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A Quick Note on Eric Gordon

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Free agency opens at midnight, with players free to "officially" sign deals on July 11th.

Eric Gordon is the Hornets' most prominent free agent, and New Orleans tendered him a qualifying offer on Thursday to ensure they keep his restricted free agent rights. We've broken down what that means a few times before, but here's one quick, final glance at the numbers the front office will be looking at:

- The longest contract the Hornets can offer Gordon is 5 years. However, each team is allowed only one five-year deal per CBA period. So the team would be wise to save that longer deal for Anthony Davis.

- The longest contract another team can offer Gordon is 4 years. So anyone that's predicting 5 year deals will probably be wrong.

- Since Gordon is a 5th year player now, his maximum deal will start at $12.9M (25% of projected BRI cap) with 7.5% raises for each of the next three years. In sum, that's $57.5M, or $14.4M on average per season for 4 years.

- The Hornets will have three days to match a contract that Gordon agrees to with another team.

- According to early reports, Phoenix is preparing to offer Gordon a 4 year/$48M deal, or nearly $10M lower than the max. Given his injury history, that's a reasonable approximation of market value probably.