Amar’e Stoudemire has one year remaining on his contract that is scheduled to pay him more than $23 million for next season.
He also has an early termination option which he could exercise, one that would allow him to become an unrestricted free agent and sign a new long-term deal to play somewhere else.
While Stoudemire was productive at times last season, he’s nowhere near the player he once was — a dominant All-Star talent who earned that monster contract in the first place.
For that reason (and others), Stoudemire is reportedly going to stick it out in New York next season.
From Chris Haynes of CSNNW.com:
As most suspected, New York Knicks power forward Amar’e Stoudemire has declined to exercise his early termination option and will return to the Knicks for the 2014-15 season to finish out the final year of his five-year, $100 million deal, a league source informed CSNNW.com.
“He is opting in,” said the source that spoke on condition of anonymity because an official announcement has yet to be made. If he had chose to exercise his ETO, he would have become an unrestricted free agent this summer.
This comes as zero surprise.
Stoudemire’s contract would theoretically make a nice trade piece for the Knicks, considering it’s expiring and would come completely off the cap the following season. But it’s uninsurable due to his history of knee injuries, and that fact alone means that no other team will touch it.
A cursory glance at New York’s cap situation, with Stoudemire’s contract in place, makes it easy to see why Phil Jackson would be trying to talk Carmelo Anthony into opting in for next season, as well.
Having Anthony and Stoudemire both come off the books in time for 2015 would give the Knicks as close to a clean slate as we see in this league, and the team would have an incredible amount of flexibility to rebuild the roster as it sees fit. New York could even consider a future without Anthony — one of the game’s elite scorers to be sure, but one who is 30 years old and will require a max contract of five years to stay in town.
Stoudemire choosing to remain with the Knicks next season was expected, however, and it means that New York will need to wait until the following year to truly make a splash in setting up the franchise for a successful future.
