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Aaron Gordon On: Vogel, New Additions, Offseason

September 6th, 2016 at 8:10pm CST by Eddie Scarito

Aaron Gordon, who was the No. 4 overall pick in the 2014 NBA Draft, is entering his third season in the league despite being just 20 years old. The forward sat down with Alex Kennedy of Basketball Insiders to discuss a number of topics regarding himself and the Magic. We’ve relayed a number of the highlights of the chat below, but the entire piece is certainly worth a look:

On how the league’s new emphasis on positional versatility has benefited him:

“Oh man, it’s huge. We can play small, we can play big. I can play the two, the three or the four, and it all depends on what my coach sees. He’ll say, ‘Aaron, we have an advantage at the four, go get him.’ The foundation is defense though. If you can’t guard the position, you can’t play the position. I’m able to guard all of those positions so therefore I can play them and it opens things up.”

On what new head coach Frank Vogel will expect from him:

“I think he wants me to do a whole lot of everything, from defending to distributing to scoring. We’re going to need to score the ball this year and I’m looking to take on a bigger scoring role. Defensively, I want to guard the best player on the other team every night. These are things that I want, but they are also things I want from my teammates. I want them to say, ‘No, I want to guard the best player.’ And we have those type of players. Serge Ibaka, Bismack Biyombo, Jeff Green, EP [Elfrid Payton] are guys who would love to do that. They all want that challenge and I love playing with guys like that. It’s always team-first with me and I’m going to do whatever I can to help my team win.”

On the Magic’s veteran offseason additions:

“It’s just exciting to me. I’ve always trusted [GM] Rob Hennigan and I’ve always trusted [assistant GM] Scott Perry. To me, it validates my trust in them. They made moves that other people couldn’t have made. They were confident, aggressive moves. Now, it’s on us. We’re ready to play. We have the coach, the staff, the players, the organization. We have a foundation of players who have been there and been through the losing, and now it’s time to start winning.”

On what he worked on this offseason:

“My training regimen has been absolutely hectic. I’ve being doing two-a-days and three-a-days to try to get ready for the season. I’m ready. I’ve been ready. I was ready the day that we lost to Charlotte on our last day of the season – I wanted to start another 82 games right then. I knew that it couldn’t happen, but I wanted it. Now, I’ve taken this offseason to work on my ball-handling, passing, shooting. Also, being able to shoot over defenders’ hands when they’re closing out on threes or being able to take one dribble and rise to pull up over everybody. I’ve been working on making decisions out of the pick-and-roll. I know with with Bismack Biyombo and Serge Ibaka, I’m going to have a roll guy and a pop guy. And with Vooch [Nikola Vucevic], I’ll have a little bit of both – a guy who can roll and pop. It’s going to be on me to either score off of the pick-and-roll or make the right read to get the ball to my guy in the best spot. I’m ready.”

On what he feels his ceiling as a player is:

“It’s really hard to say. It really is. I think if I continue to work diligently and I’m smart about it… One of my problems is that I work a little bit too hard and come game time, my body isn’t ready. This year, I was able to take [time] off and make sure my body was ready for 82 games. If I stay healthy… When I stay healthy and when I stay in the present, I think my potential is limitless. I basically get to decide how great I can be.”

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Salary Cap Snapshot: Orlando Magic

September 5th, 2016 at 9:00pm CST by Eddie Scarito

With the free agent signing period winding down and teams looking ahead to the preseason, we at Hoops Rumors will be tracking the Salary Cap figures for each team around the league. These posts will be maintained throughout the season once financial data is reported. They will be located on the sidebar throughout the year, once all the teams’ cap figures have been relayed. You can always check RosterResource.com for up-to-date rosters for each franchise, with the Magic’s team page accessible here.

Here’s a breakdown of where the Magic currently stand financially:

Guaranteed Salary

Total Guaranteed Salary= $104,110,256

Cash Sent Out Via Trade:  $0 [Amount Remaining $3.2MM]

Cash Received Via Trade: $75,000 from Trail Blazers as part of Shabazz Napier trade; $230,000 from Clippers as part of C.J. Wilcox trade [Amount Remaining $3,195,000]

Payroll Exceptions Available

  • Room Exception — $2,898,000
  • Trade Exception — $2,250,000 (Serge Ibaka trade) — Expires on 2/14/18

Total Projected Payroll: $104,110,256

Salary Cap: $94,143,000

Estimated Available Cap Space: –$9,967,256

Luxury Tax Threshold: $113,287,000

Amount Below Luxury Tax: $9,176,744

Last Updated: 4/7/17

The Basketball Insiders salary pages and The Vertical’s salary database were used in the creation of this post.

