was bound by the same extension rules as we are (i.e., no more than a 10.5% pay raise). However, because they were under the cap, they were allowed to give Perk an immediate raise in salary (which we couldn't, since we were over the cap), and after that extend him.