Offseason In Review

Offseason In Review: Dallas Mavericks

November 18th, 2014 at 5:36pm CST by Eddie Scarito

Hoops Rumors is in the process of looking back at each team’s offseason, from the end of the playoffs in June right up until opening night. Trades, free agent signings, draft picks, contract extensions, option decisions, camp invitees, and more will be covered, as we examine the moves each franchise made over the last several months.

Signings

Chandler Parsons: Three years, $46.085MM. Signed via cap room. Third year is player option. Includes 15% trade kicker.
Dirk Nowitzki: Three years, $25MM. Signed via cap room. Third year is player option. Includes no-trade clause.
Devin Harris: Four years, $17.563MM. Signed via cap room. Fourth year is partially guaranteed for $1.34MM.
Jameer Nelson: Two years, $5.587MM. Signed via room exception. Second year is player option.
Al-Farouq Aminu: Two years, $2.082MM. Signed via minimum-salary exception. Second year is player option.
Richard Jefferson: One year, $1.448MM. Signed via minimum-salary exception.
Charlie Villanueva: One year, $1.317MM. Signed via minimum-salary exception. Non-guaranteed.
Bernard James: One year, $915K. Signed via minimum-salary exception. Subsequently waived.

Extensions

None

Trades

Acquired Tyson Chandler and Raymond Felton from the Knicks in exchange for Jose Calderon, Samuel Dalembert, Shane Larkin, Wayne Ellington, 2014 pick No. 34 and 2014 pick No. 51.
Acquired Greg Smith from the Bulls in exchange for the rights to Tadija Dragicevic.
Acquired the rights to Emir Preldzic from the Wizards in exchange for DeJuan Blair.

Waiver Claims

None

Draft Picks

None

Camp Invitees

Renaldo Balkman
Eric Griffin
Ivan Johnson
Doron Lamb
Yuki Togashi

Departing Players

Rookie Contract Option Decisions

None

For teams residing in the brutally tough Western Conference the margin for error when constructing a roster is paper thin. It’s also a task that, even when making all of the proper moves, can have an incredibly short window for success. This was a lesson that the Mavericks learned quite well after bringing home the NBA title back in 2010/11. Since allowing a number of key contributors from that squad to depart, the franchise hasn’t made it out of the first round of the playoffs. With Mavs icon Dirk Nowitzki inching closer to retirement with each passing minute, owner Mark Cuban and GM Donnie Nelson decided to significantly overhaul his roster this past offseason.

Of course, before he could build around Nowitzki, Nelson first had to re-sign the 36-year-old star who was an unrestricted free agent. It was never a matter of if Nowitzki would re-sign with the Mavs but simply a question of how much of a discount he would give them. Many athletes throw out the requisite chatter about winning being more important than money, but most usually end up signing for top dollar anyway. Nowitzki is the rare player who backed up the talk by accepting a ridiculously team-friendly deal, making him an absolute steal on his three-year, $25MM contract.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is the three-year, $46.085MM deal to which Cuban and Nelson inked restricted free agent Chandler Parsons. Dallas had to overpay in order to prevent the Rockets from matching the offer sheet, but one has to think that the opportunity to stick it to Houston GM Daryl Morey, an archrival, clouded the better judgment of the Mavs here.

To say that I dislike this deal would be a gross understatement. I like Parsons as a complementary player, but he is in no way worth the amount he is being paid, and Dallas would have been much wiser to forgo Parsons and pursue Trevor Ariza instead. Ariza has a very similar offensive skill set to Parsons, but is a superior defender, and his four-year, $32MM contract would have been a much wiser long-term investment. Parsons’ contract is virtually unmovable, as Morey pointed out, and will haunt the Mavs for its duration.

Nelson and Cuban also signed a number of veteran players to fill out the team’s depth chart. Nabbing Jameer Nelson. Al-Farouq Aminu, Richard Jefferson and Charlie Villanueva on team-friendly deals were all solid moves, and necessary if the team hopes to make waves in the west. I’m not as bullish about Nelson re-signing Devin Harris for four years and $17.563MM though. It’s too long of a contract for a 31-year-old point guard with his injury history and declining production. This is another contract that will hamper the franchise’s future moves regardless of the fact that the fourth year is non-guaranteed.

Part of the impetus to bring back Harris was the trade the Mavs worked out with the Knicks to reacquire Tyson Chandler, a player that both Cuban and Nelson acknowledged should have been retained after that championship season. To complete the deal, the Mavs shipped out starting point guard Jose Calderon, who was New York’s main target, as well as intriguing young guard Shane Larkin, who only saw limited action during his rookie season in Dallas.

A motivated and healthy Chandler can be a true difference maker for the Mavericks, who sorely missed the big man’s fire and defensive leadership. Chandler certainly seems like his old self thus far, averaging 11.5 points and 10.3 rebounds, a nice upgrade over Samuel Dalembert, who also went to the Knicks as a part of the Chandler trade.

As wise a move as it was to bring back Chandler, it nonetheless negatively affected the team’s depth and production at point guard, and Calderon’s marksmanship, ball-handling, and leadership will be difficult to replace. The trade also meant that Dallas would take on the remaining two years and $7,744,306 of Raymond Felton‘s contract. He has a player option for 2015/16, but unless Felton has a bounceback season this year after he returns from his injury and the subsequent four-game suspension that he must serve, he’s more than likely to opt in.

The Knicks’ motivation to make the trade was as much about ridding themselves of Felton as it was about obtaining Calderon. The 30-year-old Felton was one of the worst starting point guards in the league last year statistically, and he had worn out his welcome in New York. While Dallas may be able to make up for Calderon’s departure in aggregate, the Mavs may live to regret dealing away Shane Larkin, who has quite a bit of potential.

This uncertainty about their point guard situation also led Dallas to re-sign J.J. Barea to a prorated minimum salary contract for the rest of the season after the Wolves waived him just as the season began. To accommodate Barea’s signing the Mavs had to part with another young point guard with potential in Gal Mekel. With Dallas’ veteran roster and the team trying to maximize the time remaining in the league for Nowitzki, going the veteran route makes sense, but it is always a risk when mortgaging the future for the now.

So far the Mavs’ re-tooling has worked out, and the team is off to a 8-3 start to the season. With the west a bit more wide open than expected thanks to the injuries the Thunder have endured, Dallas has a chance to snag a higher playoff seeding than anticipated. But this team isn’t constructed for the long-term, with only three players who possess contracts with no options or non-guaranteed salary for next season. Chandler is set to become a free agent and there are four players (Felton, Monta Ellis, Nelson, and Aminu) who possess player options for the 2015/16 campaign. Nowitzki’s sweetheart deal will help Cuban and Nelson restock next summer, but Parsons’ bloated contract will negate some of that flexibility. It will take quite a bit of luck for the Mavs to advance deep into the playoffs this season, and the team had better hope that the addition of Chandler was worth the hit they took at the point to obtain him.

Photo courtesy of USA Today. The Basketball Insiders salary pages were used in the creation of this post. Chuck Myron contributed to this post.

Offseason In Review: Denver Nuggets

November 18th, 2014 at 11:36am CST by Chuck Myron

Signings

Alonzo Gee: One year, $1.063MM. Signed via minimum-salary exception.

Extensions

Kenneth Faried: Four years, $50MM (plus incentives).

Trades

Acquired 2014 pick No. 16, 2014 pick No. 19, and the less favorable of Chicago’s and Portland’s 2015 second-round picks from the Bulls in exchange for 2014 pick No. 11 and Anthony Randolph.
Acquired Arron Afflalo from the Magic in exchange for Evan Fournier and 2014 pick No. 56.

Waiver Claims

None

Draft Picks

Jusuf Nurkic (Round 1, 16th overall). Signed via rookie scale exception to rookie scale contract.
Gary Harris (Round 1, 19th overall). Signed via rookie scale exception to rookie scale contract.
Nikola Jokic (Round 2, 41st overall). Playing overseas.
Erick Green (2013, Round 2, 46th overall): Signed via mid-level exception for three years, $2.333MM. First year is partially guaranteed for $50K. Second and third years are non-guaranteed.

Camp Invitees

Jerrelle Benimon
Pops Mensah-Bonsu
Marcus Williams

Departing Players

Rookie Contract Option Decisions

None

Perhaps the greatest additions the Nuggets made to their lineup this offseason were simply the healthy returns of several players who missed significant time with injuries last season. Danilo Gallinari and JaVale McGee, two would-be starters who accounted for nearly $20.9MM in payroll, appeared in a total of five games put together during 2013/14. J.J. Hickson and Nate Robinson, two key acquisitions from the summer of 2013, suffered torn ACLs. A roster that was largely unchanged from a 57-win squad in 2012/13 sunk to just 36 wins, 13 games out of the playoffs.

The Nuggets entered the summer without the capacity to create cap room short of a trade and seemingly little motivation to make a substantive change, short of the availability of a superstar. They were reportedly involved in trade talk for Kevin Love, and at one point they were apparently Minnesota’s most favored trading partner outside of the Cavs and Warriors, but it never looked as though a deal was close. Denver had already acquired another team’s leading scorer by the time July began, bringing back Arron Afflalo from his two-year sojourn in Orlando, where he’d taken on much of the offensive load for a still-developing team. GM Tim Connelly used the sizable trade exception left over from the sign-and-trade deal that sent Andre Iguodala to Golden State the year before, and since it was Iguodala whom the Nuggets acquired to replace Afflalo back in 2012, this summer’s deal completed a circle.