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Serge Ibaka “Never Asked” Thunder For Trade

August 31st, 2016 at 12:34pm CST by Luke Adams

While plenty of trades were completed on draft night earlier this summer, none were bigger than the four-player deal that saw Serge Ibaka head to Orlando in exchange for Victor Oladipo, Ersan Ilyasova, and No. 11 overall pick Domantas Sabonis. In his last season with the Thunder, Ibaka reportedly wasn’t thrilled with his declining role, but in a piece for The Cauldron at SI.com, the veteran big man writes that he didn’t make a trade request.

“I never asked to be traded, even though there was a lot of media conjecture that I was unhappy with my role,” Ibaka wrote. “I had an exit meeting with Billy Donovan and Sam Presti after the season, and both went well. But this is still a business, everybody has to do what’s best for them, and I let my agent deal with the business side of things. I just focus on basketball. I’m not the kind of guy who’s going to go in and ask for a trade, and I would have been happy staying with the Thunder. Playing in the NBA was my dream, and I’d be happy playing anywhere.”

Although Ibaka makes it clear that he didn’t ask the Thunder to trade him, it sounds as if agent Andy Miller was at least somewhat involved in finding his client a new home. In the days after the deal was completed, Miller told Chris Mannix of The Vertical that Oklahoma City had “overpromised and under-delivered” on a larger role for Ibaka. Assuming Ibaka agreed with that sentiment, it’s perhaps not surprising that he sounds excited by the idea of getting a fresh start in Orlando, suggesting in his SI.com piece that he feels like a rookie again.

“I’m thrilled to be in Orlando,” Ibaka wrote. “I know that might sound crazy to some people, that I’m excited to go from a contender like the Thunder to a rebuilding team, one that hasn’t made the playoffs in four years, but playing now for Frank Vogel, a coach who prides himself on defense, is very exciting for me. We have a core of like-minded, young, athletic players, which is going to be very fun. We are an old-school, smashmouth team, and I can’t wait to don a Magic uniform on opening night.”

Ibaka’s contract is set to expire after 2017, so the Magic will eventually have to work out an extension or a new free agent contract with him if they hope to keep him in the fold for more than one season.

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Can Ibaka Rebound From Down Season?

August 27th, 2016 at 9:44pm CST by ChrisCrouse
  • The Magic acquired Serge Ibaka on draft night and they hope the big man can help lead them back to the playoffs, however, Lang Greene of Basketball Insiders is pessimistic about Ibaka’s chances of having a strong 2016/17 campaign. Greene notes that Ibaka’s production, including his points, rebounds and blocks per game, has decreased over the past several seasons. His field goal percentage has also dwindled, going from 57.3% during the 2012/13 season to 47.9% last year.
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Blazers Sent Magic $75K In Shabazz Napier Trade

August 26th, 2016 at 2:58pm CST by Luke Adams
  • On the other end of the spectrum, the Trail Blazers sent just $75K to the Magic to acquire Shabazz Napier in July, per Pincus (Twitter link). Orlando no longer had use for Napier, so the team was willing to move him in exchange for the minimum amount of cash a team can receive a deal — $75K.
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Details On Cash Used In 2016 Draft Trades

August 25th, 2016 at 2:06pm CST by Luke Adams

As our list of 2016 offseason trades shows, five of the deals agreed upon on draft night this year featured one team sending cash to the other. The NBA’s Collective Bargaining Agreement allows clubs to include cash payments, but only up to a certain amount.

In the 2016/17 league year, teams are allowed to receive a total of $3.5MM in trades, and can also send out $3.5MM in trades. Those limits are separate, so a team that sends $3.5MM in a deal and then later receives $3.5MM doesn’t get a fresh, new slate — that club is capped out for the league year. In 2014/15, the limit for cash sent and received in trades was $3.4MM.

Since the league year ends on June 30, teams that hadn’t taken advantage of those cash allowances earlier in the season will often use remaining cash during the draft to move up or to snag an extra pick. Many of the cash details on those draft-day deals for 2016 were previously reported. For instance, we already knew about the following payments:

  • Warriors sent $2.4MM to Bucks to acquire No. 38 overall pick (Patrick McCaw).
  • Trail Blazers sent $1.2MM (and a 2019 second-round pick) to Magic to acquire No. 47 overall pick (Jake Layman).
  • Cavaliers sent approximately $2.5MM to Hawks to acquire No. 54 overall pick (Kay Felder).

Based on those numbers, it appears the Warriors got a much better deal from the Bucks than the Cavaliers did from the Hawks. Of course, if the Cavs badly wanted Felder, the cost to move into the draft was hardly exorbitant — Atlanta likely asked the Cavs for the maximum amount of money they could send, since Cleveland used over $900K in a separate trade earlier in the year.

