In 2016, Gorgui Dieng was at the exact right place at the exact right time. The NBA salary cap had exploded from $70 million to $94 million in a single-year leap, and players everywhere were suddenly inking lucrative deals. The Wolves big man happened to be due for an extension at the time, and the two sides hammered one out right before the deadline to do so in October 2016. The terms: 4 years, $62.8 million.
The NBA.com analysis of the deal at the time included this paragraph: In a market where big men were getting enormous deals — Oklahoma City's Steven Adams and Utah's Rudy Gobert each signed four-year extensions worth at least $100 million on Monday — Dieng comes at a relative bargain.
Dieng earned his money, and he knew what to do with it. The "human being" part of the headline comes from his work in his native Senegal, as outlined in a story by Chris Hine. The key quote for me was this:
"A successful man is not somebody who just has money and lives his life," Dieng said. "If you're successful, you have an effect on your community, your country or wherever you live. That's the way I look at things. … Do the right things to help people that need help."
Back to basketball: When Dieng signed his deal, he was coming off a season in which he played all 82 games and had gained traction as a strong post defender and functional offensive piece. In 2016-17, after he signed the extension but before it kicked in, he played and started all 82 games in Tom Thibodeau's first year as head coach, averaging 10 points and 8 rebounds in 32.4 minutes per game.
And then in the 2017 offseason, less than a year after Dieng signed his contract, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Thibodeau created an odd and expensive redundancy by inking fellow big man Taj Gibson — a solid player, but one with a skill set at least comparable to Dieng's as a more traditional big man instead of a floor-stretcher — to a two-year, $28 million deal.
Gibson performed well as the starter, Dieng's minutes were cut in half and suddenly his four-year contract started to look like an albatross. It only got worse this season when the Wolves acquired Dario Saric — the power forward of the future, further cutting into Dieng's minutes. There was a 15-game stretch in the second half of this year when Dieng either didn't play at all or had single-digit minutes in all but one game.
Here's the thing, though: Even as his minutes have been chopped now to 12.9 per game, Dieng has essentially remained the same player he always was. There's an element of "for better or worse" in that, since Dieng is limited offensively and still lacks a certain fluidity on the court.
