Joe Johnson: Worth Bird Rights?

By: Stephen Patterson


With a little under six hours remaining until teams can officially begin negotiating with free agents, there have been reports that the Atlanta Hawks plan to offer Johnson the maximum deal allowed. If this is indeed the case, the offer would be in the range of $120 million/6 years and would give Johnson "Bird Rights", meaning he would have to agree to any trade the Hawks attempted to make involving him. The most another team could offer Johnson is a $97 million/5 year contract.

If the Hawks make this offer to Joe Johnson when they visit with him in Los Angeles, I think he will sign it immediately. In fact, I don't think Johnson will be able to sign his name fast enough. This potential contract could make Johnson the most overpaid player in the league over the next few seasons. While he was a key contributor for the Hawks in the regular season, Johnson had a horrid postseason and didn't do himself any favors with fans in Atlanta with some comments he made during the Orlando series. For a player like Johnson, $14-15 million is about the most he should make without him being considered overpaid for what he brings to the table.


While Johnson has posted career averages of almost 18 ppg 4 rpg 5 apg, he has never led a team anywhere near a championship. In fact, he has only been to the postseason in five of his nine seasons, and never progressed past the second round of the playoffs. Last season, it took Johnson and the Hawks seven games to get past a depleted Milwaukee team, missing star Andrew Bogut, in the opening round. The second round was far worse for the Hawks, including an embarassing 43 point beat down in the opening game of the series. The Hawks ended being swept by the Magic and losing the four games by a combined 101 points, which is an average of around 25 points per game. To make things even worse for Atlanta, Johnson only shot 39% from the field and 22% from three point range during the playoffs, compared to 46% and 37% during the regular season.


Not only is it a questionable decision for the Hawks to offer Johnson this kind of contract, but how will it look to his teammates that he will make nearly $20 million per season and he may not even be the best player on the team? In fact, Josh Smith, arguably the Hawks best player, only made roughly $10.4 million last season, while Johnson was already taking in $14.9 million. After such a horrendous playoff performance, how can the Hawks possibly explain giving Johnson this much money? Until I heard of this potential offer, I thought it was almost certain Johnson would be in another uniform next season. Now, it seems far less likely he will walk away from this amount of money. Also by receiving "Bird Rights", Johnson would have complete control over where he plays the next six seasons, something currently only Kobe Bryant has in his contract. In my opinion, if Johnson recieves this deal, the Atlanta Hawks will spend the next six seasons, and potentially longer, regretting their decision.