2020 Team

[Kid]

The absolute minimum that any player who is tendered a contract can be paid is a 20% reduction on their prior year's salary, and it's very rare that there is any reduction.  Russell's contracted base salary in 2019 was $4.3 million (although he made less than that because of the suspension).  He also received about $300K in roster bonuses.  I don't know whether the bonuses get factored in to what he could make in arbitration, but either way, the least an arbitrator could award him would be somewhere between about $3.4 - $3.7 million.  The way arbitration works is that the arbitrator has to select one of the two options presented to him by the team or the player.  The arbitrator cannot pick any kind of middle ground.  That leads to both sides having incentives to not go as low or as high as possible because the arbitrator is supposed to pick whichever option more fairly compensates the player in the market.

 

So, the absolute least Russell would have made if he had been tendered a contract would have been $3.4 - $3.7 million, but more likely he probably would have received a contract in line with the one he had last year.