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Month: November 2024

And-Ones: Free Agents, Antic, Bagley, Heat

September 11th, 2017 at 9:40pm CST by Dana Gauruder

The addition of two-way contracts has impacted the ability of veteran free agents to find new homes this offseason, according to David Aldridge of NBA.com in his latest Morning Tip column. Gerald Green, David Lee, Anthony Morrow and Shabazz Muhammad are among the notable free agents who remain on the market and Aldridge points out that many teams are leaving their 15th roster spot open, rather than signing another player. That’s in part due to the ability of teams to sign two players to low-cost two-way deals, Aldridge continues. The increase in veteran minimum salaries under the new CBA has also depressed the free agent market, especially for teams close to or over the luxury tax threshold, Aldridge adds.

In other notable developments around the league:

  • Former NBA big man Pero Antic will play in Serbia for KK Crvena Zvezda during the upcoming season, according to a Sportando report. Antic, who signed a one-year contract, spent the last two seasons in Turkey with Fenerbahce. Antic played 113 games over two seasons for the Hawks, averaging 6.3 PPG and 3.5 RPG in 17.4 MPG.
  • Russell Westbrook‘s ability to coexist with another star player in Paul George and Kemba Walker‘s impact on Dwight Howard in Charlotte are two of the five big NBA questions heading into training camp, according to Buddy Grizzard of Basketball Insiders. The league’s proposal to change the draft lottery has much more to do with access to star players rather than concerns about tanking, Grizzard argues in another of the hot topics he addresses.
  • The potential No. 1 overall pick in the next draft, Marvin Bagley, has been officially cleared to play for Duke, Jeff Goodman of ESPN.com tweets. The 6’11” power forward was reclassified into the class of 2017 last month.
  • Roof damage to the Heat’s AmericanAirlines Arena by Hurricane Irma was superficial, Ira Winderman of the Florida Sun-Sentinel reports. The team’s practice court also sustained minor damage, Winderman adds.
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Spurs Sign Darrun Hilliard To Two-Way Contract

September 11th, 2017 at 3:42pm CST by Luke Adams

The Spurs have filled the second two-way player opening on their roster, announcing today in a press release that they’ve signed free agent swingman Darrun Hilliard to a two-way contract. San Antonio previously signed big man Matt Costello to the club’s first-ever two-way deal.

Hilliard, 24, was involved in several NBA roster moves this summer, including being included in one of the biggest trades of the offseason. A Piston to end the 2016/17 campaign, Hilliard was sent to the Rockets in a June swap, then flipped to the Clippers as part of the package Houston traded for Chris Paul. The Clippers waived Hilliard to avoid having his salary for 2017/18 become guaranteed.

A former 38th overall pick, Hilliard appeared in 77 games for the Pistons over the last two seasons, playing sparingly. He also appeared in seven total games for the Grand Rapids Drive, Detroit’s G League affiliate, averaging 24.4 PPG in those contests. The Villanova alum added some national experience to his professional résumé this summer, earning a spot on the Team USA squad that won a gold medal at the FIBA AmeriCup earlier this month.

With Hilliard officially locked up, the Spurs now have 18 players under contract — 16 on NBA deals and a pair of two-way players. That leaves two openings on San Antonio’s 20-man offseason roster.

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Damian Lillard Talks Carmelo, Blazers, Rivals

September 11th, 2017 at 2:28pm CST by Luke Adams

The Trail Blazers have had one of the NBA’s quietest summers, having not made a single free agent signing until officially inking Archie Goodwin to a camp deal today. On the trade front, Portland’s only major move involved dumping Allen Crabbe‘s exorbitant contract on the Nets — the Blazers acquired Andrew Nicholson in that trade, but subsequently waived him.

Of course, while the Blazers’ cap situation limited their ability to pursue impact free agents, the team’s star guards – Damian Lillard and C.J. McCollum – made an effort to recruit a trade candidate. Carmelo Anthony has been unwilling to waive his no-trade clause to join the Blazers, but it wasn’t for a lack of trying from Lillard and McCollum.

Speaking to Marc J. Spears of The Undefeated, Lillard admitted that he doesn’t love “doing all the extra recruiting” adding that he didn’t want to press Anthony. Despite the fact that Carmelo “didn’t seem opposed” to the idea of playing in Portland, according to Lillard, there has been no indication that a trade between the Blazers and Knicks is a viable possibility.

