The 6 worst contracts in NBA free agency, including Trae Young’s massive deal and a wild Lakers overpay

There are no bad contracts in the NBA, at least not for players. Get your money.

There are bad contracts for teams, though, as the second apron acts as a de facto salary cap. The league is so flush with talent at this point that front offices can no longer afford to misallocate any of their financial resources. They must maximize the efficiency of every asset, which is one reason we saw the Boston Celtics trade Jaylen Brown’s max contract.

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Massive overpays. Wild sign-and-trades. Accounting errors. Missed opportunities. The 2026 NBA free-agency cycle has had it all. Executives are smarter than ever before, but they still make mistakes, and these are the six worst moves of the summer so far, all of which come at an even greater cost than the half a billion dollars these players will earn.

2025-26 (15 games): 17.9 PTS (46/34/83), 8 AST, 2 REB

Contract: 4 years, $212.8 million

The Washington Wizards just tied 30% of their salary cap over the next four years — a future that includes this year’s No. 1 overall pick, AJ Dybantsa — to the prime of four-time All-Star point guard Trae Young’s career. Young once led the Atlanta Hawks to the 2021 Eastern Conference finals, though he has not won a playoff series before or since.

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If the vision is to build a high-powered offense orchestrated by Young, I can see it. They have young talent — Alex Sarr, Kyshawn George, Tre Johnson and Bilal Coulibaly among them — to run with him. And for three straight seasons from 2020-23, a similarly young, rebuilding Hawks team constructed a top-10 outfit around Young’s high usage.

Over time, though, the 6-foot-2, 164-pound Young’s deficiencies revealed themselves in Atlanta. He is a weak link on defense, and his offense hasn’t been consistently efficient enough to warrant such high usage — or such a high salary. He has thus far been unwilling to move off the ball, which means you’re either a Trae Young team, or you’re not.

(Henry Russell/Yahoo Sports Illustration)

And 29 other franchises decided they’re not Trae Young teams, mostly because, while he raises a floor somewhere into the play-in tournament hunt, he…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/nba/article/the-6-worst-contracts-in-nba-free-agency-including-trae-youngs-massive-deal-and-a-wild-lakers-overpay-150701693.html

Author : Ben Rohrbach

Publish date : 2026-07-14 15:07:00

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