Because many, MANY more people that you think should be, are considered max players in the NBA. It's just a fact.
This just gets back to the same confusion with "max." In fact, no, there are very few players in the league who are going to be earning what Stoudemire would get with a maximum extension. Here is the list of the league's top salaries now, per hoopshype:
1. McGrady, $23.2 million, expiring, obviously not going to get that kind of money again
2. Bryant, 23.0, recently extended
3. J. O'Neal, 23.0, expiring
4. Duncan, 22.2, two years left
5. S. O'Neal, 20.0, expiring
6t. Nowitzki, 19.8, opting out
6t. Pierce, 19.8, one year left
8. Allen, 19.8, expiring
9. Lewis, 18.9, goes on forever
10. Redd, 17.0, one year left
11t. Gasol, 16.5, recently extended
11t. Kirilenko, 16.5, one year left
13. Garnett, 16.4, two years left
14t. Stoudemire, 16.4, opting out
14t. Yao, 16.4, one year left
Here's the thing about "max" contracts: The higher your salary already is, the bigger a contract you can get. That means that a maximum deal for Stoudemire is larger than for anyone who isn't on this list. It's larger than one for James, or Wade, or Howard, or Bosh, or Paul, or Durant, or Deron Williams. And those players cannot
ever catch up to him in terms of salary, because he has seniority on them, so he has already played his way into a higher salary tier.
Now let's look more carefully at the list. Of all of the players currently above Stoudemire, all are up by 2012, except for these:
Kobe Bryant
Rashard Lewis
Pau Gasol
There's one other big name who will probably get a new maximum deal, and that's Nowitzki. The rest have seen their last big contract.
I have news for you. In the 2012-13 season, those three plus Nowitzki are your four highest paid players in the league, right there. Nothing can be done to change this. Their contracts are guaranteed and no one can catch them.
If you give Stoudemire a maximum extension, he becomes fifth on the list, right behind Gasol. He'll be the fifth-highest paid player in the
entire league by 2012-13. (Yao could get an identical deal if he opts out this summer, which he probably won't.) Again, no one can catch him -- not James, not Wade, not Durant -- no one.
So it's not just a question of putting Stoudemire in the same "max" category as players like Roy or Boozer or Joe Johnson. It's a question of giving him one of the top five salaries in the league for 2012-13. And the year after that. And the year after that.
Let's look at that list a little more. Bryant is the best player in the league. Nowitzki is a former MVP and still in his prime. Gasol isn't quite at that level, but his value goes up as long as he is Bryant's teammate, plus the Lakers can afford whatever they want anyway.
That leaves Lewis. Now, I know there was a big argument about whether his contract is "crippling" the Magic, which went nowhere because people couldn't agree on what "crippled" meant. But we can agree on this: Lewis's contract is very bad for the Magic. It has
already made them less competitive, and it's only going to get worse. They had a payroll of $82 million this year and made only the conference finals. If they want to field a team for 2010-11 that isn't
worse than this year's, they'll have to spend even more. Unless their ownership has unlimited resources, they can tolerate this kind of deficit spending for only another couple of years before they'll have to pull the plug. And then they'll
still be stuck with Lewis!
It is absolutely irresponsible and incorrect to look at Stoudemire's potential situation with the Suns, shrug "Well everyone does it," and not anticipate the dire consequences. Number 1, no, not everyone does it -- we're talking about giving Stoudemire a top-five salary for the next several years. And number 2, overpaying players
does come back and haunt the teams that do it, usually sooner rather than later.