The now 29-year-old Afflalo returns to Denver a more accomplished player than when he left, and one who showed a greater knack for making it to the free throw line even as he took a career-high 4.1 three-point attempts per game last year. Afflalo is also closer to the end of his contract, which pays him $7.5MM this year and would do the same in 2015/16, though he appears poised to opt out this summer. The cost to the Nuggets seemed low at the time of the trade, as Evan Fournier had yet to show why former GM Masai Ujiri spent the 20th overall pick of 2012 on him, but the Magic reportedly chose the shooting guard over other Afflalo trade packages that would have given them a future first-rounder. The wisdom of Ujiri and Magic GM Rob Hennigan is more readily apparent as Fournier has averaged 17.3 points per game to start the season in Orlando, nearly as many as Afflalo put up last season, though Fournier’s 50.9% three-point shooting suggests a regression is in order.

In any case, with a veteran to slot in at shooting guard, where Denver had been weak after the departure of Iguodala, Connelly and his staff decided two mid first-round rookies were better than one, trading the No. 11 overall pick in this year’s draft for Nos. 16 and 19. The presence of Afflalo, Randy Foye and a healthy Robinson will keep 19th pick Gary Harris from having a significant effect for a while, but 16th pick Jusuf Nurkic is already nudging his way into the rotation at center. Coach Brian Shaw has at times given Nurkic, McGee and Timofey Mozgov all meaningful minutes during games, a three-headed center rotation that worked for Shaw’s mentor, Phil Jackson, with the Bulls in the 1990s but is far from ideal. The Cavs showed consistent trade interest in Mozgov this past offseason, and while the Nuggets seemed just as consistent in turning them away, Nurkic’s development adds an intriguing subplot to Mozgov’s situation.

The Nuggets can also go three deep at power forward with Kenneth Faried, Hickson and Darrell Arthur, but that didn’t stop the team from investing heavily in Faried. The dreadlocked former 22nd overall pick made noticeable strides in his game last season and over the summer with Team USA. Connelly and company reportedly gauged the trade market for Faried about a year ago, but nothing came of early season rumors connecting him to the Knicks and Iman Shumpert, and the Nuggets reaped the benefits of Faried’s improvement.

Still, a report this week suggested that Denver isn’t as thrilled with his on-court performance as his four-year, $50MM extension would indicate, further asserting that the PR benefits of the deal played into the team’s thinking. Failing to extend Faried would have left some unanswered questions about the franchise’s future, but it also would have given the team a greater degree of flexibility. As it is, the Nuggets have about $58.2MM in commitments against a 2015/16 salary cap that’s likely to check in around $66-68MM. Some combination of Afflalo’s player option and non-guaranteed salary for Wilson Chandler and Foye could eat up whatever modest cap room Denver would otherwise be able to clear.

Perhaps leaving some questions unanswered and taking Faried to restricted free agency might have been the wisest move, particularly if Denver’s front office still has doubts about his game. The Nuggets have in the post-Carmelo Anthony era treaded the perilous waters of mediocrity, in true contention neither for the title nor the No. 1 overall pick. The team’s early season struggles have it lower in the standings than usual, but that’ll probably change once Denver’s coterie of players returning from injury get their legs back. It’s difficult to see just what the Nuggets are planning for the future even though they’ve invested in Faried as a major part of it.

Connelly’s ultimate aim appears to be packaging the team’s multitude of steady contributors in a trade for a star, as this summer’s talks involving Love suggest. Doing the Carmelo trade in reverse seemed to have been Ujiri’s end game, too, but as difficult as it can be to trade a superstar, it’s much harder to obtain one. For now, it’s a waiting game, and for Denver, it’s possible that over time Faried, Nurkic and maybe others will continue their development and become stars in their own right. It’s probably more likely that they fall short of that level, as most do. All of it leaves Denver in a position that’s not particularly appealing, one with which the Nuggets have become all too familiar.

Photo courtesy of USA Today Sports Images. The Basketball Insiders salary pages were used in the creation of this post.

Offseason In Review: Brooklyn Nets

November 17th, 2014 at 10:01am CST by Zachary Links

Signings

Bojan Bogdanovic: Three years, $10.277MM. Signed via mid-level exception. Includes 15% trade kicker.
Alan Anderson: Two years, $2.61MM. Signed via Non-Bird rights. Second year is player option
Jerome Jordan: One year, $816K. Signed via minimum-salary exception. Partially guaranteed for $100K.

Extensions

None

Trades

Acquired 2014 pick No. 44 from the Timberwolves in exchange for cash.
Acquired 2014 pick No. 59 from the Raptors in exchange for cash.
Acquired 2014 pick No. 60 from the Sixers in exchange for cash.
Acquired Jarrett Jack and Sergey Karasev in a three-way trade with the Cavaliers and Celtics for Marcus Thornton and the rights to Ilkan Karaman and Edin Bavcic.
Acquired Casper Ware and the more favorable of Milwaukee’s and Sacramento’s 2019 second-round picks from the Sixers in exchange for Marquis Teague. Ware was subsequently waived.

Waiver Claims

None

Draft Picks

Markel Brown (Round 2, 44th overall). Signed via minimum-salary exception for two years. Second year is non-guaranteed.
Xavier Thames (Round 2, 59th overall). Playing in Spain.
Cory Jefferson (Round 2, 60th overall). Signed via minimum-salary exception for two years. First year is $75K guaranteed. Second year is non-guaranteed.

Camp Invitees

Willie Reed

Departing Players

Rookie Contract Option Decisions

Sergey Karasev (third year, $1,599,840) — Exercised
Mason Plumlee (third year, $1,415,520) — Exercised

When the Nets hired Jason Kidd as head coach in the summer of 2013, many wondered how quickly he could make himself comfortable in his new role immediately after finishing his playing career. One year later, Kidd made a power play and when ownership wouldn’t give him control over basketball operations, he forced a trade to Milwaukee. His attempted coup came soon after he tried to convince Billy King & Co. to trade Brook Lopez and Mirza Teletovic to the Bucks for Larry Sanders and Ersan Ilyasova. It’s safe to say that he figured out this coaching thing pretty quickly.

Kidd has since been replaced with savvy veteran coach Lionel Hollins, and that was far from the only major change for Brooklyn this summer. The Kidd saga may have been the most shocking storyline of the offseason, but Brooklyn’s biggest loss on the court was the departure of Paul Pierce. Losing the 37-year-old stings not just because of the sticker price the Nets paid for him (and Kevin Garnett) in June of 2013, but because of what he brought to the court, even at his advanced age. The Nets, as you’ll recall, actually took off after Lopez’s unfortunate season-ending injury and that was thanks to their small-ball lineup with Pierce at the four. Pierce was in the midst of a wonderful second act to his career in black-and-white, but he was as surprised as the rest of us to see it all abruptly come to an end.

“It just happened so fast,” Pierce told reporters about a month ago. “I had a chance to talk to [Kidd] and he has his reasons, the way things went down. But like I said, the business — you’ve got to understand the business aspect of it. He moved on. The Nets moved on and people went their different directions. You see that a lot in this business.”

Pierce wound up signing with the Wizards on a two-year, $10.849MM contract and The Truth swears that the Nets let him go without a real fight or even an offer. Pierce says the Nets conveyed to him that they didn’t feel that they could contend in 2014/15 and wanted to cut costs. That’s a sad reality for Nets fans who expected that the money would never stop flowing from their free-spending, heli-skiing billionaire owner. Looking back on the way the rest of the offseason played out, it’s hard to doubt the veracity of Pierce’s claims.

Shaun Livingston was another wonderful revelation for the Nets in 2013/14. There’s simply no way the Nets could have survived missing Deron Williams for a quarter of the season (he really wasn’t all that sharp when he was on the floor, either) without the brilliant play of the former No. 4 overall pick. Teams circled the wagons around Livingston as he was poised to hit the open market and while the Nets considered the guard to be their No. 1 priority heading into the summer, they were too outmatched and fiscally handcuffed to retain him. Holding only Livingston’s Non-Bird rights, the Nets couldn’t do better than using their taxpayer’s mid-level exception, which would allow for a starting salary of $3.278MM and a total of nearly $10.3MM over the course of a three-year deal. Instead, Livingston returned to California by signing a three-year deal with a starting salary at the full $5.305MM mid-level exception with the Warriors. When considering the considerable pay difference, the Nets’ outlook for this season, and the blustery weather in Brooklyn, it’s hard to blame him.

Andray Blatche, who looked to be having a resurgence with the Nets not long ago, will also be out of the picture this season. Despite his size, athleticism, and metrics that still cast him as an eminently worthwhile reserve player, there was little interest from the Nets or the NBA’s other 29 teams. Blatche will take his talents (and his poor conditioning and his off-court issues) overseas this year to China. We can expect to see him back after the CBA season is finished, but it would be a surprise to see him pull a Colin Quinn and go back to Brooklyn.

So, who’s replacing these guys? This year, the Nets are finally welcoming draft-and-stash prospect Bojan Bogdanovic. Brooklyn inked the swingman to a three-year, $10.1MM pact a year after they failed to shake him loose from his Turkish team, Fenerbahce Ulker, for a similar deal. It’s (very) early in the season, but Bogdanovic has been one of the most impressive rookies so far in 2014/15, and that’s saying a lot given the hype surrounding this year’s class.

