Magic assistant coach David Adelman will become part of Michael Malone’s staff in Denver, tweets Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN.
The son of former NBA coach Rick Adelman, he spent just one year in Orlando. Adelman broke into the league in 2011 as a player development coach on his father’s staff in Minnesota and remained with the Wolves through the 2015/16 season.
Adelman will probably serve as offensive coordinator with the Nuggets, tweets Jon Krawczynski of the Associated Press.
The Magic continue to fill out their roster for training camp, announcing today in a press release (Twitter link) that they’ve signed free agent guard Kalin Lucas to a contract. The announcement from the team also confirmed the signing of Troy Caupain, which we covered earlier this month.
Lucas, 28, went undrafted out of Michigan State back in 2011 and has played in a number of professional leagues and countries since then. In addition to spending time with clubs in Greece and Turkey, Lucas has extensive G League experience, having averaged 17.7 PPG and 4.9 APG with a .448/.391/.842 shooting line in 112 career G League contests.
Lucas was signed and waived multiple times by the Grizzlies in 2014, and ultimately saw his only NBA experience with Memphis during that 2014/15 season. His stint in the NBA was brief — he played in just one game and saw the floor for six minutes.
Having played for the Erie BayHawks last season, Lucas is a good bet to join the Lakeland Magic to start the 2017/18 campaign. Those teams are technically one and the same — the Orlando Magic bought the BayHawks and relocated the G League franchise to Florida for the coming season.
The Magic now have 18 players officially under contract, with an agreement also reportedly in place with undrafted rookie Rodney Purvis — when Purvis’ deal becomes official, Orlando would have just one open spot left on the team’s 20-man offseason roster.
When top college prospects like Markelle Fultz or Lonzo Ball are drafted, there’s virtually no doubt that their next step will involve signing an NBA contract. However, that’s not the case for every player who is selected in the NBA draft, particularly for international prospects and second-round picks.
When an NBA team uses a draft pick on a player, it gains his NBA rights, but that doesn’t mean the player will sign an NBA contract right away. International prospects will often remain with their professional team overseas for at least one more year to develop their game further, becoming “draft-and-stash” prospects. Nikola Mirotic, Dario Saric, and Bogdan Bogdanovic are among the more notable players to fit this bill in recent years.
However, draft-and-stash players can be former NCAA standouts too. Sometimes a college prospect selected with a late second round pick will end up playing overseas or in the G League for a year or two if there’s no space available on his NBA team’s 15-man roster.
While these players sometimes make their way to their NBA teams, others never do. Many clubs around the NBA currently hold the rights to international players who have remained overseas for their entire professional careers and are no longer viewed as top prospects. Those players may never come stateside, but there’s often no reason for NBA teams to renounce their rights — those rights can sometimes be used as placeholders in trades.
For instance, earlier this summer, the Pacers and Raptors agreed to a trade that sent Cory Joseph to Indiana. Toronto was happy to move Joseph’s salary and didn’t necessarily need anything in return, but the Pacers had to send something in the deal. Rather than including an NBA player or a draft pick, Indiana sent Toronto the draft rights to Emir Preldzic, the 57th overall pick in the 2009 draft.
Preldzic is currently playing for Galatasaray in Turkey, and at this point appears unlikely to ever come to the NBA, but his draft rights have been a useful trade chip over the years — the Pacers/Raptors swap represented the fourth time since 2010 that Preldzic’s NBA rights have been included in a trade.
This week, we’re taking a closer look at the players whose draft rights NBA teams currently hold, sorting them by division. These players may eventually arrive in America and join their respective NBA teams, but many will end up like Preldzic, plying their trade overseas and having their draft rights used as pawns in NBA trades.
Here’s a breakdown of the draft rights held by Southeast teams:
Previously:
Information from Mark Porcaro and Basketball Insiders was used in the creation of this post.
The Magic have added an undrafted free agent to their offseason roster, formally inking former Cincinnati point guard Troy Caupain to an NBA contract. According to RealGM’s official transactions log, the deal was finalized last week. Caupain posted an Instagram message over the weekend thanking the Magic for the opportunity.
Caupain, 21, worked out for a number of NBA teams in the weeks leading up to the draft this spring, but wasn’t one of the 60 players selected in June. The former Bearcat played for the Raptors in the Las Vegas Summer League in July, appearing in five games for the club and averaging 4.8 PPG in 16.0 minutes per contest.
A 6’4″ guard, Caupain is coming off a senior year at Cincinnati in which he averaged 10.5 PPG with 4.6 RPG and 4.4 APG. His shooting line was also fairly modest, at .453/.325/.687.
Orlando doesn’t yet have 15 players on fully guaranteed contracts, but I’d still be surprised if Caupain ended up on the team’s regular season roster. He appears to be a good candidate to end up with the Lakeland Magic, Orlando’s G League squad, as an affiliate player.
With Caupain officially locked up, the Magic now have 16 players on their roster, and will have 17 if and when they finalize a deal with veteran free agent Adreian Payne. Orlando has yet to sign a player to a two-way contract.
Giannis Antetokounmpo‘s decision to skip EuroBasket is causing international conspiracy accusations, relays Matt Velazquez of The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. In a message written in Greek, Antetokounmpo announced on social media this morning that he will miss the tournament to keep from aggravating a knee injury. He is serving as an NBA ambassador this week in China, where he failed a physical administered by team doctors for the Bucks. Antetokounmpo called the decision to pull out of EuroBasket “by far the biggest disappointment in my career.”
However, the Greek basketball federation is casting doubt on the injury, claiming it’s a ruse by the Bucks to keep Antetokounmpo out of the competition. “A series of clues by which we were particularly worried about since Giannis arrived in Greece and the national team training camp started, had created the conviction of an organized and well-staged plan by the NBA franchise in which Giannis has signed,” the organization charged in a written statement translated by Eurohoops.net. EuroBasket will get under way August 31st.
There’s more NBA-related news from around the world:
During the 2016 NBA offseason, when the salary camp jumped from $70MM to $94MM, 27 teams had cap room available, with only three clubs operating over the cap all year. A more modest cap increase this year to $99MM meant that fewer teams had cap space to use. So far, 14 teams – less than half the league – have used cap room to sign players.
Of those 14 teams, several have since used up all their cap room, including the Celtics, Knicks, Jazz, Lakers, and Timberwolves. However, there are still several teams around the NBA that have room available, or could create it without waiving and stretching any players on guaranteed salaries.
With the help of data from HeatHoops and Basketball Insiders, here’s a quick breakdown of teams that still have cap room available, along with their estimated space:
The following two teams are essentially capped-out, but could create a very small amount of room if necessary:
The following two teams are technically operating over the cap at the moment, with various trade and mid-level exceptions pushing them over the threshold, but they could create room if they choose to go under the cap:
The Magic and Adreian Payne are close to an agreement that will bring the big man to Orlando, international journalist David Pick reports (Twitter links). Pick adds that the 26-year-old recently turned down an offer from Guangdong in the Chinese Basketball Association worth $900K.
Payne’s deal with the Magic will be a two-way deal, according to Darren Wolfson of ESPN.com (Twitter link).
Payne was drafted by the Hawks with the No. 15 overall pick in the 2014 draft. Atlanta sent him to Minnesota during the 2014/15 season for a future first round pick. In two-plus seasons with the Wolves, Payne has seen just 13.5 minutes per game. He averaged 4.1 points and 3.1 rebounds per contest while shooting 40.0% from the field.