JaMychal Green, who plays for the Austin Toros, San Antonio’s D-League affiliate, is garnering interest from the Knicks, Spurs, and Bulls for a possible 10-day contract, Marc J. Spears of Yahoo! Sports reports (Twitter link). Green was in training camp with San Antonio this year. Here’s more from the Atlantic Division:
- The Celtics could end up with as many as four first-rounders in the 2015 NBA draft, depending on how the protections attached to some of the picks shake out. In an interview on 98.5 The Sports Hub (hat tip to Ben Rohrbach of WEEI 93.7 FM), Boston’s president of basketball operations Danny Ainge said of the upcoming draft, “It’s a decent draft, not spectacular.“
- Ainge, who has been stockpiling future picks in the deals he has made for Rajon Rondo, Jeff Green, and Austin Rivers, added, “In a perfect world, I would like to trade picks for proven, quality players. That’s a perfect world,” Rohrbach tweets.
- Explaining why he has acquired so many future draft picks in his various deals this season if his preference was for proven players, Ainge said that it is difficult to obtain superstar talent outside of the draft in today’s NBA, Rohrbach relays (Twitter link).
- The Knicks need to break the franchise’s pattern of sacrificing the future for the present, Christopher Reina of RealGM opines. One change that Reina posits could help is for Phil Jackson to hire a workaholic GM who would continue to tear down the roster and concentrate on accumulating assets, not salary cap space.
- The Pelicans’ rebuilding plan is one that Sixers GM Sam Hinkie hopes to emulate, Mike Sielski of The Philadelphia Inquirer writes. The Pelicans accumulated assets, similar to what Hinkie is doing, and used them to acquire players like Jrue Holiday and Tyreke Evans through trades. While it can be argued that mimicking New Orleans, with its 19-19 record, isn’t necessarily shooting for the moon, if the Pelicans were in the East, they would currently occupy the sixth playoff seed.