Ranking the NBA's Biggest Bag Fumbles of the Past 10 Years

Every offseason, dozens of NBA players cash in by signing contracts for life-changing amounts of money.

Not every player is so fortunate, though.

When the free-agent game of musical chairs ends and cap space dries up around the league, plenty of players are forced to sign below-market deals and try their luck again next year. Derrick Jones Jr. is one such example, having turned a one-year, minimum-salary contract with the Dallas Mavericks last offseason into a three-year, $30 million deal with the Los Angeles Clippers this summer.

Here, we're focused on the opposite. We're reminiscing about the players who blew the biggest bags in recent years.

Take new Philadelphia 76ers forward Caleb Martin, for instance. The Miami Heat offered him a five-year, $65 million extension ahead of free agency, according to Ira Winderman of the South Florida Sun Sentinel. He wound up signing a four-year, $40 million deal with the Sixers that includes only $35 million in guaranteed money, per Michael Scotto of HoopsHype.

Players who lost out on major paydays because of injuries won't be appearing here. Victor Oladipo, DeMarcus Cousins and Isaiah Thomas all made far less money than they would have prior to their respective career-altering injuries, but that isn't their fault.

The players featured here all had a choice at some point. They all just chose poorly from a financial standpoint.

We've ranked them here based on how much they reportedly gave up, what they ended up signing for and how much each of them earned from that point forward.

In 2016, the Brooklyn Nets signed restricted free agent Donatas Motiejūnas to a four-year, $37 million offer sheet, according to ESPN's Calvin Watkins. The Houston Rockets decided to match, which is where the drama typically ends for restricted free agents.

Motiejūnas proved to be the exception to that rule.

According to Watkins, the Rockets only had to match the "principal terms" of the offer sheet, which was $31 million. As a result, Motiejūnas then refused to show up for his physical, leaving the Rockets to wait him out or pull the offer sheet and let him become a restricted free agent again.

The Rockets initially did the latter, but they then signed Motiejūnas to a four-year, $35 million deal. However, an issue arose in his physical, and the Rockets wound up renouncing their rights to him entirely. That made him an unrestricted free agent who was free to sign with any team.

Motiejūnas wound up signing a one-year, $1.5 million minimum-salary contract with the New Orleans Pelicans. He played only 37 NBA games in total from that point forward.

That's a casual $35-plus million bag fumble.

After the NBA's salary cap exploded in 2016, the Minnesota Timberwolves offered Shabazz Muhammad a four-year extension "believed to be worth at least $40 million," according to Jerry Zgoda of the Star Tribune.

The following summer, he wound up re-signing with the Timberwolves on a two-year, $3.4 million minimum-salary contract.

According to ESPN's Adrian Wojnarowski, "Muhammad re-signed with the Timberwolves last offseason with hopes of a substantial bench role, only to find [then-head coach Tom] Thibodeau reverting to the longstanding practices of shorter bench rotations and heavy starter minutes that became a staple of his five years as Chicago Bulls coach." He averaged only 9.7 minutes per game with Minnesota in 2017-18 after playing 20.5 minutes per game over the previous three seasons.

Muhammad asked for the Timberwolves to either send him elsewhere at the 2018 trade deadline or release him, according to Wojnarowski. They eventually chose the latter, leading him to sign a rest-of-season contract with the Milwaukee Bucks. Muhammad played in 11 games for the Bucks that season and has yet to appear in an NBA game since then.

Muhammad met with the Los Angeles Lakers when he was a free agent and reportedly turned down bigger offers from other teams to re-sign with the Timberwolves, per Zgoda. Considering how caustically their partnership ended later that season, it might have been better for both parties to part ways in free agency.

Montrezl Harrell hit free agency at the perfect time in 2020. He was fresh off winning the NBA's Sixth Man of the Year award after averaging a career-high 18.6 points and 7.1 rebounds per game while shooting 58.0 percent overall with the Los Angeles Clippers.

Harrell just finished a two-year, $12 million contract with the Clippers and appeared poised for a significant raise. He wound up signing a two-year, $19.0 million deal with the Los Angeles Lakers and has gotten only minimum contracts ever since.

Brad Turner of the Los Angeles Times reported that Harrell turned down a bigger offer from the Charlotte Hornets when he signed with the Lakers. According to ESPN's Kendrick Perkins, the Hornets offered him a four-year, $80 million deal.

Considering that Harrell has earned roughly $25 million over that same span, this would be a legendary bag fumble if Perkins is right. He's earned nearly $39.5 million across his nine-year career.

If Harrell won a championship with the Lakers, perhaps the discount would have been worth it. He was joining the reigning champions, after all. The only problem is, they lost in the first round of the playoffs in 2020-21 and missed the playoffs entirely the following season.

