They’ve won the title, dumped a lot of beer and champagne onto each other and onto many dozens of other bystanders, smoked some cigars, held the parade, worn some interesting T-shirts, and now…

Off to Las Vegas! And yes I imagine we’ll see several Warriors players ringside for this weekend’s Ward-Kovalev bout.

On the non-Vegas side of things, it’s probably time to sketch out how the Warriors’ off-season is setting up just one more time…

My general theme, which I’ve mentioned more than a few times over the last few months as people noted that Kevin Durant, Stephen Curry, Andre Iguodala and Shaun Livingston, among others, are due to become free agents in July, and that seems like a lot…

–The Warriors’ payroll is obviously going to skyrocket, but that’s not news to the Warriors front office. You don’t gather this much talent and then get shocked when it comes time to pay the bills.

–This group was foresighted enough to start planning for Durant two years ago and nimble enough to land him on July 4….

–You think they’re not prepared for this mega-re-signing period?

–If you’re measuring where the Warriors’ 2017-2018 payroll might land, keep an eye on the $127M mark, which is the estimated tax apron; teams that go over that number are “hard-capped,” which means they lose their exceptions, and the Warriors are going to be very leery about doing that into the future.



‘Gold Standard’ chronicles the Warriors run to the 2017 NBA Championship. Order the book here.



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–The Warriors could feasibly exceed the $127M apron — and pay more luxury tax — if they have to, but if they go over the apron this July, the Warriors would have a strong desire not to repeat that next July.

–The Warriors’ payroll was about $102M this past season, FYI.

Bob Myers & Co. are prepared. They’ve been prepared for this ever since Curry, Iguodala, Draymond Green and Klay Thompson met with Durant in The Hamptons last year, because there was no way they were all going through all of that just for a one-year fling.

That does not mean everything is set in stone. That does not mean everything will go exactly as Myers, Joe Lacob and everybody else hoped and planned.

But they have a financial framework for this, they just fulfilled every expectation for this season on the basketball court, Durant, Curry and everybody else are obviously ready to come back for several more title attempts, and it’s pretty easy to see how this will likely work.

Let’s go step by step…

1. Durant will opt-out of his current deal, and become a free agent again.

This was always the plan. He only signed the one-plus-one (one year at the max plus a player-option) as insurance against a possible major injury this season, so he’d have that extra year just in case he wanted it.

He doesn’t need it. He’ll opt-out, as a prelude to…

2. Durant will agree to another one-plus-one deal with the Warriors, similar to the deal he signed last July, except he likely will take just a 20% raise to $31.8M, which the Warriors can give him without fitting him into cap space.

If Durant insists on making absolute max (about $35.5M to start), which he is wholly worth, the Warriors would have to fit him into cap-space again because they do not have his Full Bird Rights, and to do that they would have to renounce both Iguodala and Livingston, and lose their Bird Rights to both, and that would probably mean losing both.

But Durant has given every indication that he will take the 20% raise in order to give the Warriors the flexibility to pay Iguodala and Livingston whatever salary necessary above and beyond the cap number.

By doing this new 1 + 1, Durant would be eligible to receive a “super-max” deal of about 4 years, $160M (** I ORIGINALLY WROTE 5 years, $205M BUT BECAUSE DURANT WOULD BE AN “EARLY-BIRD” HE COULD ONLY GET AT MOST FOUR YEARS h/t @nateduncanNBA **) in July 2018 when the Warriors would have his Early Bird Rights.

Which, again, is what is extremely likely to happen.

3. Curry will agree to a “super-max” extension, five years worth about $205M, but it will not be announced or signed until after all the other deals are done.

As I’ve noted many times before, there’s really no strategic reason for Curry to take a dollar less than the super-max, especially because he has been so vastly underpaid almost from the moment he signed that four-year, $44M deal in 2013.

Curry has earned every dollar possible — because he’s a Bird Rights player, the only thing taking less would affect is Lacob and Guber’s profit level, and Curry has already contributed more than enough to that.

And Lacob told me Monday that the Warriors would do “whatever it takes” to re-sign Curry.

There’s your super-max deal.

So, presuming Curry and Durant agree to extensions at those starting numbers, the Warriors would have about $105M committed to seven players + Jason Thompson’s stretched salary next season.

Curry

Durant

Draymond

Klay

Kevon Looney

Damian Jones

McCaw

And they still have two more annual $945k charges after using the “stretch provision” to release Jason Thompson last season.

The Warriors would be about $22M short of the apron and would still have Iguodala and Livingston’s potential contracts and many other roster spots to fill, including somebody to start at center.

4. Iguodala will likely sign a multi-year extension with the Warriors worth somewhere between $8M to $12M per year.

Obviously, Iguodala remains an immensely valuable player for the Warriors, especially when their main rivals feature LeBron James — go to Game 5 of the Finals for a reminder — and it’s possible Iguodala could get a larger offer from another team.

