By: Ross Sutton

After being selected by the Nets with the 29th overall pick in the 2021 draft, Day’Ron Sharpe’s game has developed quite nicely, signaling yet another diamond in the rough found by Sean Marks and the Nets front office. Sharpe’s recent play even has some Nets fans calling for him to play more minutes than Nic Claxton, who just landed a 4 year, $97M contract from the Nets last offseason. This makes for an interesting discussion, as Day’Ron is set to enter free agency for the first time in his career, but he likely won’t be able to choose his next team the way “free agency” may imply.

Assuming the Nets extend a qualifying offer to Sharpe and he declines that offer so that he can sign a more lucrative, multi-year deal this summer, Sharpe will be a restricted free agent, meaning that the Nets will have the opportunity to match any offer sheet that Sharpe signs with another team, and retain him. Therefore, the Nets front office will ultimately have the final say on whether they re-sign Day’Ron. The Nets will have by far the most cap space in the league this summer, so it appears that the most a team other than the Nets could offer Sharpe in the first year of his new deal is the full Non-Taxpayer Mid-Level Exception, which will be worth $14.1M next season. If that’s the case, then the Nets front office must decide whether Sharpe is worth that much, and the best way to make that determination is by looking at centers from around the league with comparable stats that have signed new contracts recently.

The five centers that I believe are the best comps for Day’Ron are Isaiah Stewart, Mitchell Robinson, Onyeka Okongwu, Naz Reid, and Daniel Gafford. These are the players that I think are most comparable to Day’Ron because their platform year (the season leading up to their free agency) stats are similar to Day’Ron’s (as of 3/4/25), and they also had similar roles as Day’Ron as high-end, backup centers. Mitchell Robinson is the one exception in this group when it comes to his role, as he was undoubtedly the Knicks starting center when he signed his contract, but I included him in this group of comparable players because Day’Ron’s per game stats are very similar to Robinson’s despite playing fewer minutes. So with all of that being said, here is how these players stack up against each other statistically:

As you can see, Sharpe has very comparable stats to all of these players, and is arguably the best of the bunch on a per 36-minute basis. Therefore, I think it’s fair to say that Day’Ron belongs in this group of players when it comes to player value.

When looking at the contracts that these players signed, I focused on the percentage of the salary cap that their salaries account for rather than the total dollar amount in each season because it is more representative of a player’s value since the salary cap increases every year and these players didn’t all sign these contracts in the same season. So essentially, this method of evaluating contracts accounts for salary cap inflation. Interestingly enough, these comparable players signed contracts worth very similar amounts per season in terms of the percentage of the cap that their salaries represented. In most years of these players’ contracts, they earned about 9.5% of that season’s salary cap. So, if the Nets were to offer Day’Ron 9.5% of next year’s salary cap (cap projection via RealGM) and then gave him raises of 5% per year (the CBA allows for Nets to give him up to 8% raises but another team could only offer 5% raises) in the remaining years of the contract, a four-year contract would be worth approximately $63.3M with an Average Annual Value of $15.8M. Coincidentally, 9.5% of next year’s salary cap is projected to be about $14.7M, or 600k more than next year’s entire Non-Taxpayer Mid-Level Exception, meaning this offer would be guaranteed to slightly outbid any team that doesn’t have cap space, which should be almost all of them.

I realize that people might not love the idea of paying Claxton and Sharpe a combined $40M per season, but I actually think that’s pretty decent value for a team as it would lock down Brooklyn’s center position for the next few years. Additionally, the Nets could always trade one of Claxton or Sharpe in the future if they want to allocate that money to another position of need and they have enough cap flexibility in the next few years that even if this duo ends up being slightly overpaid, it shouldn’t really matter. I would gladly sign Day’Ron to the four-year, $63.3M deal that I projected above, as I think he is a really solid, young big to have on the roster going forward.