Meanwhile, to fill the void left by Livingston’s departure, the Nets completed a three-team deal with the Cavs and the Celtics to land guard Jarrett Jack. It wasn’t easy to give up Marcus Thornton, who had some strong performances for the Nets after his midseason arrival, but Livingston’s play from last season underscored the importance of having a strong backcourt option both alongside and in support of Williams. The swap also brought forward Sergey Karasev to the Nets’ second unit. Of course, the C’s picked up some nice assets from the deal and the trade gave the Cavs enough cap flexibility to bring LeBron James back home.

Andrei Kirilenko, who raised suspicions with his bargain signing last season, exercised his player option for $3.3MM this season. The Nets rounded out their roster with a few other moves, like re-signing Alan Anderson to a two-year, $2.61MM deal, adding big man Jerome Jordan on a minimum salary pact, and buying their way into the later part of the draft. The Nets had no picks heading into draft night, but they wound up acquiring three second-round choices that became Markel Brown (No. 44), Xavier Thames (No. 59), and Cory Jefferson (No. 60). Thames will get some seasoning in Europe, but both Brown and Jefferson are with the team for 2014/15.

Reporters spent a great deal of ink discussing whether Garnett would return to the Nets for the final season of his deal or retire, but the 38-year-old confirmed the general assumption that he would be back when he showed up at camp for his 20th NBA season. While KG’s best years are behind him, it always seemed as though KG was the key to retaining Pierce. As it turns out, the Nets let Pierce walk and wound up on the hook for Garnett’s $12MM this season. The Nets insist that Garnett can still be a contributor on limited minutes, but it remains to be seen how he’ll hold up between now and April, or possibly beyond.

Ultimately, much of the Nets’ success this season will come down to the health of stars Williams and Lopez. Williams spent a large chunk of the offseason recovering from double ankle surgery and Lopez had to bounce back from the fracture in his foot that cost him all but 17 games last year. The Nets played well despite Williams much of the time last season and as a whole were at their best without the services of Lopez, but the play of these two high-priced assets will dictate how far the Nets can go. They won’t be in the contender conversation this season, but there’s no reason why they can’t be in the playoff mix.

Photo courtesy of USA Today Sports Images. The Basketball Insiders salary pages were used in the creation of this post.

Offseason In Review: Milwaukee Bucks

November 14th, 2014 at 6:52pm CST by Eddie Scarito

Signings

Jerryd Bayless: Two years, $6MM. Signed via cap room.

Extensions

None

Trades

Acquired a 2015 second-round pick from the Hawks in exchange for 2014 pick No. 48.
Acquired Jared Dudley and the Clippers’ 2017 first-round pick (top-14 protected) from the Clippers in exchange for Carlos Delfino, Miroslav Raduljica and the Clippers’ 2015 second-round pick that they’d given up in a previous trade (as long as it falls between picks 31-50).

Waiver Claims

Kendall Marshall: Claimed from the Lakers. One year, $915K remaining.

Draft Picks

Jabari Parker (Round 1, 2nd overall). Signed via rookie scale exception to rookie scale contract.
Damien Inglis (Round 2, 31th overall). Signed via cap room for three years, $2.65MM. Third year is non-guaranteed.
Johnny O’Bryant (Round 2, 36th overall). Signed via cap room for three years, $2.425MM. Third year is non-guaranteed.

Camp Invitees

Micheal Eric
Elijah Millsap

Departing Players

Rookie Contract Option Decisions

Giannis Antetokounmpo (third year, $1,953,960) — Exercised
John Henson (fourth year, $2,943,221) — Exercised

When your NBA franchise has only had one winning season out of the last 10 and your city isn’t quite the draw for free agents that a warm weather locale is, nor is seen as a major mecca such as New York or Chicago, turning your fortunes around isn’t quite so simple. This is the position that Bucks GM John Hammond finds himself in while attempting to bring winning basketball to Milwaukee.

The Bucks had a rather quiet offseason for a team that only won 15 games a season ago. Only one free agent was inked, and while I’m a fan of Jerryd Bayless‘ game, he’s not a transformative sort of player for the franchise. He also plays the same position as the team’s only other veteran addition, Kendall Marshall, who was claimed off waivers after being let go by the Lakers, who could sure use his services this season, and the Bucks’ current leading scorer, Brandon Knight.

Generally speaking, teams that lose 67 games have much greater issues than filling up the bottom tiers of their point guard depth chart, though both Bayless and Marshall were solid, inexpensive additions. Still, if an NBA title is going to come to Wisconsin, it’s going to take quite a bit more to make that happen.

But just because the team didn’t throw money at a number of veterans this year, it doesn’t mean the Bucks aren’t headed in the right direction. This is a franchise that will need to build itself up through player development and the NBA draft, and that plan, while not likely to fully pay off this season despite the team’s 4-4 start, is well underway.

The biggest addition this summer arrived in the form of No. 2 overall pick Jabari Parker, one of the most intriguing talents in the draft. While Parker may not have the above-the-rim athleticism of Andrew Wiggins, nor the sky-high potential of Dante Exum or a healthy Joel Embiid, Parker is arguably the most NBA-ready of the entire 2014 draft class.

Parker’s NBA position isn’t quite defined yet, and he’ll rotate between both forward positions for the time being. He’s a bit of a tweener and may not be athletic enough to guard some of the league’s more dynamic small forwards, and he isn’t strong enough yet to play with the big boys down in the paint. But Parker is a talent, and talent will always find a place in this league. I can see Parker being used eventually like Carmelo Anthony is in New York when the Knicks go to their smaller lineups and ‘Melo mans the four spot. Parker isn’t in Anthony’s class as a scorer, nor do I think he’ll ever be, but he has the potential to be a multidimensional stat-sheet filler for the Bucks, and was a great addition to the franchise.

The most important cog in the Bucks’ future already resided on their roster heading into the offseason in the 6’11” form of Giannis Antetokounmpo, bane of arena announcers and basketball writers across the league. The “Greek Freak” is a major work in progress whose physical ability and highlight-reel plays far outdo his current level of production. Antetokounmpo has all the tools to be a major star in the league for years to come, but will need more than the 23.8 minutes per game he currently receives to get there.

One obstacle that worries me in regard to the Bucks’ handling of Antetokounmpo is the team’s preseason experiment with him at point guard. While he may have the physical tools to play the position, and while it would be amazing to watch a near seven-footer man the one-spot on a nightly basis, this could derail his development. Point guard is by far the most difficult position to learn, and doing so at the NBA level against the ridiculous talent that exists in the league at that position is no easy task. There are enough fundamental holes in Antetokounmpo’s current game that he doesn’t need the added level of difficulty that a position switch would bring about.

Milwaukee wisely exercised exercised both Antetokounmpo’s and John Henson‘s rookie options this offseason, but the team passed on working out an extension with Brandon Knight. Knight isn’t a pure point guard and is much more comfortable as a scorer than as a ball-distributor. His turnover rate is extremely high this season at 4.0 per game, up from his career average of 2.7, but he’s only 22 years old, and is a dynamic offensive player. If Knight keeps up his averages of 17.4 PPG, 6.1 RPG, and 6.9 APG, he’ll definitely garner interest when he becomes a restricted free agent next summer and could be costly for the Bucks to retain.

Thanks to their young, exciting core of players, the Bucks’ outlook is quite positive. A number of player-friendly contracts on the books will nonetheless hamper the franchise’s ability to improve over the next few seasons. Milwaukee has $46,849,680 in guaranteed salaries already committed for the 2015/16 season, and this doesn’t include a new deal for Knight, nor the $4.25MM salary for Jared Dudley, who has an early termination option for next season.

The Bucks agreed to tether themselves to Dudley’s 2015/16 salary in a trade that sent out Carlos Delfino and Miroslav Raduljica, both of whom had non-guaranteed salary for that season. It signaled a willingness to take some pains in the near future for the rare opportunity to net a first-round pick, the price the Clippers paid to facilitate the deal. The lottery-protected selection won’t come until 2017 at the earliest, and it will probably fall in the 20s barring an unlikely decline in Clipper fortunes over the next few years. It’s still quite a valuable asset to receive for some short-term cap burden, a future second-round pick and two players who weren’t contributing much. It’s a signal that new Bucks majority owners Wesley Edens, Marc Lasry and Jamie Dinan are much more willing to focus on the future than longtime former owner Herb Kohl, who always seemed committed to competing in the near term, even if it mired the franchise in mediocrity.

Center Larry Sanders‘ $11MM annual salary is the most significant blight on the team’s balance sheet, and he is in no way worth that amount of money. The best hope the franchise has is if he can return to form and build up his trade value, though with Sanders averaging 5.9 points on 38.2% shooting, a horrid number for a 6’11” inside player, it will be extremely difficult to obtain anything of value for him.

The $16MM that the Bucks owe to O.J. Mayo between now and the end of 2015/16 isn’t helping the team, either. Mayo’s 12.1 PPG average isn’t setting the league on fire, and at 27 he’s not likely to break out anytime soon. The less-than-stellar contracts of Ersan Ilyasova ($7.9MM per year) and Zaza Pachulia ($5.2MM per year) are additional albatrosses the team will have to deal with through next season. Neither of those two big men are worth that chunk of cap space on a young rebuilding squad like the Bucks.

