Throughout the course of the history of free agency in the NBA, there have been multiple franchise-altering deals that have taken place (like Shaquille O’Neal going to Los Angeles and LeBron James going to Miami). But for every one of those, you can probably find a half-dozen (or more) contracts that altered the course of an NBA team in the exact opposite direction — crippling the team’s salary cap and overall financial flexibility, setting them back for a multitude of years.
Some of them look bad with the benefit of hindsight, and some of them came as NBA teams overpaid for certain positions or players, but many of them were seen as horrific deals from the moment they were signed. Here is our list of the worst contracts in recent NBA history.
