Father Stretch My Contract

I analyze the Bucks and (likely) Suns respective decisions to stretch Damian Lillard and Bradley Beal and if it's the start of a new trend in the future of team-building.

At the start of free agency, Shams Charania reported that Myles Turner would sign a four-year, $107 million contract with the Milwaukee Bucks. The simplest way to acquire him would be through a sign-and-trade. Otherwise, they needed cap space, meaning they needed to clear $30 million in salary.

The shocking news of Turner’s departure from Indiana came with the more surprising news that the Bucks were waiving and stretching Damian Lillard’s remaining two years, $113 million. It resulted in a $22.5 million dead cap hit on Milwaukee’s cap sheet over the next five seasons. This cleared $32 million in payroll for 2025-26, creating most of the cap space necessary for Turner.

Third Apron has repeatedly analyzed teams’ increased risky behavior in trading multiple future first-round picks and how second-round picks have been reduced to currency for some. Teams have also been on a spending spree in the past five years, handing out maximum contracts to fringe All-Star-level players.

However, these teams often find themselves with few assets and minimal flexibility to improve their roster or reduce their bad salaries. What happens when such a team falls below expectations, hits a wall, and has nowhere else to turn? We are seeing a couple of teams utilizing the “waive and stretch” provision, or stretch provision, to extend their window.

Typically, teams that need to significantly reduce payroll resort to the trade market. But that would require them to incentivize other teams with an asset. The stretch provision allows teams to waive a player and divide his remaining guaranteed money by twice the number of years remaining, plus one. This allows them to restructure current and future salary obligations instead of a trade.

When teams waive a player, most of the time they incur the dead cap hit as is, minus any portion the player agreed to give back in a buyout. That’s because while the stretch provision gives immediate savings, it could result in burdensome dead cap hits in subsequent years. This could cause issues in long-term salary cap planning.

This is why most of the contracts that are stretched are for minimal amounts. For example, the Blazers and Cavaliers have less than $500,000 in stretched money annually from one player. The Pacers just had three stretched players come off their books, who had amounts ranging from $555,000 to $702,000. The impact of these amounts is mostly insignificant.

It’s important to understand that teams cannot stretch as many players as they’d like. Teams are limited to having 15 percent of the salary cap worth of stretched money.

But we’ve never come closer to a team maximizing their stretching flexibility to this extent. Now the Suns might be joining in on the fun by implementing the league’s first maximum stretch with Bradley Beal.