Hoops Rumors Front Office Subscriber Chat Transcript: 7/16/2026
Hoops Rumors’ Arthur Hill held a live chat today exclusively for Trade Rumors Front Office subscribers. Topics included the Bulls‘ questionable offseason decisions apart from Caleb Wilson, the Lakers‘ pursuit of Jonathan Kuminga and desire to keep Bronny James, the Pistons‘ failure to get another scorer and playmaker to team with Cade Cunningham, the Warriors‘ chances to land LeBron James and more!
Contract Observations: Trent, Jordan, Achiuwa, Knicks
There are several notable players still unsigned nearly two weeks into free agency, including former MVPs LeBron James and James Harden and top restricted free agents Jalen Duren and Peyton Watson. But the action has slowed down since the start of July, giving us an opportunity to take a closer look at some of the contracts signed in the past week by the free agents who have come off the board.
Today, we’re focusing on a pair of contracts in Milwaukee and New Orleans that raised some eyebrows around the basketball world, along with an interesting decision by the Kings and a series of signings by the Knicks.
Let’s dive in…
Hoops Rumors Front Office Subscriber Chat Transcript: 7/9/2026
Hoops Rumors’ Arthur Hill held a live chat today exclusively for Trade Rumors Front Office subscribers. Topics included whether the Sixers are a top-two team in the East after adding Jaylen Brown, the Clippers‘ options to expand the Kawhi Leonard deal, the Pistons‘ need for another major move, the reasons behind LeBron James‘ long decision-making process and more!
Offseason Observations: Morant, Draft-Pick Trades, Roster Crunches
After a flurry of NBA action over the past week that included trade agreements involving players like Kawhi Leonard, Jaylen Brown, Paul George, Ja Morant, and Walker Kessler, the holiday weekend has provided a much-needed breather.
The break in the action likely won’t last long. The July moratorium is set to end on July 6, which means a ton of previously reported signings and trades will be formally completed on Monday and Tuesday. Often, the end of the moratorium brings a mini-rush of new moves as well, now that they can be officially finalized.
Before another busy week gets underway, I want to highlight a few under-the-radar offseason subplots that have caught my eye despite being overshadowed by splashier headlines.
The Ja Morant trade bonus that wasn’t
While most of the blockbuster trade agreements reached so far this summer weren’t able to be completed during the 2025/26 league year for various cap- or apron-related reasons, one major deal that could legally be made official in June was Portland’s acquisition of Morant. And both the Grizzlies and Trail Blazers had a major incentive to get that trade done as soon as possible — much to Morant’s chagrin, I imagine.
Hoops Rumors Front Office Subscriber Chat Transcript: 7/3/2026
Hoops Rumors’ Arthur Hill held a live chat today exclusively for Trade Rumors Front Office subscribers. Topics included the Sixers‘ trade for Jaylen Brown, the Nuggets‘ inactivity since free agency began, the Warriors‘ commitment to older players, DeMar DeRozan‘s future and more!
Hoops Rumors Front Office Subscriber Chat Transcript: 6/26/2026
Hoops Rumors’ Arthur Hill held a live chat today exclusively for Trade Rumors Front Office subscribers. Topics included the Pistons‘ plans after trading Isaiah Stewart, the Hawks‘ path toward building a real title contender, the Heat’s chances of keeping Norman Powell, the Bulls‘ draft decisions and more!
2026 NBA Offseason Preview: New York Knicks
After being eliminated in the Eastern Conference finals by the Pacers in 2025, the Knicks opted not to make any major changes to their roster. While the team signed Jordan Clarkson in free agency and drafted Mohamed Diawara using a second-round pick, its biggest roster move last offseason was using the taxpayer mid-level exception to add Guerschon Yabusele, who was a poor fit in New York and was traded to the Bulls along with cash at the 2026 deadline in order to get him off the club’s books.
The Knicks’ most significant change ahead of the 2025/26 season was firing head coach Tom Thibodeau and replacing him with Mike Brown. Both steps of the coaching change were heavily scrutinized. Thibodeau had just led New York to its best season in a quarter-century, and the team only landed on Brown after being denied permission to interview several coaches already under contract, including Jason Kidd, Billy Donovan, Quin Snyder, Chris Finch, and Ime Udoka, which created the impression that the Knicks’ new head coach was a fall-back option.
Questions about whether Brown was the right fit for the job persisted for most of 2025/26, as the Knicks had a streaky regular season that saw them run out to a 19-7 start and claim an NBA Cup title before they dropped nine of 11 games in late December and January.
After finishing the regular season with a 53-29 record – two games better than their 2024/25 mark – and securing the No. 3 seed in the East, the Knicks were widely regarded as a second-tier contender in the East, with oddsmakers considering the Celtics and Cavaliers the best bets to win the conference and New York viewed as roughly on par with the Pistons. Enthusiasm for New York’s title chances didn’t exactly surge as the club lost two of its three games in the first round vs. Atlanta.