Lillard expanded on that subject and addressed a few other topics in his conversation with Spears, which includes details on his community work and is worth checking out in full. Here are some of the highlights from the Blazers’ point guard:

On recruiting Carmelo Anthony to waive his no-trade clause for the Trail Blazers:

“I guess they call it tampering or whatever. It’s not against the rules for us to interact with each other. We all peers, we all play in the same league and everybody hints at playing with each other. ‘What you think about this?’ ‘What do you think about that?’ All that matters is whether it got done or did not get done. Or hasn’t got done, and it hasn’t got done. So, it is what it is …

“I’m not giving up on anything. I just think I’ve done what I can do. And camp is a few weeks away. And you have to focus on getting ready with who we are, plan on going in as we are. Whatever changes, the front office will be the ones making that change, with the Knicks and our front office or whatever. But I get my mind focused on what I can control at a certain point.”

On the offseason upgrades made by division and conference rivals:

“It’s tough. The West is tough as always. I think a lot of teams in the West got better on paper, and at the end of the day, things have to work out. A lot of things look good, but it still got to work out. You got to make it work. So, we’ll see how that go.”

On the Trail Blazers’ outlook for 2017/18:

“I got a lot of confidence with everybody on our team. We still got a young team. Obviously, we could improve in a lot of areas as a group. With all the struggles we had last year, we still found a way to get it done and to get into the playoffs, which is what every team goes into the season and tries to get done. So, we make the improvements that we need to make collectively on the defensive end, and just being able to do things at a high level consistently. We should be pretty good.”

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Latest On Timberwolves’ Free Agent Search

September 11th, 2017 at 2:08pm CST by Luke Adams

2:08pm: Wolfson has provided an update to his initial report, tweeting that Thornton is actually working out for the Wolves later this week. However, veteran guard Jason Terry was spotted at the team’s facility today, per Wolfson.

11:27am: After working out several free agents last week, the Timberwolves are once again taking a closer look at some available players today, says Darren Wolfson of 5 Eyewitness News (via Twitter). According to Wolfson, veteran shooting guard Marcus Thornton is among the players working out today for Minnesota.

The Timberwolves have been on the lookout for much of the offseason for three veteran players who could fill out the team’s roster. Minnesota is said to be in the market for a pair of wings and a backup point guard, and auditioned a handful of players last week that fit that bill, including Anthony Morrow, Alan Anderson, Trey Burke, and Isaiah Canaan.

One of Minnesota’s top choices would be to simply re-sign Shabazz Muhammad, who remains on the free agent market. The Wolves renounced Muhammad’s rights in July, so they can’t offer him more than a minimum salary deal, but it’s possible that will be enough — Wolfson reports that there’s “slightly growing optimism” on the possibility of bringing back the free agent swingman.

The Wolves currently have 11 players on fully guaranteed contracts, and are open to increasing that number to 14 by the start of training camp. That would leave one opening on the 15-man regular season roster, which could be filled by a non-guaranteed player who has an impressive camp, or could be left open to start the season.

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Trail Blazers Sign Archie Goodwin

September 11th, 2017 at 2:00pm CST by Austin Kent

SEPTEMBER 11: The Blazers have officially announced their deal with Goodwin, issuing a press release to confirm the signing.

SEPTEMBER 7: The Trail Blazers have agreed to a training camp deal with guard Archie Goodwin, Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN tweets. The 23-year-old last played for the Nets prior to being waived over the summer.

While Goodwin has shown flashes of modest potential at various points throughout his career, he hasn’t been able to thrive with a big league club just yet.

With one roster spot available, however, Goodwin stands a chance of sticking with the the Blazers into the regular season.

If he does, expect to see the combo guard in direct competition with reserves Shabazz Napier and Pat Connaughton for reps behind the team’s All-Star backcourt of Damian Lillard and C.J. McCollum.

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Wizards Sign Carrick Felix

September 11th, 2017 at 1:41pm CST by marksuleymanov

SEPTEMBER 11: Felix’s deal with the Wizards is official, per RealGM’s NBA transactions log.

SEPTEMBER 9: The Wizards are signing swingman Carrick Felix to a training camp deal, according Chris Reichert of 2Ways10Days.com (Twitter link).

A former second round pick of the Cavaliers in 2013 (33rd overall), Felix has considerable experience in the G League. He has made G League appearances for affiliate teams of the Nets, Cavaliers, and Warriors.

Felix, 27, made his lone NBA experience came during the 2013/14 season, appearing in seven games for the Cavaliers. He averaged 2.7 PPG in just over five minutes per game. Felix was traded to the Jazz that offseason and was eventually waived.

The Wizards currently have 18 players under contract, but have also reached reported agreements with Felix and Kris Jenkins, which would take their roster count to 20, the offseason maximum.