In February 2021, the Los Angeles Lakers approached Dennis Schröder's agent to discuss a contract extension, according to ESPN's Dave McMenamin. They reportedly offered him a four-year, $84 million deal, per ESPN's Brian Windhorst (via Dan Feldman of NBC Sports), but McMenamin reported that "Schröder's side said they would rather wait until the offseason to discuss a deal when he reached free agency."

Although Schröder averaged 15.4 points, 5.8 assists and 3.5 rebounds per game for the Lakers during the 2020-21 season, the free-agent market wasn't kind to him the following summer. He wound up settling for a one-year, $5.9 million contract with the Boston Celtics via the taxpayer mid-level exception.

Schröder initially had a good sense of humor about his bag fumble. However, he later began pushing back on the narrative that he turned down an extension offer from the Lakers.

"I mean, end of the day, there never was a contract," Schröder told McMenamin. "There never was a contract, never rejected anything ... That's not true."

Had the Lakers made him an official offer, Schröder told Jake Fischer of Yahoo Sports that he would have signed it. "I would never just leave money on the table," he added. "My mom didn't raise me that way."

In 2022, Schröder took a one-year, $2.7 million contract to rejoin the Lakers. And last summer, he finally did cash in by signing a two-year, $25.4 million contract with the Toronto Raptors.

Still, the roughly $34 million he'll earn over that four-season stretch pales in comparison to the $84 million deal that the Lakers were reportedly willing to offer him in 2021.

When Nerlens Noel entered restricted free agency in 2017, the Dallas Mavericks offered him a four-year, $70 million deal, according to ESPN's Tim MacMahon. Noel declined and requested a max contract, at which point the Mavericks "immediately pulled the offer off the table and never made another one," per MacMahon.

Noel wound up signing his $4.2 million qualifying offer with the Mavericks instead. The following summer, he left Dallas to sign a two-year, $3.8 million minimum-salary contract with the Oklahoma City Thunder.

From there, Noel signed a one-year, $5 million deal with the New York Knicks in 2020 and then re-upped on a three-year, $28.8 million contract the following summer. However, he wound up getting bought out of that contract in February 2023 and has appeared in only three NBA games since then.

In total, he came nowhere close to recouping what the Mavericks originally offered to pay him in 2017.

"They think he should of taken the [$17 million]," a source close to the Mavericks told SB Nation's Tim Cato at the time. "That's a good number for him. But if he's willing to risk it and bet on himself, you can't knock someone looking for their first big bag of money."

Noel wound up suing his former agent, Rich Paul of Klutch Sports, after Klutch accused Noel of not paying his commission on one of his contracts, according to Windhorst. A judge dismissed his lawsuit in September 2022, and the two sides settled a few months later.

Everyone featured here so far turned down tens of millions of dollars. James Harden is the only one who's turned down hundreds of millions.

In 2021, the Brooklyn Nets offered Harden a three-year, $161 million contract extension, according to Brian Lewis of the New York Post. Harden declined to sign it, perhaps in part because he would be eligible for a four-year, $227 million extension the ensuing offseason.

Five months later, the Nets traded him to the Philadelphia 76ers, where he reunited with former Houston Rockets team president Daryl Morey.

That reunion proved fruitful at first. Morey convinced Harden to sign a two-year, $68.6 million below-max contract, which gave the Sixers enough space under the first apron to use both the non-taxpayer MLE to sign P.J. Tucker and the bi-annual exception to sign Danuel House Jr. Harden got a second-year player option on the deal, which allowed him to opt out and try to cash in the following summer if he wanted.

Things went south between Harden and the Sixers ahead of his opt-in decision in 2023. Morey and the Sixers reportedly ghosted Harden in the days leading up to the start of free agency, which eventually led him to pick up his option and request a trade.

That was not exactly the $227 million payday that was promised.

The Sixers eventually traded Harden to the Los Angeles Clippers last fall, but the NBA's new collective bargaining agreement effectively defanged the unmatched spending power of team governor Steve Ballmer. With the second apron looming large, the Clippers refused to give Harden or Kawhi Leonard full max contracts. Instead, Harden agreed to a two-year, $70 million deal with a second-year player option.

In total, Harden will make just over $100 million across the three seasons that his extension with the Nets would have spanned. He has nearly $340 million in career earnings to date, so he'll likely be fine either way, but misreading the market for mid-30s stars in the new CBA landscape cost Harden upward of $60 million over the past few years.

Unless otherwise noted, all stats via NBA.com, PBPStats, Cleaning the Glass or Basketball Reference. All salary information via Spotrac and salary-cap information via RealGM.