Soon-to-be free agent Lou Williams has hired agent Wallace Prather of Perennial Sports and Entertainment, Prather tells Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo! Sports (Twitter link). This season’s Sixth Man of the Year had been with Leon Rose of the Creative Artists Agency. Williams said toward the end of the season that he wanted to re-sign with the Raptors and was optimistic that his camp and the team would work out a deal.
Prather’s clients include Derrick Favors and, along with Brian Dyke of Shibumi Sports, Josh Smith. Prather also represents Jordan Adams and Anthony Morrow, as the Hoops Rumors Agency Database shows. Favors just finished year one of an incentive-laden four-year, $48MM extension with the Jazz, while Smith is drawing from both a four-year, $54MM contract he signed with the Pistons in 2013 and the one-year deal for the $2.077MM biannual exception he inked with the Rockets in December upon his release from Detroit. Morrow signed a three-year, $10.032MM deal with the Thunder this past offseason, the same summer in which Adams joined the Grizzlies on a rookie scale contract after going 22nd overall in the 2014 draft.
Williams, with Rose’s representation, signed a three-year deal with the Hawks in 2012 for the value of the non-taxpayer’s mid-level exception worth a total of nearly $15.7MM. A torn ACL prematurely ended his first season with Atlanta, and he struggled to regain his form after coming back last season. The Hawks shipped him to the Raptors in a cost-cutting move last June, and he blossomed in Toronto, scoring a career high 15.5 points per game, 5.1 better than his output last season.
I like Louis Williams, but I don’t love him enough to give him more than a two-year contract. He’s 28, and the decline is not far off …