What does Donovan Mitchell’s big payday mean for Cleveland’s future?

It’s not the most famous whiteboard in the NBA this week, but the dry-erase-marker scribblings that Bobby Marks posted on Tuesday morning were enough to make your eyes bulge out of their sockets all the same:

Unwritten: the dollar signs before the numbers, and the word “million” after them.

That’s what Donovan Mitchell will be making in each of the four seasons of the new $273 million extension he agreed to with the Cleveland Cavaliers on Tuesday: $60.9 million for the 2027-28 season, $65.8 million in 2028-29, $70.6 million in ’29-30, and $75.5 million in ’30-31. Mitchell will also get a full 15% trade kicker in the new deal, and will hold a player option for that final season, his agent told ESPN’s Shams Charania — preserving the opportunity to get one more big bite at the free-agency apple when he’ll be 34 years old.

It’s a gigantic pact for a phenomenal player. Since joining the Cavs in 2022, the 29-year-old Mitchell has earned four straight All-Star selections and has made three of the last four All-NBA teams (and likely would’ve made the fourth had injuries not limited him to 55 games in 2023-24). He’s one of just eight players in the NBA to average at least 25 points and five assists per game with a true shooting percentage (which factors in 2-point, 3-point and free-throw accuracy) north of 60% in that span, joining MVP winners Nikola Jokić, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Giannis Antetokounmpo and Stephen Curry, as well as all-world superstars Luka Dončić, Damian Lillard and Kyrie Irving.

Mitchell has become one of the NBA’s premier offensive orchestrators in the half-court — a high-level pick-and-roll creator and isolation weapon whose teams perpetually score at an elite rate when he’s on the floor. In his three full healthy seasons in Cleveland, the Cavs have finished seventh, first and eighth in offensive efficiency. Since his arrival, they’ve consistently had the point differential of a high-50s-win-team (or better) in his minutes.

Thanks partly to his high-volume/high-accuracy 3-point shooting, his low turnover rate despite high usage, his strong-for-his-position steal rate and increased free-throw attempt rate, Mitchell tends to grade out well in many advanced metrics. This past season, a slew of them — estimated plus-minus, The BBall Index’s LEBRON, value over replacement player, player efficiency rating, box plus-minus and DARKO daily plus-minus, among others — pegged Mitchell as a top-10 player in the league.

Mitchell has finished in the top seven in Most Valuable Player voting three times in the last four years, and has led Cleveland to four straight playoff appearances — including the first Eastern Conference finals berth of any Cavaliers team that didn’t employ LeBron James since 1992. While the Cavs were swept out of the final four by the eventual NBA champion New York Knicks, the season itself represented a step forward for both the franchise and its firmly established face, who had previously not advanced past the second round in eight postseason appearances.

“Donovan is our guy,” Cavaliers president of basketball operations Koby Altman told reporters during his end-of-season press conference. “The four years without him, no playoffs. Four years with him, playoffs. He’s elevated everything about this franchise and this organization. We’re fortunate to have him.”

Mitchell could have put himself in line for an even bigger payday had he held off until next summer. As a veteran with 10 years of NBA service time, he’d be eligible for an extension that pays a maximum of 35% of the salary cap. With the 2027-28 cap line currently projected at $174 million, Mitchell could have commanded a gobsmacking total — more than $353 million on a full-freight five-year max, topping out with a single-season salary above $80 million in 2031-32.

In that sense, then, Mitchell took a theoretical haircut here, in favor of the stability and security of a long-term deal in a spot where he wants to stay. It’s notable that the initial reporting emphasizes the seven-time All-Star committing to the new deal “to stamp his pledge to Cleveland.”

“Mitchell didn’t want to wait,” wrote Chris Fedor of Cleveland.com. “Cleveland is where he wanted to be — and it’s been that way since he left Utah.”

In that sense, you could draw a parallel between Mitchell doing what he did on Tuesday — taking the biggest offer available to him on the first day he was able to, even if it meant guaranteeing himself about $80 million less than what he could have earned by waiting a year — and what Jalen Brunson did in July of 2024.

That’s when Brunson, coming off his first All-Star and All-NBA nods and a disappointing second-round exit at the hands of the Indiana Pacers, accepted a four-year extension at a significantly lower total dollar figure than he could have gotten had he waited a year and entered unrestricted free agency. He did so in favor of both locking in the largest and longest deal he could at that time, and essentially cementing himself as a partner in the ongoing project of building the Knicks into a bona fide championship contender. (That partnership, as you’re probably aware, paid off handsomely last month.)

If you draw that parallel, though, the lines will look wobbly. Because while Brunson took the highest amount he could earn in an extension at that time — 140% of his previous salary — he did not get a “maximum annual salary” as defined by the collective bargaining agreement between the NBA’s teams and its players, which is pegged to a certain percentage of that season’s cap figure, depending on factors like the player’s seniority and various accolades that player might have accrued. Mitchell did, and will be one of very, very few players on the biggest max contract.

What that means is, in 2027-28, when Mitchell will start his new extension by making 35% of the Cavaliers’ salary cap, Brunson is projected to account for 23.4% of the Knicks’ — a gap of about 11.5%.

Here are some players in line to make around 11.5% of the cap in that season: Andrew Nembhard, Alex Caruso, Herb Jones, Ayo Dosunmu, Aaron Nesmith, Grayson Allen, Kristaps Porziņģis, Wendell Carter Jr. and Toumani Camara.

Here are some players slated to make less than that: Andrew Wiggins, Onyeka Okongwu, Tobias Harris, Mitchell Robinson, Nickeil Alexander-Walker, Julian Champagnie, Isaiah Stewart and Rui Hachimura.

That’s not to say that Mitchell’s deal precludes the Cavs from building an elite roster around him. It does make it harder, though: harder to fit potentially helpful pieces into the salary structure; harder to insulate a small and at-times defensively challenged guard with the kind of elite defenders with which the Knicks were able to flank Brunson; and, potentially, harder to find an exit ramp in the latter years of the contract.

For the moment, Mitchell’s new deal ranks as the fourth-largest in the NBA — behind only the supermax deals that Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown signed with the Boston Celtics, and that Nikola Jokić signed with the Denver Nuggets. One day before Mitchell reached his agreement with the Cavs, Celtics president of basketball operations Brad Stevens was holding a press conference to explain that he had just sent Brown, an NBA Finals MVP fresh off the best season of his career, to Philadelphia of all places, because of a need to preserve “optionality” and the difficulty of building a championship contender with 70% of Boston’s salary cap figure tied up in the tandem of Tatum and Brown.

On the same day, in his native Serbia, Jokić told reporters that he’d “probably” sign an extension in Denver “next year” — when he’ll be in line for a five-year deal worth nearly $360 million to carry him through his age-36 season.

“My wish is to stay and play for Denver the rest of my career,” Jokić told reporters, before adding, with a smile: “It’s on them if they want me.”

The question increasingly facing franchises blessed enough to employ incandescent talents isn’t whether they want to keep doing it. It’s whether they believe they can keep doing it at any cost — whether they continue to pony up for beloved cornerstones and decorated veterans who might be closer to top-15 than top-five, or whether the looming prospects of second-apron restrictions and hefty luxury-tax payments necessitate a more circumscribed notion of what constitutes a “max” player.

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