But in Game 4 against the Hawks, the Knicks embarked on one of the best regular season or playoff runs in NBA history, setting a league record by winning their next 11 games by a combined total of 262 points (23.8 per game) to make the NBA Finals.
New York was an underdog in the Finals and fell behind by double digits to the Spurs in the first quarter of every single game of that series, but the team’s chemistry and playoff experience were difference-makers, and Brown pushed all the right buttons — despite outscoring San Antonio by just 12 points in the series, the Knicks won four of five games and claimed their first championship since 1973.
The title run was the culmination of an impressive series of roster moves by president of basketball operations Leon Rose, who pulled off arguably the greatest free agent heist of the 2020s when he signed Jalen Brunson away from the Mavericks on a four-year, $104MM deal in 2022.
The rest of the Knicks’ starting lineup was acquired in a series of trades, with Josh Hart sent to New York from Portland in a four-team deal at the 2023 deadline, OG Anunoby dealt from the Raptors to the Knicks several months later in a trade that sent Immanuel Quickley and RJ Barrett to Toronto, and Mikal Bridges and Karl-Anthony Towns landing with the team during the 2024 offseason in a pair of blockbusters that saw the Knicks give up Julius Randle, Donte DiVincenzo, and six first-round picks.
Long-suffering NBA fans in New York will be celebrating the Knicks’ first title in 53 years for a while, but team owner James Dolan put a bit of a damper on the party prior to last Thursday’s championship parade by announcing in a radio interview that he has no intention of operating in the second tax apron in 2026/27.
Brunson, Hart, Anunoby, Bridges, and Towns are all under contract for at least the next two seasons, so Dolan’s edict doesn’t mean the Knicks’ core is at risk of breaking apart this offseason. But it does raise questions about whether the team will bring back a few reserves who played crucial roles off the bench during New York’s title run. We’ll take a closer look below at whether Dolan’s professed roster-management strategy makes sense and what it would mean for the Knicks if he doesn’t have a change of heart.
The Knicks’ Offseason Plans
2026 NBA Offseason Preview: San Antonio Spurs
It’s strange how quickly expectations can change. There’s no better example of that than the Spurs, who entered 2025/26 with a projected win total of 44.5 and wound up blowing past that number with over a month left in the season. San Antonio ultimately posted a 62-20 record, the second-best mark in the NBA and in the Western Conference.
The Spurs’ ascent up the standings was sudden, given that they had posted six straight losing seasons, but the team was pretty consistently great throughout the 2025/26 campaign. San Antonio started out 5-0, was 32-16 by the end of January, and finished the final two-plus months of the regular season on a 30-4 tear.
The Spurs’ rapid rise was largely fueled by lottery luck. After winning the draft lottery in 2023 and selecting a truly generational talent in Victor Wembanyama, the Spurs nailed the fourth overall pick in 2024 by drafting Stephon Castle, then moved up six spots to No. 2 in the 2025 lottery, adding another dynamic young guard in Dylan Harper (they also controlled the 14th pick, which they used on Carter Bryant).
Wembanyma, who was limited to 46 appearances in 2024/25 due to a blood clot in his shoulder, was the foundation of the Spurs’ success, particularly on the defensive end. The towering French big man was the first unanimous choice for Defensive Player of the Year in NBA history after leading the league in blocks and forcing offenses to adjust to his presence in a way that has never been seen before.
It’s difficult to overstate how impactful Wembanyama was for the Spurs in ’25/26. When he was off the court, San Antonio had the equivalent of the 17th-best net rating (+0.6 points per 100 possessions) in the NBA and a defense that would have ranked 15th. When he was playing, the team had a +17.0 net rating (the Thunder had the best mark during the regular season at +11.1), with a defensive rating of 103.6 — nearly three full points better than the Thunder’s league-best defense (106.5).
It was hard to get a read on how the young Spurs might perform in their debut playoff run, but they were considered a viable contender despite their relative inexperience. In some ways, the team’s overwhelming talent obfuscated its weaknesses during the regular season, and that carried over to the postseason as well.
The Spurs defeated the Trail Blazers in a five-game first-round series, then took down the battle-tested but shorthanded Timberwolves in a six-game second-round matchup. They faced the top-seeded Thunder in the Western Conference finals and eliminated the defending champions after an epic and extremely well played seven games.
While there had long been a perception that the winner of that Spurs-Thunder series would be the heavy favorites to win the championship, the Knicks entered the NBA Finals on a historic hot streak and ended up taking the first two games on the road despite trailing early in both contests. Wembanyama had a critical turnover in the closing seconds of Game 2 when the score was tied and then compounded his mistake by fouling Jalen Brunson, who made one of two free throws to give New York the lead. Wembanyama missed a potential game-winning jump shot on the next possession.