Another change worth noting for the Bucks this past offseason was the hiring of Jason Kidd as the new head coach after a courtship that took place while Larry Drew was still employed in the position. Bringing in Kidd cost Milwaukee 2015 and 2019 second-round draft picks, which were sent to Brooklyn as compensation. Kidd’s lone season in Brooklyn was anything but smooth, with the Nets organization seemingly all for parting ways despite the team making it to to the second round of the playoffs for the first time in seven years. Kidd was reportedly pushing for more front office control in Brooklyn, something the team apparently wasn’t too keen on granting. Add that to the reports of locker room strife and it remains to be seen how Kidd will fare switching from a veteran-dominated team to a much younger squad. It is a much different task to develop players while losing than to step in and take over a team that was built with the intent to challenge for an NBA title.

Fortunes in Milwaukee aren’t likely to turn around this season, but the groundwork has been laid for incremental gains, and if the team continues to draft well and the young talent reaches its potential, Bucks fans will have more to cheer about in the coming years. It will nonetheless continue to be difficult to lure upper-tier free agent talent to the city, and the Bucks will need to rid themselves of a number of bloated contracts to make themselves more competitive for the second-level free agents that hit the market. But for now, Milwaukee can enjoy watching the development of Antetokounmpo and Parker. The team must pin its hopes on being able to sign them for the long term when their rookie deals are up, and that years of losing basketball don’t take a toll on their pair of gems in the meantime.

Photo courtesy of USA Today Sports Images. The Basketball Insiders salary pages were used in the creation of this post. Chuck Myron contributed to this post.

Offseason In Review: Detroit Pistons

November 13th, 2014 at 6:39pm CST by Eddie Scarito

Signings

Jodie Meeks: Three years, $18.81MM. Signed via cap room.
Caron Butler: Two years, $9MM. Signed via cap room. Second year is non-guaranteed.
D.J. Augustin: Two years, $6MM. Signed via cap room.
Greg Monroe: One year, $5.48MM. Signed qualifying offer.
Aaron Gray: Two years, $2.584MM. Signed via cap room. Second year is player option. Subsequently waived.
Cartier Martin: Two years, $2.417MM. Signed via cap room. Second year is player option.

Extensions

None

Trades

Acquired Joel Anthony from the Celtics in exchange for Will Bynum.

Waiver Claims

None

Draft Picks

Spencer Dinwiddie (Round 2, 38th overall). Signed via cap room for three years, $2.525MM. Third year is non-guaranteed

Camp Invitees

Josh Bostic
Lorenzo Brown
Brian Cook
Hasheem Thabeet

Departing Players

Rookie Contract Option Decisions

Kentavious Caldwell-Pope (third year, $2,891,760) — Exercised
Andre Drummond (fourth year, $3,272,091) — Exercised

Detroit entered this past offseason fresh off of their second consecutive 29-win campaign and with a roster still filled with a number of ill-fitting parts, but there is reason for hope in the Motor City with the arrival of new team president and head coach Stan Van Gundy. Both Van Gundy and the organization realize that any turnaround will take some time, but after seven consecutive seasons of under .500 basketball, any positive development is cause for celebration.

It’s been over 16 months since Josh Smith inked his four-year, $54MM contract, and the franchise is still trying to figure out how to best utilize him. I’m sure that in theory, forming a frontcourt that featured a trio of talented big men seemed like an intriguing premise, but the results have been quite disappointing thus far. Smith’s field goal percentage has plummeted and it might be time for both the 28-year-old and the team to acknowledge that he isn’t suited to play small forward, nor is it in the best interests of either for him to keep firing away with ill-advised three-pointers.

The Pistons were supposedly shopping Smith during the offseason, and there was talk that the Kings were interested in acquiring the 28-year-old forward, but no deal came to fruition. Unloading Smith would present a challenge, as there aren’t many teams eager to shell out $13.5MM per year for a limited offensive player on the downswing of his career. Smith even at his best is not a true No. 1 option on a contending club, but rather a talented complementary piece.

While Smith is arguably the biggest name on the roster, the storyline that dominated Detroit’s sports pages all offseason were the talks between the team and Greg Monroe. Monroe showed little interest in signing a long-term deal with the Pistons, and he and agent David Falk reportedly sought sign-and-trade deals rather than offer sheets with the fear that the Pistons would match, keeping him in Detroit for the long-term. Instead, Monroe took an unusual and riskier path, signing his qualifying offer, worth only about $5.48MM for one season, setting himself up to become an unrestricted free agent next summer.

By signing the team’s qualifying offer Monroe all but assured two things: He’ll be on the Pistons roster for the entire season, and he’ll be wearing a different team’s jersey the next one. Theoretically Monroe can still be dealt during the season, but because he signed the qualifying offer, he can veto any trade, and unless things truly become untenable for him in Detroit, he would most likely do just that, since any team that traded for him wouldn’t have his Bird rights. The Pistons would also only get pennies on the dollar for him at this point, since other teams wouldn’t give up the farm for a player who would essentially be a rental, so there would be little incentive at this point to try and deal Monroe.

Monroe hasn’t completely ruled out re-signing in Motown, but if he truly wanted to stay, the ink from his signature would have dried on a new deal already. Of course, things can always change, and if the franchise has a strong season, or if Van Gundy can convince Monroe during the year that the Pistons are truly the right team for him, then it’s possible Monroe could have a change of heart.

The 24-year-old will likely seek max money in his new deal, something I quite frankly don’t feel that he is worth. He’s a young, productive big man whose best seasons are still likely to come, but with the league moving further and further away from being a post-up league, Monroe’s limited offensive game and less-than-stellar defense do not warrant that large of a financial commitment. The Pistons could just look to Roy Hibbert‘s deal with the Pacers as a cautionary tale in this regard. For his part, Monroe is playing like he’s in a walk-year thus far, logging 17.3 points and 11.0 rebounds a night.

Van Gundy was quite busy this offseason in the free agent market, and he made a number of moves to address the team’s lack of outside shooting. I’m a big fan of signing Caron Butler, whose professionalism and work-ethic are fantastic, and just what a younger team like Detroit needs. The lack of a guarantee on the second year also mitigates the franchise’s financial liability greatly, which was a shrewd move. I also like the deal that Van Gundy gave to D.J. Augustin, a solid backup at the point whose two-year pact is quite reasonable.

The move I have an issue with is signing Jodie Meeks to a three-year, $18.81MM contract. This is one that I believe will stain Detroit’s balance sheet for its duration. As I mentioned, the Pistons desperately needed outside shooters to spread the floor so that Monroe, Smith, and Andre Drummond could have more room to operate down low. But Meeks is a complementary rotation piece at best, and his career-high 15.7 PPG last season was grossly inflated by playing for the Lakers, who needed someone to take those shots in the absence of Kobe Bryant. Plus, with the rise of Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, Meeks should prove to be even more of an unnecessary acquisition. I firmly believe that Meeks is more likely to be the player who had a career 7.4 PPG average heading into the 2013/14 campaign than a true game-changer when he returns from the back injury that has kept him out of action thus far.

The Pistons were also limited in what they would be able to garner on draft night, thanks to the first-round pick they had to surrender to the Hornets when the lottery slotted them just one spot shy of the protected range on the selection they owed from the Corey Maggette/Ben Gordon deal. But Van Gundy did very well to maximize the value of his lone second-rounder when he chose Spencer Dinwiddie, a player who would have been a likely mid-to-late first rounder if he had not been injured during his final season at Colorado. It will take him some time to regain his form, but for the long-term, he was a steal.

Detroit has a number of roster issues to address as it moves onto its next chapter. With only $39,479,553 in guaranteed money committed for 2015/16, Van Gundy will have a great opportunity to reshape the roster. But by next season, Monroe will likely be playing elsewhere, Smith will probably still be taking up a large chunk of cap space, and Brandon Jennings, who continues to try to prove that he can be a successful floor general, will still likely be on the books for $8,344,497. Thankfully, the Pistons have Drummond, who is one of the most intriguing big men in the league, to build around. But with the rise of the Cavs and the continued excellence of the Bulls in the Central Division, the franchise is still a ways from being a contender.

Photo courtesy of USA Today Sports Images. The Basketball Insiders salary pages were used in the creation of this post.

Offseason In Review: Cleveland Cavaliers

November 13th, 2014 at 1:30pm CST by Chuck Myron

Signings

LeBron James: Two years, $42.218MM. Signed via cap room. Second year is player option. Includes 15% trade kicker.
Mike Miller: Two years, $5.587MM. Signed via room exception.
James Jones: One year, $1.448MM. Signed via minimum-salary exception.
Shawn Marion: One year, $1.448MM. Signed via minimum-salary exception.
Alex Kirk: Two years, $1.352MM. Signed via minimum-salary exception. First year is partially guaranteed for $65K. Second year is non-guaranteed.
Lou Amundson: One year, $1.31MM. Signed via minimum-salary exception. Non-guaranteed.
A.J. Price: One year, $1.063MM. Signed via minimum-salary exception. Non-guaranteed. Waived after opening night.

Extensions

Kyrie Irving: Five years, maximum salary. Fifth year is player option. Includes 15% trade kicker.
Anderson Varejao: Three years, $30MM. Second year is partially guaranteed for $9.36MM. Third year is non-guaranteed.