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2017/18 NBA Salary Guarantee Dates

September 11th, 2017 at 12:34pm CST by Luke Adams

While the majority of players on NBA rosters currently have fully guaranteed salaries for the 2017/18 season, there are many whose contracts are still non-guaranteed or only have a partial guarantee. We published a post last week dedicated to keeping tabs on those non-guaranteed players, sorting them by team.

By default, NBA contracts all become fully guaranteed on January 10 every year, meaning that a team must waive a non-guaranteed player by the end of the business day on January 7 to ensure he clears waivers before January 10. That way, his full-season salary won’t count against that team’s cap.

However, many players with non-guaranteed salaries have language in their contracts that ensures their guarantee deadline arrives early. We saw that over the summer, as many players with guarantee dates in June, July, or August were either waived in advance of those deadlines or had their 2017/18 salaries become guaranteed.

There are many more players with guarantee dates due in the coming weeks or months, so we’ll use the space below to track those deadlines and decisions. When a deadline date passes, we’ll note below if that player was waived. If he remained on the roster, receiving his guarantee, that’s noted with a ✔️ symbol.

We’re relying on salary information from Eric Pincus of Basketball Insiders and Bobby Marks of ESPN, who each do an outstanding job of providing detailed contract info. However, there are a handful of discrepancies between the details they’ve provided, so we’ve noted those cases below — we’ll consider those details tentative for now.

Here’s the full upcoming salary guarantee calendar:

September 15

  • Eric Moreland (Pistons): Guarantee increases from $500,000 to $750,000. (✔️)

September 26

October 15

October 16

  • Troy Williams (Rockets): Guarantee increases from $1,312,611 to $1,471,382 (fully guaranteed). (✔️)

October 17

October 18

  • Khem Birch (Magic): Guarantee increases from $25,000 to $407,808. (✔️)
  • Mario Chalmers (Grizzlies): Guarantee increases from $25,000 to $2,106,470 (fully guaranteed). (✔️)
    • Note: Chalmers’ fully guaranteed salary will count for $1,471,382 against cap.
  • Marcus Georges-Hunt (Timberwolves): Guarantee increases from $0 to $275,000. (✔️)
  • Rodney McGruder (Heat): Guarantee increases from $452,625 to $1,312,611 (fully guaranteed). (✔️)
  • Eric Moreland (Pistons): Guarantee increases from $750,000 to $1,000,000. (✔️)
  • Okaro White (Heat): Guarantee increases from $452,624 to $1,312,611 (fully guaranteed). (✔️)

October 19

October 31

November 10

  • Jordan Crawford (Pelicans): Guarantee increases from $250,000 to $750,000. (Waived)
    • Note: Based on Marks’ data. Pincus had Crawford’s guarantee increasing from $250,000 to $500,000.

December 5

  • Dorian Finney-Smith (Mavericks): Guarantee increases from $150,000 to $200,000. (✔️)

December 15

  • Luke Babbitt (Hawks): Guarantee increases from $987,080 to $1,974,159 (fully guaranteed). (✔️)
    • Note: Babbitt’s fully guaranteed salary will count for $1,471,382 against cap.

January 7

Contract information from Basketball Insiders and ESPN was used in the creation of this post.

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Poll: Toronto Raptors’ 2017/18 Win Total

September 11th, 2017 at 10:05am CST by Luke Adams

When speculation centers on which team will win the Eastern Conference in 2017/18, the Cavaliers and Celtics generally dominate the conversation, with the Wizards earning a mention and the Bucks perhaps being labeled a dark horse. The Raptors, who finished last season tied with the Cavaliers at 51-31, and faced Cleveland in the Eastern Conference Finals in 2016, are often overlooked.

There are multiple reasons why that happens. Raptors stars Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan have struggled to translate their regular season success to the postseason in recent years, and the club’s style of play is somewhat dated. Additionally, the Raptors will have to cope with some key departures this season.

Longtime power forward Patrick Patterson left in free agency, as did veteran swingman P.J. Tucker, who became a crucial part of the Raptors’ rotation down the stretch last season. With big new contracts for Lowry and Serge Ibaka threatening to push Toronto into tax territory, the club also had to shed salary by trading DeMarre Carroll and Cory Joseph. Carroll had been a disappointment during his two years in Toronto, but Joseph was one of the league’s more reliable backup point guards.

The Raptors still have a strong starting five, and the addition of C.J. Miles should provide a boost to the club’s outside shooting, but the team will have to rely on a handful of youngsters to step up and claim rotation roles in 2017/18. As such, it’s no surprise that – after averaging 52 wins per year for the last three seasons – the Raptors’ over/under for the coming season is a slightly more modest 48.5, per offshore betting site Bovada.

