Malcolm Thomas Rumors | Hoops Rumors

Atlantic Notes: Knicks, Thomas, Outlaw, Melo

October 28th, 2014 at 7:33pm CST by Zachary Links

Outgoing Raptors executive Tim Leiweke is in talks with Irving Azoff, a confidant of Knicks owner James Dolan, about a deal that would see them have a stake in assets that are currently part of the Madison Square Garden company, reports Scott Soshnick of Bloomberg.com. MSG, which owns the Knicks, is considering splitting into a pair of companies, as Soshnick details, though Soshnick doesn’t indicate whether there’s a role for Leiweke on the Knicks under consideration. Leiweke, who’s leaving his job with the company that owns the Raptors by the end of June or as soon as a replacement is found, said he doesn’t think the company is close to finding it’s next chief executive. More from the Atlantic Division..

Malcolm Thomas got a fairly substantial contract guarantee of $474K for this season on his four-year, minimum-salary deal with the Sixers, according to Eric Pincus of Basketball Insiders (on Twitter). Thomas, we learned yesterday, was getting set to play in China before Philly reached out to him over the weekend. The rest of his contract with the Sixers is non-guaranteed, as Pincus shows on the team’s Basketball Insiders salary page.
The Knicks received a $1,863,840 trade exception when they traded Travis Outlaw to the Sixers, tweets Pincus. That’s equivalent to the difference between the salaries for Outlaw and Arnett Moultrie, whom the Knicks acquired and immediately waived.
Carmelo Anthony is preaching patience when it comes to the Knicks, who had a 37-win season, traded Tyson Chandler, and have a first-year head coach, writes Ian Begley of ESPNNewYork.com. “It’s a work in progress now. It’s going to be a work in progress until the end of the season,” Anthony said. “We’re not looking for nothing easy, but we know it’s a work in progress. We have a chance to create something here, and we’re excited about it.”

Chuck Myron contributed to this post.

Atlantic Notes: Nets, Knicks, Thomas

October 27th, 2014 at 10:00pm CST by Alex Lee

It’s been a busy Monday in the Atlantic division, with the Knicks and Sixers completing a trade and then promptly cutting both players involved. That wasn’t it for Philly, which added a forward before cutting two others. Meanwhile, the Celtics cut five players to get down to the required roster count of 15. With final rosters set, let’s see what else is going on in the Atlantic:

After waiving Casper Ware on Saturday to get their roster down to 15, the Nets now have some flexibility with Jorge Gutierrez, Cory Jefferson and Jerome Jordan, none of whom have deals that become fully guaranteed until the leaguewide guarantee date in January, tweets Robert Windrem of Nets Daily. With opening-night rosters finalized, Stefan Bondy of the New York Daily News also points out that the Nets luxury tax bill of around $35MM for this season, as it stands now, pales in comparison to last season’s mammoth $90MM total (via Twitter).
Knicks head coach Derek Fisher indicated that Travis Outlaw was suffering from an Achilles injury that hurt his chances of making the team, writes Marc Berman of the New York Post. Outlaw was traded to Philly earlier today, opening up a roster spot for Travis Wear, who the Knicks initially had planned to cut and send to the D-League, according to Berman.
Sixers signee Malcolm Thomas was set to play in China and was ready to leave on Tuesday before Philly reached out to him over the weekend, notes Tom Moore of Calkins Media (via Twitter).
Meanwhile, Max Rappaport of Sixers.com points out that the careers of Thomas and Sixers coach Brett Brown intersected in San Antonio in 2012, when Thomas appeared in three games with the Spurs. “He’s got a chance — really his first chance, in my opinion — to [get] minutes and [have] a role. He sees we’ve got a bunch of young guys he’s competing with, and he probably sees a lot more daylight than he may have with Utah, the Spurs, or Chicago,” Brown said.

Sixers Sign Malcolm Thomas

October 27th, 2014 at 12:10pm CST by Cray Allred

MONDAY: 12:10pm: The deal is official, the team announced via press release.

SATURDAY, 9:25pm: The Sixers have agreed to a deal with free agent Malcolm Thomas, reports Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo! Sports. While many signees this late in the preseason have been quickly waived as means of teams securing D-League rights to players that won’t make the regular season NBA roster, Wojnarowski writes that Thomas is assured of a spot on Philadelphia’s opening-night roster.