Trades

Acquired Boston’s 2015 second-round pick (top-55 protected) and the rights to Ilkan Karaman and Edin Bavcic in a three-team trade with the Celtics and Nets in exchange for Jarrett Jack, Sergey Karasev, Tyler Zeller and Cleveland’s 2016 first-round pick (top-10 protected).
Acquired the Clippers’ 2016 second-round pick (top-55 protected) from the Pelicans in exchange for Alonzo Gee.
Acquired Brendan Haywood and the rights to Dwight Powell from the Hornets in exchange for Scotty Hopson and cash.
Acquired John Lucas III, Malcolm Thomas and Erik Murphy from the Jazz in exchange for Carrick Felix, Cleveland’s 2015 second-round pick, and $1.3MM cash.
Acquired Kevin Love in a three-team trade with the Timberwolves and Sixers in exchange for Andrew Wiggins, Anthony Bennett and Miami’s 2015 first-round pick (top-10 protected).
Acquired Keith Bogans, Sacramento’s 2015 second-round pick (top-55 protected) and Sacramento’s 2017 second-round pick (top-55 protected) from the Celtics in exchange for Dwight Powell, Erik Murphy, Malcolm Thomas, John Lucas III, Cleveland’s 2016 second-round pick and Cleveland’s 2017 second-round pick.
Acquired Philadelphia’s 2015 second-round pick (if it falls from pick No. 51 through No. 55, as long as the Sixers don’t have to send it to the Celtics to satisfy an obligation from previous trades) from the Sixers in exchange for Keith Bogans and Cleveland’s 2018 second-round pick.

Waiver Claims

None

Draft Picks

Andrew Wiggins (Round 1, 1st overall). Signed via rookie exception to rookie scale contract. Subsequently traded.
Joe Harris (Round 2, 33rd overall). Signed via cap room for three years, $2.710MM. Third year is non-guaranteed.
Dwight Powell (Round 2, 45th overall). Signed via minimum-salary exception for two years. Subsequently traded.

Camp Invitees

Chris Crawford
Shane Edwards
Stephen Holt

Departing Players

Rookie Contract Option Decisions

Dion Waiters (fourth year, $5,138,430) — Exercised

Cleveland has endured countless tough breaks over the years, but ever since the Cavs lucked out and grabbed the No. 1 overall pick in the lottery this year, fortune has shined on northeast Ohio. LeBron James reversed course from four years ago and returned home from Miami, and three of his former Heat teammates joined him in flocking to Cleveland. The four-time MVP’s magnetism was most impactful in swaying Kevin Love, the best player available on the trade market, to accept a deal that sent him to Cleveland, a prospect Love reportedly otherwise wouldn’t have considered. We may never know if LeBron would still have chosen to sign with the Cavs if they hadn’t emerged from the lottery with the top pick, but it was clear that possessing Andrew Wiggins, whom the Cavs took with that No. 1 overall selection, was crucial to the Love trade.

The presence of Wiggins allowed GM David Griffin to beat out a field that included nearly half the league in a heated derby to win over Timberwolves president of basketball operations Flip Saunders, who held out on the Cavs until they were willing to surrender the former Kansas swingman. It was an early test of mettle for Griffin, who took over the GM duties on an interim basis shortly before the trade deadline last season and saw the team remove the interim tag a few months later. Regardless of whether James intentionally left Wiggins’ name out when he discussed his teammates in the public letter announcing his return, any trade involving a first overall pick is fraught with historical consequences. That’s doubly so when a team trades not one but two former No. 1 picks, as was the case with Anthony Bennett heading to Minnesota along with Wiggins. Bennett certainly didn’t live up to having been the top pick as a rookie, but he nonetheless has plenty of potential, and the addition of a future draft choice in the deal made it clear that priorities have shifted in Cleveland. The Cavs aren’t going to waste precious years of LeBron’s prime slowly building toward a championship. They want to make it happen this year.

Still, it’s not as if Griffin cleaned out all of his team’s young talent. The Cavs have taken five players within the top four picks in the last four drafts, and three of them remain. None is as prominent as Kyrie Irving, who quickly shushed rumors that he was looking to escape Cleveland, signing a five-year max extension that makes him the team’s Designated Player. Irving didn’t receive all of what he might have wanted in the extension, since he agreed to take approximately 27.5% of the salary cap as a starting salary, rather than the roughly 30% to which he’d be entitled if he triggers the Derrick Rose Rule this year. There’s a decent chance he’ll do so, since the Rose Rule would kick in for him if he repeats his selection as an All-Star starter from a year ago. Those extra millions of dollars will matter in seasons to come as Cleveland strains to carry three maximum-salary players, but in the context of this past summer, the extension was one of many hallmarks of the changing fortunes surrounding the Cavs. Irving committed to the extension before LeBron decided to return, hitching himself to a franchise that still dealt with more questions than answers. Few players would ever turn down a five-year max deal, but securing Irving’s agreement on the first day of free agency surely didn’t hurt the Cavs’ case as LeBron weighed his choices in July.

The dynamics surrounding the team’s negotiations with its other player eligible for a rookie scale extension were much different. Tristan Thompson‘s alliance with Klutch Sports, the same agency that counts LeBron as its founding client, seemingly gave the former No. 4 overall pick an inside track to a lucrative deal with the Cavs. Thompson reportedly sought salaries of around $12MM a year, and the Cavs apparently exceeded that figure in their final offer, but the sides fell short of a deal in talks that went right up until the final hour before the 11:00pm Central deadline on October 31st. That negotiations carried on nearly as long as they possibly could seems to indicate that there’s common ground that they could revisit when Thompson hits restricted free agency in the summer. Still, Cleveland’s veteran extension for Anderson Varejao creates complications.

Varejao has close ties to LeBron, too, as he’s the only member of the Cavs who remains from the four-time MVP’s first go-around in wine-and-gold, and the two have remained close friends. Still, there’s significant risk involved in committing $30MM over three years to a 32-year-old so beset by injuries that he’s averaged fewer than 37 games played over the last four seasons. The Brazilian is healthy now, and he beat out Thompson for a starting spot on opening night, but even when he’s in the lineup, there are issues. Neither Thompson, Varejao nor Love, the three most prominent big men on the Cavs roster, is a strong rim-protector. Even if one of them were, the Cavs would be hard-pressed to start all three of them, and if Cleveland re-signs Love at a sum anywhere close to market value and gives a new deal to Thompson at the terms he’s seeking, all three will be making eight figures apiece annually. That would be a steep price to pay for a talented but flawed frontcourt, even with the salary cap poised to rise dramatically.

The lack of an extension for Thompson leaves the Cavs with flexibility for the future, which Griffin has strived to maintain even as he makes a hard push to ready the team to win now. A three-for-one trade with the Jazz that he pulled off in late July turned out to provide the fuel for the acquisition and subsequent flipping of Keith Bogans, a set of maneuvers that netted the Cavs a $5,285,816 trade exception that they can use anytime between now and the end of next September. That trio of swaps, seemingly a precursor to a fourth trade, is demonstrative of Griffin’s dexterity at swinging deals. He had already put that on display over the summer when he engineered a three-team trade with the Nets and Celtics to unload Jarrett Jack‘s $6.3MM salary and open cap room necessary to sign LeBron to a max deal.

Still, for all the superstar acquisitions and intricate trades that took place for the Cavs this past offseason, the team’s boldest move came when it hired David Blatt as head coach. It’s the first time an NBA team has ever hired a head coach whose prior experience came exclusively overseas, and while Blatt left a trail of success at his many stops around the globe, there’s no league like the NBA. Lead assistant Tyronn Lue, upon whom the team bestowed a record four-year, $6.5MM deal, is entering only his sixth season as a coach following the end of his playing career in 2009. Granted, that’s a wealth of experience compared to the wave of neophytes who’ve taken over head coaching jobs in the NBA, like Derek Fisher, Steve Kerr and Jason Kidd, but Blatt and Lue are under immediate pressure to succeed. There’s little to suggest whether they will or they won’t, casting perhaps the most significant cloud of uncertainty over a team that returns a league-low five players from last season.

The victories piled up for Cleveland in the offseason, from LeBron to Love to Irving to Shawn Marion, who could have commanded higher salaries and more minutes elsewhere as he lingered into August as perhaps the most significant unsigned free agent. Miller, too, was a sought-after commodity after he showed off his health with the Grizzlies last season, when he appeared in all 82 games. There’s still a chance that Ray Allen, still undecided on retirement, will choose not only to play but to do so with a few of his old Heat teammates in Cleveland. None of it will matter unless all of the new faces in Cleveland can quickly coalesce and live up to the lofty expectations surrounding them. It took LeBron two years to win a championship in Miami, but the noise and pressure surrounding the team didn’t stop until he did. That will likely be the case in Cleveland, too.

Photo courtesy of USA Today Sports Images. The Basketball Insiders salary pages were used in the creation of this post.

Offseason In Review: Washington Wizards

November 12th, 2014 at 1:00pm CST by Chuck Myron

Signings

Marcin Gortat: Five years, $60MM. Re-signed via Bird rights.
Paul Pierce: Two years, $10.849MM. Signed via mid-level exception. Second year is player option.
Kevin Seraphin: One year, $3.899MM. Signed qualifying offer.
Garrett Temple: Two years, $2.082MM. Re-signed via minimum-salary exception. Second year is player option.
Drew Gooden: One year, $1.448MM. Signed via minimum-salary exception.
Rasual Butler: One year, $1.448MM. Signed via minimum-salary exception.