In addition to those three swaps, two other draft-night deals featured money changing hands, and Eric Pincus of Basketball Insiders has the details on those payments, along with several others from the 2015/16 league year. According to Pincus, these are the details on the other two draft trades involving cash:

Once again, one of these deals looks far more favorable than the other, with the Thunder paying a fraction of what the Nets did for a second-round pick. But again, the available players and interested teams essentially set the market for these cash payments.

In the case of the Nets/Jazz deal, Brooklyn clearly wanted to make sure not to miss out on Whitehead, and the team was willing to pay a relatively significant amount to secure him. The Thunder, meanwhile, offered all their available remaining cash to the Nuggets for the 56th pick, and Denver likely had no better offer and no player targeted at that spot — so the Nuggets took what they could get.

Be sure to check out Pincus’ piece at Basketball Insiders for more thorough details of how teams spent and received cash in trades during the 2015/16 league year.

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Ibaka Eligible For Extension

August 16th, 2016 at 3:30pm CST by Arthur Hill
  • The Magic can offer an extension to newly acquired power forward Serge Ibaka, writes Bobby Marks of The Vertical. Ibaka, whom Orlando picked up in a draft-night deal with the Thunder, is about to enter the last season of a four-year, $49MM extension he received from Oklahoma City. Ibaka would be limited to a 4.5% raise from his $12.2MM salary in the first year of an extension because the Magic are over the salary cap, Marks notes, and because he has been traded in the past six months Ibaka can only have two years added to his contract.
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Six Free Agents Signed Five-Year Contracts

August 9th, 2016 at 12:06pm CST by Luke Adams

The NBA’s current Collective Bargaining Agreement is designed to give teams certain benefits when it comes to re-signing their own free agents. Many players who reach free agency, for instance, are permitted to get 7.5% annual raises from their own teams, while they can only get 4.5% raises from another team. More notably, Bird rights free agents can sign five-year contracts with their own teams, but can only go up to four years with other clubs.

In some cases, that extra year doesn’t make much of a difference. Al Horford left Atlanta for Boston and signed a four-year contract with the Celtics, even though there were reports suggesting the Hawks were open to going to five years (albeit not quite for the max). Kevin Durant signed with the Warriors on a two-year contract that he’ll likely opt out of after the first year in order to maximize his future earnings.

Still, for at least a handful of players, that five-year contract appears to have played a part in their decisions to return to their own teams. As our Free Agent Tracker shows, six free agents signed five-year deals this year, and all six of those contracts were worth at least $85MM. Three of them were maximum-salary pacts.

Here are those five-year contracts, which will run through the 2020/21 season:

  • Mike Conley (Grizzlies): Five years, $152,605,578 (partial guarantee in year five)
  • DeMar DeRozan (Raptors): Five years, $137,500,000 (player option in year five)
  • Andre Drummond (Pistons): Five years, $127,171,313 (player option in year five)
  • Bradley Beal (Wizards): Five years, $127,171,313
  • Nicolas Batum (Hornets): Five years, $120,000,000 (player option in year five)
  • Evan Fournier (Magic): Five years, $85,000,000 (player option in year five)

Although Conley drew significant interest from the Mavericks, he was always a favorite to return to the Grizzlies, and none of the other five players on this list were seriously linked to another suitor, which is interesting.

Drummond and Beal were restricted free agents who got max deals, so there was never any suspense about their destinations, but plenty of teams would have been interested in prying away DeRozan from the Raptors, Batum from the Hornets, or Fournier from the Magic. The fact that those players’ teams were willing to offer five years likely made negotiations much simpler, since no rival suitor could offer that fifth year.

A five-year contract provides additional long-term security for free agents, and also gives the team the opportunity to give the player some agency as well. In four of the six deals listed above, the contract features a fifth-year player option.

That means DeRozan, Drummond, Batum, and Fournier have a safety net for that 2020/21 season — if they’re still playing at a high level at that point, it might make sense to opt out and sign a new longer-term contract. If their production has slipped, or if they’re battling injuries, they’ll have the option of remaining in their current contract and collecting a big pay check in that fifth year.

The ability to offer an additional year to their own free agents hasn’t always prevented teams from losing top-tier players on the open market, but there are still plenty of instances where that fifth year seems to make a difference. As the CBA opt-out date nears and the NBA and NBPA explore potential changes to their current agreement, it makes sense for this aspect of the CBA to remain unchanged. That extra long-term security may not appeal to every marquee free agent, but it does give a player’s current team a leg up, which is crucial if the league is worried about potential imbalance.

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