I do not think the Suns should match a maximum offer for Johnson. Yes, he looked good at times last season, he has the potential to be a star, and it would hurt to lose him. But that price is just too high.
I personally don't think that Johnson is even a top-five SG. Some people will say that Bryant is a rapist, McGrady is really a SF, Allen is old, Hughes is erratic, and Redd is one-dimensional. That's fine, but it smacks of homerism. Johnson brings things to the table that no one else does, but you don't have to have ideally versatile players at every position. What you need is a versatile roster, and if the Suns really go with four $10+ million contracts for the next four years, there's simply no way they can have overall roster versatility.
I'm one of many on this board who has been saying for the last month that Johnson is more important to the team than Marion. But I've changed my mind about that. It's much easier to remember games last season when Marion came up huge than it is to remember games when Johnson did. Losing Johnson for that handful of playoff games was rough, but would the Suns have had any easier of a time if Marion had been lost instead? I seriously doubt it.
I'm excited about what Johnson might become, but there's a limit to how much of a commitment should be made on "potential." We're talking about someone who has never come close to making an All-Star team, whose career high is a mere 31 points, and who hits double figures in rebounds or assists only once in a blue moon. It's possible, even likely, that his numbers would go up on a different team, but the question is how valuable he
really is to the Suns.
If Johnson really wants to sign a maximum offer sheet from Atlanta, I hope the Suns can work out a three-way trade, where they get a good player or two in return and the third team gets (in effect) Atlanta's cap space. (Heck, the third team and player could even be Portland and Ratliff....
Not really.) Johnson helps the Suns, but other players can help too. $70 million over five years can bring a lot of talent to the roster, and there have to be better ways of spending that kind of money than on Joe Johnson.