Extensions

None

Trades

Acquired $1.8MM cash from the Lakers in exchange for 2014 pick No. 46.
Acquired Melvin Ely in a three-way trade with the Rockets and Pelicans in exchange for Trevor Ariza. Ely was subsequently waived.
Acquired DeJuan Blair from the Mavericks in exchange for the rights to Emir Preldzic. Blair was signed-and-traded for three years, $6MM. Third year is non-guaranteed.
Acquired Kris Humphries from the Celtics in exchange for Washington’s 2015 second-round pick (top-49 protected). Humphries was signed-and-traded for three years, $13.32MM. The third year is non-guaranteed.

Waiver Claims

None

Draft Picks

None

Camp Invitees

Vander Blue
Damion James
John Lucas III
Daniel Orton
Xavier Silas
David Stockton

Departing Players

Rookie Contract Option Decisions

Bradley Beal (fourth year, $5,694,674) — Exercised
Otto Porter (third year, $4,662,960) — Exercised

The Wizards had their greatest postseason success in more than three decades last season, but it’s not as if there weren’t expectations that they would step forward. The franchise had just committed a five-year maximum-salary extension to John Wall in the summer of 2013 and traded a first-round pick to Phoenix on the eve of the season to acquire Marcin Gortat and keep its playoff hopes alive in the wake of a serious injury to Emeka Okafor. Coach Randy Wittman was under the gun, and rumors about his future with the team reportedly persisted until the Wizards dispatched the Bulls in the first round. Wittman wound up receiving a three-year extension worth roughly $3MM a year soon after the Pacers eliminated the Wizards in round two, but that was just a single step in an offseason journey that scarcely allowed time for GM Ernie Grunfeld to revel in the team’s newfound success.

There was pressure on the Wizards from the time Gortat arrived to ensure that they hadn’t surrendered the pick that turned out to be this year’s 18th overall selection for a mere rental. The Polish Hammer’s value only escalated as he proved he could handle the starting center job on a team capable of making noise in the playoffs. The Wizards tried to entice Gortat into signing an extension last season, but rare is the veteran who would do so, and he hit free agency as expected this past summer, drawing interest from the Cavs and Heat. Still, neither could offer the fifth year that the Wizards included in their proposal, and Gortat quickly chose to stay in Washington for $12MM annual salaries. The commitment is not especially dire for an accomplished starting center in his prime, especially given the expected jump in the salary cap in years to come. It made it harder for the team to find the money necessary to re-sign Trevor Ariza, but it wasn’t necessarily the reason why the swingman chose not to return.

Ariza said he took Houston’s offer of the same $32MM over four years that the Wizards had on the table in part because of the lack of a state income tax in Texas. The Wizards probably could have mitigated that difference, at least to some degree, and they certainly could have stuck a fifth year on their offer as they did with Gortat. Still, Ariza felt that the Rockets simply pursued him harder, even though the Wizards seemingly put him at or near equal footing with Gortat as the team established its priorities. Grunfeld nonetheless made the best of his loss, participating in a sign-and-trade that netted Washington a lucrative $8,579,089 trade exception. He also used the full mid-level exception that re-signing Ariza would have made difficult, if not impossible, to access to make the sort of signing the Wizards hadn’t made in ages.

Paul Pierce had his sights set on returning to the Nets, and once Brooklyn failed to bend to his demands, the Clippers were next in line. In an ironic twist, current Clippers and then-Wizards assistant coach Sam Cassell helped turn Pierce on to what had been an uncommon destination for late-career veteran stars. Washington’s playoff run had positioned the franchise to convince the 10-time All-Star to join a team that’s spent much of Pierce’s career looking up at his team in the standings. The now 37-year-old clearly isn’t the player he used to be, as he’s coming off a career-low 13.5 points per game, but his arrival signals a potential turning point for the Wizards, one that nonetheless heaps additional pressure on the team to keep the momentum going.

Grunfeld wasted no time reaping another benefit from the Ariza sign-and-trade, using part of the trade exception to engineer yet another sign-and-trade that saw Washington come away with a player this time around. Kris Humphries is a 10-year veteran whose production has tailed off in recent years, but he’s still just 29 years old and seemingly capable of finding the form that allowed him to average a double-double in back-to-back seasons with the Nets in 2010/11 and ’11/’12. His arrival lends further credence to the win-now attitude that surrounds the Wizards, particularly given Washington’s decision to pass on a qualifying offer for Trevor Booker at the conclusion of his rookie contract this summer. Humphries seems capable of filling the role that Booker, now with the Jazz, played last year off the bench and as a part-time starter for the oft-injured Nene.

DeJuan Blair figures to mount a challenge for those minutes, too. The undersized big man came to Washington via yet another sign-and-trade, one that Grunfeld made possible with the trade exception that rose from the vestiges of last summer’s ill-fated Eric Maynor signing. Blair’s acquisition seemed a clear signal that Grunfeld considers depth along the front line a priority. The re-signing of late-season find Drew Gooden is further indication of that. The Wizards will certainly have plenty in reserve should Nene go down with injury again, but they’ve also positioned themselves firmly in the dwindling camp of teams that believe in the benefits of having two big men on the floor.

The Wizards also secured the services of center Kevin Seraphin for another year when they extended him a qualifying offer, which Seraphin simply decided to ink. It was somewhat surprising to see the Wizards make a qualifying offer to Seraphin and not to Booker. Even though the Wizards had triggered a bump in the value of Booker’s would-be qualifying offer, it still would have been less than $1MM greater than Seraphin’s. Every dollar certainly counted for the team as it sought to bring back Gortat and Ariza, and Seraphin, at 6’9″, can play the center position a lot more capably than the 6’7″ Booker can. Still, it’s an odd choice, particularly given that Booker saw nearly twice as many minutes per game as Seraphin did last year.

The timing of the decision came as the team opted to guarantee Andre Miller‘s $4.625MM salary for this season rather than waive him and owe only a $2MM partial guarantee, so perhaps Washington viewed Miller and a qualifying offer for Booker as an either-or proposition. Regardless, Miller, another shrewd midseason veteran acquisition, gave the Wizards stability in the backcourt, as did the re-signing of Garrett Temple. Upgrading the backup point guard position was seemingly on the team’s to-do list before it acquired Miller, but Temple clearly proved his value to Grunfeld and company, earning a deal that gives him two guaranteed seasons, including a player option on year two. The 6’6″ Temple has shown his versatility as he’s capably plugged the hole that Bradley Beal‘s early season injury had created at shooting guard, leaving precious few minutes for Rasual Butler, whom the team kept to start the season on his non-guaranteed training camp deal.

Still, even the 35-year-old Butler is symbolic of the commitment to the present in Washington. Six of the team’s 15 players have already celebrated their 30th birthdays, and Humphries will join that club in February. Neither Wall nor Beal has yet reached age 25, but there’s no mistaking that the Wizards are a veteran team built to win now. They’re still a step or two away from title contention, but even amid all the pressure surrounding the club, that’s not necessarily the only goal in mind. If the team can sneak into the Eastern Conference Finals this year, thus continuing its trend of unfamiliar postseason success, the Wizards will have furthered their status as a free agent destination, with Washington native Kevin Durant‘s free agency looming in 2016.

Photo courtesy of USA Today Sports Images. The Basketball Insiders salary pages were used in the creation of this post.

Offseason In Review: Orlando Magic

November 11th, 2014 at 6:11pm CST by Eddie Scarito

Signings

Channing Frye: Four years, $32MM. Signed via cap room.
Ben Gordon: Two years, $9MM. Signed via cap room. Second year is non-guaranteed.
Luke Ridnour: Two years, $5.5MM. Signed via cap room. Second year is non-guaranteed.

Extensions

Nikola Vucevic: Four years, $48MM (plus incentives)

Trades

Acquired 2014 pick No. 10 from the Sixers in exchange for 2014 pick No. 12, Orlando’s 2015 second-round pick, and Philadelphia’s 2017 first-round pick that the Sixers had given up in a previous trade.
Acquired Evan Fournier and 2014 pick No. 56 from the Nuggets in exchange for Arron Afflalo.
Acquired Anthony Randolph, the more favorable of Chicago’s and Portland’s 2015 second-round picks, the more favorable of Chicago’s and Portland’s 2016 second-round picks, and cash from the Bulls in exchange for the rights to Milovan Rakovic. Randolph was subsequently waived.

Waiver Claims

Willie Green: Claimed from the Clippers. One year, $1.448MM remaining.

Draft Picks

Aaron Gordon (Round 1, 4th overall). Signed via rookie exception to rookie scale contract.
Elfrid Payton (Round 1, 10th overall). Signed via rookie exception to rookie scale contract.
Devyn Marble (2013, Round 2, 50th overall). Signed via cap room for three years, $2.71MM. Second and third years are non-guaranteed.

Camp Invitees

Kadeem Batts
Drew Crawford
Seth Curry
Peyton Siva

Departing Players

Rookie Contract Option Decisions

Evan Fournier (fourth year, $2,288,205) — Exercised
Maurice Harkless (fourth year, $2,894,059) — Exercised
Andrew Nicholson (fourth year, $2,380,594) — Exercised
Victor Oladipo (third year, $5,192,520) — Exercised

The Magic entered the offseason looking to continue onward with their plan of rebuilding through young, athletic talent. Orlando isn’t a realistic playoff contender for the 2014/15 campaign, despite playing in the Eastern Conference, nor do the Magic necessarily expect themselves to be in the postseason mix this season. Success this year will be measured more in player development rather than in the standings. With that mission in mind, the team’s offseason should be considered mostly a success.