But he loves playing for the Warriors, loves the Silicon Valley connection, loves winning titles (which help out his potential Hall of Fame case), understands that he is extending his career by playing with so many stars, and if the Warriors step up with the number of years, this seems like a relative slam-dunk.

Back in 2013, Iguodala signed for four years, $48M — in a time of a much smaller cap number, but also when he was 28, not 32, and if you adjust for all the factors, getting just a little less of an annual salary in exchange for multi-year stability seems about where this is going to land for Iguodala.

Iguodala has already indicated that his negotiation is almost already done and that he will re-sign with the Warriors, though I’m sure there are still deal points to be finalized.

Months ago a source indicated to me that the only real issue to be worked out was the number of guaranteed years.

5. Livingston will be a much more open-ended situation and it’s a coin-flip whether he stays with the Warriors.

Notably, Livingston has given every indication that he’d prefer to stay with the Warriors, and the Warriors clearly would love to bring him back, but both sides understand that there are many factors in play here.

Livingston, 31, has never made huge money, has been through catastrophic injury, plays a valuable position, and if he gets a large multi-year offer, it’s probable that the Warriors won’t match it.

Then it’ll be Livingston’s call, and he deserves the right to make as much money as possible.

But there is some squeeze for Livingston here, coupled with Iguodala’s situation; let’s say Iguodala lands at $10M next season — that brings the Warriors within only $12M of the apron, with a lot of other roster spots to fill.

If I had to guess, I’d say the Warriors would hope Livingston comes in at around $6-7M per, and would not require longer than a two-year deal.

(Two years will be a target number for the Warriors on several contractual fronts, because that’s when Klay’s deal is up.

(The Warriors will need to be bare bones except for the Big Four — and possibly Iguodala — by then or else they’ll be headed into monster tax payments after a potential huge Thompson extension. This is the same sort of way they cleared cap space for Durant last July and kept it open in case they need it this July by avoiding many long-term deals with non-essential players.)

One point about how the Warriors would value Livingston: He likely will hit the market as a point guard, and could get an offer from a team looking for him to start, but Livingston isn’t even the Warriors’ back-up point guard any more.

About half-way through the season, Kerr switched that up and turned the “second unit” ball-handling over to Iguodala, and moved Livingston over to the back-up shooting guard spot, to play alongside Curry when Thompson rested.

The Warriors now have Patrick McCaw possibly to do some of that.

This is not a knock on Livingston, it’s just as note as the Warriors look at their salary structure going into July.



‘Gold Standard’ chronicles the Warriors run to the 2017 NBA Championship. Order the book here.

6. After Durant, Curry, Iguodala and Livingston, I don’t think the Warriors will be interested in offering anything much over the minimum to any other free agents— and anything over the minimum would strictly be with their exceptions (tax-payer mid-level being the biggest, at about $5M per to start).

As multiple NBA sources have told me, it’s all about the Warriors “Big Four and Iguodala” — this whole thing is built on Curry, Durant, Klay, Draymond and Iguodala, and nobody else is going to be set up for any significant dollars.

They can always fill in around the top five guys. That’s the general sense and it’s not wrong.

That would apply to the negotiations for Zaza Pachulia, David West, JaVale McGee, Ian Clark and James Michael McAdoo and even Matt Barnes if the Warriors are so inclined.

I would expect the Warriors to treat the center position almost exactly as they did last summer — offer the minimum or parts or all of the exceptions to several veterans, see what they can get, and then let Steve Kerr and his staff figure it out.

The Warriors are probably planning for Damian Jones to compete for and earn one of the center-rotation spots and I would say that Looney is behind Jones, maybe by a lot.

Yes, this minimum situation includes Ian Clark, who is extremely popular in the locker room and gave the Warriors some very good minutes this season, but he’s not getting $6M per, $8M per or I saw someone even sketched out $9M per for him somewhere.

Clark is not getting anything like that. Well, not from the Warriors, at least. If Clark gets an offer from somebody else that’s anything like $6-7M a year, then the Warriors will congratulate him, make sure he gets his 2017 championship ring, and wish him good luck.

Again, the Warriors have McCaw to fill some of those minutes — as he did in Game 5, quite well — and the extra guard off the bench is a replaceable slot for the Warriors, worth only the minimum.

There will always be veterans who will want to be a part of this. Last summer, it was Pachulia, West and McGee, and then Barnes joined up mid-way through.

There will be others, ready to take the minimum salary to get a ring, because they know it can happen. It just did.

And the Warriors’ payroll isn’t going to go much above $127M this July — there are certainly ways their payroll might explode again in 2019 (when Thompson’s deal is up) or 2020 (when Draymond’s deal is up)…

But also, those two players will no longer be in their 20s when that happens, and that’s a long ways from now, anyway.

For now, the Warriors aren’t going to be anywhere near $140M-150M this July or probably even next July, because they’ve got their framework, it’s built around five guys, and everybody else is going to have to fill in around that… or head elsewhere and the Warriors will find other players to fill in, anyway.



‘Gold Standard’ chronicles the Warriors run to the 2017 NBA Championship. Order the book here.