What do you think? Are the Raptors still talented enough to win 49 games or more for the fourth straight year, or will the impact of their offseason departures knock them below that mark? Vote below in our poll and jump into the comment section to share your thoughts!

Trade Rumors app users, click here to vote.

Previous over/under voting results:

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Latest On NBA’s Draft Lottery Reform Proposal

September 11th, 2017 at 8:51am CST by Luke Adams

After ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski first reported last week that the NBA was mulling the idea of draft lottery reform, we rounded up the highlights of the proposal. Among those highlights: Teams would be able to drop as many as four spots in the lottery (ie. from first to fifth), and the odds for the top three teams to land the No. 1 pick would be reduced and flattened, giving each of those clubs equal odds.

In a piece for USA Today, Jeff Zillgitt picks up where Wojnarowski left off, filling in a few more details on those main elements of the NBA’s proposal:

  • The three highest lottery seeds would each have a 14% chance of landing the first overall pick. Previously those teams had odds of 25%, 19.9%, and 15.6% respectively.
  • The odds for the remaining lottery teams to land the No. 1 pick would decrease smoothly, with each team’s odds increasing by an extra 1-2% over the old system.
  • We could deduce this from Wojnarowski’s report, but Zillgitt confirms that the number of picks determined by the lottery would increase from three to four, which would allow – for example – the No. 1 lottery seed to end up with the No. 5 overall pick.
  • The new system would be implemented for the 2019 NBA draft, giving teams time to plan and prepare accordingly.

While NBA team owners may vote on the proposal at the league’s Board of Governors meeting later this month, it’s not considered a slam dunk. Back in 2014, NBA owners voted on a similar plan, and while 17 owners voted in favor of that proposal, a three-quarters majority is required to pass it.

As Zillgitt details, some small- and mid-market teams believe this proposal would hurt their chances of landing a franchise-altering star through the draft — those clubs already feel that their odds of landing that sort of player in free agency are slim. However, the NBA is hopeful that this solution would eliminate the notion that a franchise has to be the worst of the worst in order to truly rebuild and improve.

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2017 Hoops Rumors Retro Series

September 10th, 2017 at 10:54pm CST by Austin Kent

Ever get tired of the year 2017 and wish that you could travel back to a simpler time when athletes only made nine-digits and the NBA MVP didn’t dress like Mayim Bialik in Blossom?

With our Hoops Rumors Retro series you can.

Earlier this year we started experimenting with the idea of bringing back a transaction retrospective that shed a light on significant roster moves that helped shape the NBA landscape. In January, for example, I wrote about the mid-season trade that brought Dikembe Mutombo to a scary Sixers team in 2001 and another that sent Gary Payton to Milwaukee, inspiring half a season’s worth of unnatural photo ops in Bucks purple.

We were pleased with the reception that the pieces got at the time and have decided to bring them back into our rotation. I can’t be the only one, after all, who spent late August tweeting out pictures of Patrick Ewing in a Magic jersey while NBA Twitter and the blogosphere at large channeled their attention on the Isaiah Thomas–Kyrie Irving swap.

The truth is, the NBA is awesome. But it’s not just awesome now — it’s always been awesome. The only difference is the influx of content on the internet and how readily available everything is 24/7. How would the hoops world of 20, even 15 years ago, look through the lens of modern media? Imagine David Robinson‘s Instagram feed (trust me, it’s just colorized images of historic sea vessels) or Rik Smits‘ undoubtedly risqué Snapchat stories.

Back in the nineties, we didn’t have social media news or, sadly, even Hoops Rumors to whet our appetite for basketball news but that didn’t stop kids around the world from absorbing the game in any way that they could, even if that meant inferring the Stephon Marbury–Sam Cassell trade from a pack of basketball cards months after the fact because the last thing that they would ever broadcast on basic Canadian cable was a New Jersey Nets game circa 1999. What? No. Who’s bitter? You’re bitter.

Consider Hoops Rumors Retro, then, a series that pays homage to the landmark moments of yesteryear that never got the full internet treatment. It may have been a simpler time with less endless noise and narcissistic hot takes, sure, but think of the hours-long Basketball Reference deep dives we’d be losing. Or the unexpected Woj Bombs. Heck, if Alonzo Mourning ever got up on stage and started dancing at a Digital Underground concert, would anybody outside of the venue even know about it?

It’s almost enough to give these crazy kids a pass for fraternizing with their supposed division rivals on the red carpet of a fashion show.

Almost.

Below is a list of the Hoops Rumors Retro pieces we’ve run this year. Including the latest from just last week. If you have any suggestions for particularly memorable moments that you’d like to see brought to life in a feature, let us know in the comments below or by harassing me on Twitter.

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