Orlando began the summer by agreeing to a trade with the Nuggets that sent Arron Afflalo back to Denver for the younger, cheaper Evan Fournier and a second-rounder. I must admit at first blush that I wasn’t a fan of the deal. Afflalo had two solid seasons in Orlando in which he averaged 16.5 and 18.2 points per game, respectively. His salary was extremely reasonable at $7.5MM with a player option for the same amount in 2015/16. So, there was no real need to get him off of the books, despite Orlando having a league leading $14,705,259 in dead money against the salary cap for this season.

But at second pass the deal makes complete sense given the team’s youth movement. The 29-year-old Afflalo has probably peaked as a player, and with the Magic a year or two away from the playoffs, he wasn’t likely to be a major contributor by the time the team made it to the postseason anyway. Fournier is only 22 years old, and his skill set is similar enough to Afflalo’s that he’ll slot in nicely to Orlando’s system. So far the move has worked out rather well, with Fournier averaging 16.0 PPG compared to Afflalo’s 10.8 PPG on 38.7% shooting.

When rebuilding around younger players, one of the most important aspects of the process after development is the retention of that talent and not letting another franchise reap the rewards of your coaching staff’s hard work. To this end, the team met with mixed results.

Orlando and Nikola Vucevic reached an agreement on a four-year, $53MM contract extension that will keep the seven-footer in the Magic Kingdom through the 2018/19 season. Vucevic had a solid 2013/14 campaign but didn’t quite show the improvement from the previous season that the franchise and its fans had hoped for, though injuries certainly played a part in that result. He’s still only 24 years old and hasn’t hit his prime, and the early returns this year are very encouraging with averages of 18.6 PPG and 12.3 RPG.

On the negative side of the equation, the Magic failed to come to terms with their young forward Tobias Harris. Though the 22-year-old has said that he wants to remain in Orlando, at least one report indicated that his eye is wandering. Also not helping Orlando’s cause is that Harris is playing like he’s in a contract year, putting up 16.7 points and 8.1 rebounds through the first seven contests. Harris will become a restricted free agent this summer, so the Magic will have an opportunity to match any offer sheet Harris signs, though if another team jumps in and is willing to overpay similar to the Mavericks’ deal with Chandler Parsons, I would speculate that Orlando would let Harris walk.

This year’s NBA Draft was a boon for the franchise, and landing both Aaron Gordon and Elfrid Payton laid the groundwork for some exciting basketball in the seasons to come. Gordon was a bit of a surprise at the fourth overall pick since a number of mock drafts, including DraftExpress, had Gordon going somewhere between the seventh and tenth picks. But his upside was too good to ignore, and he’s shown flashes of the player he can become even though he doesn’t have a well-defined position yet.

While I like the selection of Gordon, I absolutely love the team nabbing point guard Elfrid Payton as the fruit of a draft-night swap with the Sixers. Payton is far from a finished product, and his jump shot mechanics are a major work in progress. But as a ballhandler and distributor, he’s already NBA-caliber, though his 3.0 turnovers a game will need to be improved upon. The true value of Payton though is that he will allow the team’s star player, Victor Oladipo, to return to his natural shooting guard position. While Oladipo was serviceable at the point, he and the team will be much better served long-term if Oladipo doesn’t have to wear himself out being the primary ballhandler and having to play defense against the likes of Chris Paul, Derrick Rose, and Russell Westbrook on a nightly basis.

This summer wasn’t all about youth for the Magic, and that’s where the team’s strategy showed some cracks. Signing Luke Ridnour to replace the departed Jameer Nelson as backup point guard was a decent signing, though Nelson’s leadership in the locker room will be missed. The second year of Ridnour’s deal is non-guaranteed, so the team limited its risk and allowed itself some flexibility moving forward.

The other two free agents the team added are a bit more puzzling to me. While Orlando didn’t guarantee the second year of its deal with Ben Gordon, a two-year, $9MM arrangement for an oft-injured aging veteran for whom there wasn’t stiff competition is a head-scratcher. But the four-year, $32MM fully guaranteed deal they gave to Channing Frye was downright confounding.

Stretch fours are all the rage in the league nowadays, but for a young rebuilding team like Orlando, Frye is an unneeded luxury, especially with the team having drafted Aaron Gordon, and also given the ability of Harris to fill that same role. Paying that stiff a price for a relatively one-dimensional player like Frye has all the earmarks of a contract that the team will regret in a year or two. This deal looks even worse to me when compared to the two-year, $14MM contract the Hornets inked with Marvin Williams.

Things will be brighter in Orlando in the coming seasons, and the franchise did well to extend Vucevic while making the most of draft night. Top free agents don’t see Orlando as a desirable free agent destination just yet, which may help explain the gross overpay for Frye. But with Oladipo, Vucevic, Payton, and Aaron Gordon, the franchise does have an exciting young core to build around.

Photo courtesy of USA Today Sports Images. The Basketball Insiders salary pages were used in the creation of this post. Chuck Myron contributed to this post.

Offseason In Review: Memphis Grizzlies

November 10th, 2014 at 11:04pm CST by Zachary Links

Signings

Vince Carter: Three years, $12.264MM. Signed via mid-level exception. Third year is partially guaranteed for $2MM. Contains 15% trade kicker.
Beno Udrih: Two years, $4.247MM. Signed via biannual exception. Second year is partially guaranteed for $923K.

Extensions

Zach Randolph: Two years, $20MM.

Trades

Acquired 2014 pick No. 35 from the Jazz in exchange for the more favorable of Toronto’s and Boston’s 2016 second-round picks.

Waiver Claims

None

Draft Picks

Jordan Adams (Round 1, 22nd overall). Signed via rookie scale exception to rookie scale contract.
Jarnell Stokes (Round 2, 35th overall). Signed via mid-level exception for three years, $2.55MM. Third season is non-guaranteed.

Camp Invitees

Michael Beasley
Patrick Christopher
Earl Clark
Luke Hancock
Kalin Lucas
Hassan Whiteside

Departing Players

Rookie Contract Option Decisions

None

After a rough start to the 2013/14 season, the Grizzlies got Marc Gasol back into the lineup and got back to the kind of basketball that we’re accustomed to. From January on, they fired on all cylinders and managed to make the playoffs as the No. 7 seed in the brutally tough West. The Grizzlies pushed the Thunder to a seven game series in the first round and coach Dave Joerger was, well, nearly fired. You read that right.

After owner Robert Pera fired assistant GM Stu Lash, CEO Jason Levien followed him out the door, putting the futures of Joerger, front office exec John Hollinger, and others in question. The Wolves came calling for Joerger but, ultimately, he wound up staying put while GM Chris Wallace saw his power restored.

The biggest question surrounding the Grizzlies offseason was whether they would keep Zach Randolph in place. Randolph had a $16.5MM option on 2014/15 but was pushing hard for an extension. Right after the draft, Z-Bo picked up his option and the two sides shook hands on a two-year, $20MM deal, which would seem to be a pretty fair deal for both sides. Randolph, 33, gets a nice payday on what could be his last big deal. The Grizzlies, meanwhile, get to keep their star forward at a reasonable price.

Randolph might not be a top flight player in his age 35 season, but the additional two years on his contract is preferable to the three that he was seeking. And, it’s hard to say how things would have played out for Z-Bo in free agency, but he was one of the top players available on the open market and ranked 10th in our free agent power rankings at the time. The new deal wasn’t cheap, but Randolph was bound to find other lucrative offers elsewhere.

While one big name vet was retained, Memphis lost another. The Grizzlies were discussing a new deal with Mike Miller for some time over the summer but eventually they informed him that they’d be going in a different direction.

That direction, it turns out, was vertical: the Grizzlies replaced the sharpshooting Miller with prolific high flyer Vince Carter. VC can’t get up like he used to, but he averaged a solid 11.9 PPG, 4.9 RPG, and 3.7 APG in 24.4 minutes per night for Dallas last season. He’s also a pretty solid outside shooter, even if he’s not on Miller’s level in that regard. The eight-time All-Star came aboard on a three-year, $12.264MM deal, though the final year of the pact is only partially guaranteed. As Carter later explained, Dallas had him on the backburner while they waited to see how the Chandler Parsons situation would turn out. Memphis gave him something of a take-it-or-leave-it offer, and he had little choice.

“I kind of understood how it goes from there. It’s a business. I get it, so there’s no hard feelings or anything like that. I understand how it goes. It was a great situation, a great offer from Memphis. It was kind of like, ‘If I pass on this now, what would be left here [in Dallas] for me?’ Obviously not much. Had to move on,” Carter said in October.

The Grizzlies’ other signing was a move to keep one of their own – guard Beno Udrih. Beno didn’t see a lot of burn for Memphis during the regular season – just 55 minutes, in fact – but he played a key role for them in the playoffs when Nick Calathes was suspended. Udrih averaged 7.9 points and 1.7 assists in 16.4 minutes per game in that first round series and was rewarded with a two-year, $4.247MM deal.

With Ed Davis and James Johnson moving on, the Grizzlies got reinforcements in the draft. With the No. 22 overall pick, Memphis selected UCLA shooting guard Jordan Adams, a player widely regarded as one of the draft’s best scorers but also one of the worst athletes in the class. Some people aren’t crazy about the pick, especially since Duke guard Rodney Hood was still on the board, but time will tell if the advanced stats tell the real story when it comes to Adams. In the second round, the Grizzlies plucked blue collar rebounder Jarnell Stokes out of Tennessee. Stokes doesn’t have world class athleticism or size (he’s only 6’6″), but he has tons of grit and is deceptively strong.

