Michael Porter Jr. agrees to five-year max extension with Nuggets

The Nuggets and ahead Michael Porter Jr. have reached an settlement on a five-year contract extension definitely worth the most wage, agent Mark Bartelstein tells ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski (Twitter link).

The deal presently initiatives to be value $172.5M, primarily based on the NBA’s projection of a $119M wage cap for the 2022-23 season. Nevertheless, the contract will embrace Rose Rule language, permitting Porter to probably earn 30% of the cap within the first 12 months of the extension (quite than 25% of the cap) if he makes an All-NBA workforce in 2021-22. In that state of affairs, the five-year deal can be value a projected $207M.

The Nuggets’ funding indicators how far the previous 14th total choose has come since lacking his complete rookie season in 2018-19 as a consequence of a again harm. After enjoying a modest position in ’19-20, Porter grew to become a key piece for Denver final season, averaging 19.0 PPG and seven.3 RPG with a powerful .542/.445/.791 taking pictures line in 61 video games (31.3 MPG).

Porter nonetheless has loads of room to enhance on the defensive facet of the ball, however the 23-year-old has displayed the potential to turn out to be one of many NBA’s perfect scorers, so there was no probability the Nuggets would let him get away.

With extensions for Porter and Aaron Gordon accomplished this offseason, the Nuggets’ roster is getting very costly. The newly-extended forwards gained’t even be Denver’s highest-paid gamers — that honor belongs to veteran stars Nikola Jokic and Jamal Murray, who’re incomes a mixed $60M+ in 2021-22.

As Bobby Marks of ESPN tweets, the Nuggets challenge to hold about $156M in workforce wage for the ’22-23 marketing campaign and are on monitor to be a taxpayer for the primary time in over a decade. The workforce stays beneath the tax line for the ’21-22 season.

Porter’s deal is the fourth maximum-salary rookie scale extension to be finalized this offseason, with the Nuggets ahead becoming a member of Luka Doncic, Trae Young, and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. As our tracker exhibits, Robert Williams is the one participant who has obtained a rookie scale extension beneath the max to this point in 2021.