Brooklyn Nets power forward Kris Humphries has agreed to return to the Nets on a 2 year $24 million deal. Despite posting decent per-minute stats throughout his career, Humphries had never gotten serious playing time and bounced around the league for the first 5 years of his career before finding himself on the Nets. With the Nets out of the playoff picture and lacking quality players, Humphries was pressed into duty and saw significant court action for the first time in his career. He continued to keep up his per-minute production, and in 2010, posted career highs of 10 points and 10 rebounds a game. Despite his obvious rebounding acumen, he found the market for him to be lacking in free agency (with teams perhaps shying away from him due to his reality TV notoriety, which we’ll get to in a bit) and returned to the Nets on a one year deal. He again averaged a double-double, posted a career high Player Efficiency Rating and cemented his status as a premier rebounder in the league.
It made sense then that the Nets would reward him with a generous deal to keep him Brooklyn. Having recently signed the offensively gifted but rebounding non-factor Brook Lopez to a max contract, the Nets were in need of an elite rebounding power forward to play next to Lopez and mask his inadequacy on the glass. Who better to do that than the 6th leading rebounder in the league who they had the Bird Rights to? $12 million a year is a very generous price for him, but the Nets have shown this season that money is not an object for them and with this signing they have solidified a very strong lineup which should finish among the top four teams in the Eastern Conference
Adding some sizzle to the signing was Humphries’ tweet mockingly quoting lyrics from Kanye West’s song “Theraflu” which implied that Kanye could ask his buddy and Nets part-owner Jay Z to drop Humphries from the team. In case you haven’t been looped in, Kris Humphries used to date (and actually married, for a brief period of time) reality TV star Kim Kardashian, who is currently dating Kanye.
Of course, despite all the attention Jay Z gets for being part of the Nets ownership group, in reality he owns a fairly small share in the team and it’s pretty absurd to think that Jay would drop a productive member of the team because of his buddy’s relationship drama. Nonetheless, Humphries decided that being $24 million richer he could afford to send a little zinger back Yeezy’s way.