After bouncing back with a Game 3 victory, the Spurs looked set to tie the series in Game 4, building a 29-point lead. But they completely unraveled in the second half and ended up setting a record for the largest blown lead in Finals history, losing by one point in regulation after a series of inexplicable miscues. Yet another early lead in Game 5 turned into another late-game collapse, with the Spurs losing the series 4-1 despite having led 72% of the time they were on the court.
The Spurs’ Offseason Plans
Although no one could have expected the Spurs to make the Finals before the season started, their inexperience and lack of composure late in games wound up being their undoing. It didn’t help that Wembanyama, whose minutes were carefully managed during the season, needed to play more than he was accustomed to in the playoffs and didn’t have the stamina to maintain his peak performance. Another factor was the play of De’Aaron Fox, who struggled mightily in the Finals as he battled through an ankle sprain that reportedly would have kept him out for multiple weeks under ordinary circumstances.
2026 NBA Offseason Preview: Cleveland Cavaliers
The Cavaliers entered last offseason in a relatively difficult position considering they had won an East-best 64 games in 2024/25 and entered the playoffs as the top seed in the conference. After quickly dispatching the Heat in a lopsided four-game sweep, the Cavaliers looked overmatched in round two against the Pacers, the eventual Eastern Conference (and nearly NBA) champions.
Still, going 64-18 isn’t easy, and owner Dan Gilbert has shown a willingness to spend when he believes the team is capable of contending. Despite projecting to be well over the second tax apron, the Cavaliers made some moves around the edges last summer rather a significant salary shake-up involving their “core four” of Darius Garland, Donovan Mitchell, Evan Mobley and Jarrett Allen.
The Cavaliers added Tyrese Proctor and Saliou Niang late in last year’s draft, prioritized re-signing Sam Merrill (four years for $38MM) over Ty Jerome, who signed a three-year, $27MM contract with Memphis, and traded former No. 5 overall pick Isaac Okoro for Lonzo Ball in an effort to add size and play-making to their diminutive backcourt.
Garland, who underwent surgery on his toe after injuring the digit in the 2025 playoffs, didn’t make his season debut until early November. He aggravated his toe ailment in his third game back and seemed bothered by it off and on until around mid-December, when he hit his stride before suffering a similar injury to his other big toe. That left toe sprain caused him to be sidelined heading into the February deadline.
The Cavs pulled the plug on the Garland/Mitchell pairing that month, when they traded Garland to the Clippers for James Harden. They also dumped Ball’s salary to Utah after he struggled mightily in Cleveland and dealt De’Andre Hunter to Sacramento in a three-team deal which brought back Keon Ellis and Dennis Schröder.
Those transactions didn’t move Cleveland beneath the second apron, but they did save the Cavaliers a ton of money in 2025/26 and put the team in much better position to dip below the restrictive threshold in ’26/27. The moves also helped the team salvage what had been a rocky start for the Cavs, who had the largest payroll in the league.
Cleveland’s regular season results in 2025/26 were inconsistent after a dominant ’24/25. The Cavs had already lost more games (19) by the halfway point of ’25/26 than they did all of ’24/25, but they closed the season on a high note, going 30-11 in the second half to finish with a 52-30 record and earn the No. 4 seed in the East.
A tough seven-game first-round series vs. Toronto was followed by another seven-game battle against the Pistons, who entered the playoffs as the East’s top seed but weren’t widely viewed as contenders due to their lack of shooting and play-making around Cade Cunningham. The Cavaliers emerged victorious, advancing to the Eastern Conference finals against New York.
The Cavs looked great for the first 40 minutes of Game 1 against the Knicks, building a 22-point lead they somehow managed to blow in under eight minutes. They fell apart in overtime, where they were outscored by 11 points, and wound up being swept by the Knicks, who went on to win their first title in 53 years.
The Cavaliers’ Offseason Plans
The Cavaliers were quick to point out after they were eliminated from the postseason that making the Eastern Conference finals was another incremental step toward their goal of winning a championship — it was the best finish a Cavs team without LeBron James had since 1992. But it was extremely difficult for Cleveland to reach that point, and the club still feels far away from being a true contender. Mitchell will be extension-eligible in a few weeks and the Cavs have several potential free agents — most notably Harden — in what figures to be a busy summer in Cleveland.
Hoops Rumors Front Office Subscriber Chat Transcript: 6/19/2026
Hoops Rumors’ Arthur Hill held a live chat today exclusively for Trade Rumors Front Office subscribers. Topics included potential draft-day trades, the Pistons‘ interest in Trey Murphy III, the Wizards‘ decision with the No. 1 pick, a possible three-team deal involving LeBron James and more!