All in all, it was a rather quiet offseason in Memphis. But, given the chaos of the spring, that’s just fine for the Grizzlies.

Photo courtesy of USA Today Sports Images. The Basketball Insiders salary pages were used in the creation of this post.

Offseason In Review: Philadelphia 76ers

November 10th, 2014 at 4:58pm CST by Chuck Myron

Signings

Malcolm Thomas: Four years, $4.373MM. Signed via cap room. First year is partially guaranteed for $474K. Second, third and fourth years are non-guaranteed. Fourth year is also team option. (Waived after season began)
JaKarr Sampson: Four years, $3.384MM. Signed via cap room. First year is partially guaranteed for $50K. Second, third and fourth years are non-guaranteed. Fourth year is also team option.

Extensions

None

Trades

Acquired 2014 pick No. 12, Orlando’s 2015 second-round pick, and their own 2017 first-round pick that they’d given up in a previous trade from the Magic in exchange for 2014 pick No. 10.
Acquired the rights to Pierre Jackson from the Pelicans in exchange for 2014 pick No. 47.
Acquired 2014 pick No. 58 and 2014 pick No. 60 from the Spurs in exchange for 2014 pick No. 54.
Acquired cash from the Nets in exchange for 2014 pick No. 60.
Acquired Luc Mbah a Moute, Alexey Shved, and Miami’s 2015 first-round pick (top-10 protected) in a three-way trade with the Cavaliers and Timberwolves in exchange for Thaddeus Young.
Acquired Hasheem Thabeet and $100K cash from the Thunder in exchange for Philadelphia’s 2015 second-round pick (top-55 protected). Thabeet was subsequently waived.
Acquired Keith Bogans and Cleveland’s 2018 second-round pick from the Cavaliers in exchange for Philadelphia’s 2015 second-round pick if it falls from pick No. 51 through No. 55, as long as the Sixers don’t have to send it to the Celtics to satisfy an obligation from previous trades. Bogans was subsequently waived.
Acquired Marquis Teague and the more favorable of Milwaukee’s and Sacramento’s 2019 second-round picks from the Nets in exchange for Casper Ware. Teague was subsequently waived.
Acquired Travis Outlaw, New York’s 2019 second-round pick, and the right to swap the Clippers’ 2018 second-round pick with New York’s 2018 second-round pick from the Knicks in exchange for Arnett Moultrie. Outlaw was subsequently waived.

Waiver Claims

Chris Johnson: Claimed from the Celtics. Three years, $2.948MM remaining. Contract is non-guaranteed. Final year is also team option.

Draft Picks

Joel Embiid (Round 1, 3rd overall). Signed via rookie scale exception to rookie scale contract.
Dario Saric (Round 1, 12th overall). Playing overseas.
K.J. McDaniels (Round 2, 32nd overall). Signed required tender for one year, $507K. Non-guaranteed.
Jerami Grant (Round 2, 39th overall). Signed via cap room for four years, $3.762MM. Third and fourth years are non-guaranteed. Fourth year is also team option.
Vasilije Micic (Round 2, 52nd overall). Playing overseas.
Jordan McRae (Round 2, 58th overall). Playing overseas.
Pierre Jackson (2013, Round 2, 42nd overall). Signed via cap room for one year, $507K. Partially guaranteed for $400K. Subsequently waived.

Camp Invitees

Drew Gordon
Malcolm Lee
Ronald Roberts Jr.

Departing Players

Rookie Contract Option Decisions

Michael Carter-Williams (third year, $2,399,040) — Exercised
Nerlens Noel (third year, $3,457,800) — Exercised
Tony Wroten (fourth year, $2,179,354) — Exercised

You might assume that a team that pulls off nine trades in a single offseason and comes away with two of the top 12 picks in the draft would be in line to make significant improvements on a 19-63 record from the season before. But in the Bizarro world of the Sixers, where the concerns of tomorrow effectively blot out the existence of today, such conventional wisdom simply doesn’t hold. Those nine trades netted only a pair of players who are on the current roster. One of those top 12 picks is months from playing again, while the other probably won’t be in the NBA until 2016/17. Malcolm Thomas, the team’s most lucrative free agent signee, inked but a four-year, minimum-salary contract, and the Sixers have already released him.

Ultimately, the key figure of Philly’s summer of 2014 will be No. 3 overall pick Joel Embiid, who seemed primed to become the top pick until he broke his foot several days before the draft. The fear that Embiid might miss a significant portion of this season, if not all of it, dissuaded the Cavs and Bucks, who held the top two picks, from drafting him. Neither of them had the stomach to wait that long and risk that the 7-footer would never make it back fully healthy. The Sixers, with more patience than any team in memory, had no such qualms. Of course, it’s not necessarily a matter of merely waiting, since the Cameroonian’s skills, though eminently intriguing, are raw and in need of careful development. The Sixers already have 6’11” Nerlens Noel in place to offset the risk that Embiid simply doesn’t pan out, and while Noel has returned seemingly at full strength after missing all of 2013/14, two big men with a history of injuries doesn’t always add up to at least one healthy player.

There’s no specific timetable for Embiid’s return to the lineup, and there seems a decent chance that he, like Noel, will sit out the first year of his rookie scale contract. This, too, is a gamble for the Sixers, since even as they may be willing to wait longer to compete than anyone had imagined a team could, their up-and-coming talent won’t wait an eternity to be paid. The Sixers surely have no shortage of flexibility to grant extensions or new contracts to Noel and reigning Rookie of the Year Michael Carter-Williams when the time comes. Still, if 2014/15 is a lost cause of a year for Philadelphia, at least as far as the standings are concerned, that means Noel and Carter-Williams will have gone through half of their bargain rookie scale contracts without the Sixers having reaped much tangible benefit.

Philadelphia could nonetheless convert their existing talent into yet more future considerations, and reports this summer indicated the team considered trading Carter-Williams, with the acquisition of another high draft pick in mind. Such a swap would seem a last resort even for the brazen Sixers, as there’s seemingly little logic in giving up on a young prospect who’s already shown signs of achievement for the goal of either acquiring promising but unproven talent or buying more time to develop the rest of the team. Of course, GM Sam Hinkie doesn’t necessarily agree with that sentiment.

Hinkie and owner Josh Harris, who has empowered the GM to ignore any regard for winning in the near term, nearly found out the hard way what it’s like to hold an unpopular opinion about the way an NBA team should conduct its business. Rampant distaste around the NBA for Philadelphia’s take-no-prisoners approach to rebuilding fueled a league proposal to change the lottery and reduce the chances that the teams at the very bottom of the standings each year would receive the top pick in the subsequent draft. Luckily for the Sixers, they found an ally in Thunder GM Sam Presti, whose campaign against lottery reform seemed to play a crucial role in convincing enough owners to block the measure, which needed a three-fourths majority to pass. Support for adding greater disincentive to tank still remains, and another proposal seems likely to surface. It’s nonetheless an issue that almost certainly won’t affect the 2015 lottery, allowing the Sixers to proceed with their radical plan for the time being.

Even if the 2016 lottery takes place under a different set of rules, that still gives Hinkie plenty of time to prepare. The GM has made his moves in relatively short order even as he keeps his eye firmly on long-term goals. He traded his team’s three most talented healthy players from the start of last season within a span of six months, completing the trifecta when he shipped Thaddeus Young to Minnesota as the third team in the trade that sent Kevin Love to Cleveland. The prize for Philadelphia was the future first-round pick that Hinkie had been unable to obtain for Evan Turner and Spencer Hawes. Six of the nine trades the Sixers made in the offseason sent draft picks for 2014 and beyond to Philadelphia. They netted just two first-round picks, but Hinkie continued to demonstrate his affection for second-rounders. Philadelphia could make as many as a dozen second-round picks between 2015 and 2019 after making four this past June.

One of those second-rounders threw the Sixers a curve this summer. No. 32 overall pick K.J. McDaniels, a small forward from Clemson talented enough to go in the first round, balked when the Sixers offered a deal similar to the four-year, mostly non-guaranteed contract for slightly better than the minimum salary that they gave No. 39 overall pick Jerami Grant. McDaniels probably could have grabbed a more lucrative contract overseas, but agent Mark Bartelstein convinced him to bet that a one-year deal for the minimum salary with zero guaranteed money provided the best way to beat Philly’s system. McDaniels signed the required tender for those terms, an offer that the Sixers had to make to keep his draft rights, and so far, his gamble appears to be paying off at least to a modest extent, as he’s averaged 7.2 points and 5.6 rebounds in 28.4 minutes per game across five starts. He’s set for restricted free agency next summer, when he’ll be 21, and though the Sixers still have the ability to match all offers, McDaniels has the ability to solicit bids from 30 teams instead of just one, as he did this past summer.

The McDaniels saga proves that while Harris and Hinkie are bent on future glory at the expense of the present, the concerns of today are nonetheless important for realizing the dreams of tomorrow. The Sixers have to give at least enough regard to the talent they have already in their possession if they’re ever to gather enough of it to start to build some momentum toward their ultimate goals. It’s unclear whether the team regards McDaniels as an outlier or a trend-setter, but it’s critical for the Sixers that they heed all the lessons they learn from their experiment.

Photo courtesy of USA Today Sports Images. The Basketball Insiders salary pages were used in the creation of this post.

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