The terms of the deal are unclear at this time, but I would speculate that it is likely for the minimum and possibly non-guaranteed. Thomas spent time last year with both the Spurs and Jazz, appearing in a total of eight games and slightly upping his 5.9 MPG average for his three-year career. His non-guaranteed deal was shipped to the Cavs, then the Celtics, this summer before Boston waived it.

The move will bump the Sixers’ roster count up to 18, three more than the maximum they can keep for the regular season. The team waived three partially guaranteed contracts earlier today, and have at least seven deals without guaranteed money, not including Thomas’ contract.

Celtics Waive Malcolm Thomas, John Lucas III

September 29th, 2014 at 11:07am CST by Eddie Scarito

MONDAY, 11:07am: The releases are official, the team announced.

SUNDAY, 4:26pm: The Celtics have waived Malcolm Thomas and John Lucas III, Marc Stein of ESPN.com is reporting (Twitter link). Both players were recently acquired in the trade that sent Keith Bogans to the Cavaliers, and Bogans has since been traded to the Sixers in a move that garnered Cleveland a valuable trade exception. The Celtics, too, were afforded a trade exception for the same $5,285,817 amount when they relinquished Bogans.

A roster move was expected from the Celtics who had 21 players on their preseason roster. That number includes Evan Turner whose signing has not been formally announced yet. This should change shortly now that Boston is down to 19 players after waiving Thomas and Lucas.

The team had waived Christian Watford on Friday, but reports have indicated that the team intends to re-sign the forward this week. So, Watford’s return would put Boston at the preseason limit of 20 players, including Turner, meaning the team’s camp roster is likely set.

Cavs Notes: LeBron, Irving, Deng, Crawford

September 27th, 2014 at 11:18pm CST by Chuck Myron

LeBron James reiterated his intentions to stay in Cleveland beyond his current contract during an interview that ran Friday on CNN’s “Unguarded with Rachel Nichols. “I plan on finishing my career back home,” James said, as Joe Vardon of the Northeast Ohio Media Group transcribes.
James called the two-year length of his contract a “business decision.” There’s more on the four-time MVP amid the latest on his new team:

James based 95% of his decision to return to Cleveland on his desire to return to his Northeast Ohio roots, but the chance to play with Kyrie Irving was “a huge part” of the other 5%, James said to reporters, including Michael Lee of The Washington Post (Twitter link).
James and Luol Deng traded places this summer, but Deng knows the Cavs got the better end of the de facto swap, as he told reporters, including Joseph Goodman of the Miami Herald. “I’ve been in the league 11 years and I’m still improving,” Deng said. “I would never try to replace anybody no matter if they’re better than me or I’m better than somebody. We all bring different things. The biggest mistake I would make is try to be LeBron. I’m not LeBron.”
The Cavs intended to re-sign Chris Crawford even as they waived him Thursday, according to Chris Haynes of the Plain Dealer. That suggests the Cavs also intended from the time they traded for Bogans that they would flip him to the Sixers or another club, and indeed, a league source told Jason Lloyd of the Akron Beacon Journal that Cleveland was never keen on keeping the veteran guard.
Cleveland’s brass had wanted to use Kevin Murphy, John Lucas III and Malcolm Thomas to create a trade exception ever since acquiring the trio, even though it took two moves for the Cavs to come up with the $5,285,817 trade exception they extracted from today’s Bogans trade, as Lloyd writes in the same piece.

Arthur Hill contributed to this post.

Atlantic Notes: Celtics, Grunwald, Sixers

September 26th, 2014 at 9:25am CST by Chuck Myron

The Keith Bogans trade enables the Celtics to create a trade exception equivalent to the value of Bogans’ $5,285,816 salary, but just how they structure the deal to come up with that exception isn’t clear. They could absorb the $1.6MM salary of John Lucas III into their $2.09MM Courtney Lee trade exception, essentially exhausting it while preserving the full amount of their $4.25MM trade exception from the Kris Humphries deal, a path that Eric Pincus of Basketball Insiders suggests (Twitter link). Alternatively, they could fold Lucas into the Humphries exception, reducing its value to $2.65MM while leaving the $2.09MM Lee exception intact. In any case, the minimum salaries of Erik Murphy, Dwight Powell and Malcolm Thomas don’t figure into the equation, since Boston can absorb them into the minimum salary exception. There’s more on the aftermath of the trade amid the latest from the Atlantic Division:

Thomas and Lucas, on non-guaranteed contracts, are long shots to remain with the Celtics come Tuesday, when training camp begins, though Murphy, who has a partial guarantee of $100K, will be “evaluated,” tweets Jeff Goodman of ESPN.com. Goodman indicates that Powell is likely to stick, at least for camp, with his fully guaranteed deal.
Former Knicks GM Glen Grunwald admits that he was caught off guard when the team decided to fire him a year ago and disputes owner James Dolan’s assertion that he wasn’t well-versed in analytics, as Grunwald tells Marc Berman of the New York Post.
It’s a stark reality for the stripped-down Sixers, and coach Brett Brown emphasized that he won’t measure success in terms of wins and losses this year, as he spoke to reporters, including Tom Moore of Calkins Media. Asked whether he’s on board with the drastic rebuilding process, Brown quipped, “I have to be, don’t I?”

Cavs Acquire Keith Bogans

September 25th, 2014 at 8:25pm CST by Eddie Scarito

8:25pm: The trade is official, the Celtics announced via a press release.

8:20pm: More details about the trade are rolling in, with Eric Pincus of Basketball Insiders (Twitter link) noting that the Celtics sent the Cavs the rights to the Kings’ 2015 and 2017 second-rounders, both of which are top-55 protected. Marc Stein of ESPN.com also adds Dwight Powell to the list of players heading to Boston.

8:00pm: The second-rounders going to the Celtics will be Cleveland’s 2016 and 2017 selections, notes Gary Washburn of The Boston Globe (Twitter link).

7:41pm: The Celtics will also get a $5.3MM trade exception as part of the deal, notes Goodman (twitter link).

7:20pm: The Cavs will waive guard Chris Crawford once the deal is official, tweets Chris Haynes of The Plain Dealer.

7:16pm: The Celtics are also receiving two second round draft picks as part of the deal, Jeff Goodman of ESPN.com reports (Twitter link).

6:52pm: The Cavaliers and Celtics are in discussions on a trade that would send Keith Bogans to Cleveland, Marc Stein of ESPN.com is reporting. The Cavs are expected to package the non-guaranteed contracts of Erik Murphy, John Lucas III and Malcolm Thomas in return for Bogans, notes Stein.

The acquisition of the 34 year-old shooting guard out of Kentucky would suggest that Cleveland has either received word from free agent Ray Allen that he isn’t interested in signing with the team, or that he intends to retire, though that’s just speculation on my part. Whatever the case is, it would seem that Bogans is taking the role that the Cavs were intending Allen to fill.

Bogans has played 11 seasons in the league after being selected in the second round of the 2003 NBA Draft by the Bucks. His career numbers are 6.3 PPG, 2.7 RPG, and 1.3 APG. Bogans’ career slash line is .394/.353/.716. He has two years remaining on his contract, both non-guaranteed, and he is scheduled to make $5,285,816 this coming season.

As for the Celtics, they currently have 21 players on their roster, including Evan Turner, whose signing has not been officially announced yet. So it’s highly likely that Boston will waive all three players once the deal is completed.

Windhorst’s Latest: Love, Mozgov, Thompson

August 26th, 2014 at 11:06am CST by Chuck Myron

The Cavs were only willing to give up two of three assets they relinquished in the Kevin Love trade until owner Dan Gilbert met with Love earlier this summer in Las Vegas, as Brian Windhorst of ESPN said in his appearance Monday with Tom Rizzo on ESPN Cleveland radio (audio link). Cleveland switched gears after that meeting and decided to give up its entire package of Andrew Wiggins, Anthony Bennett and the 2015 first-round pick it had previously acquired from Miami, as Windhorst details. The ESPN scribe speculates that Gilbert probably emerged from having spoken with Love more confident that the superstar power forward would remain in Cleveland long-term, which led him to up the Cavs’ offer. Windhorst had plenty more to say on Rizzo’s “The Really Big Show,” and we already touched on the Zydrunas Ilgauskas news earlier today. We’ll share the rest of the highlights here:

Cleveland’s acquisition of John Lucas III, Erik Murphy and Malcolm Thomas in last month’s trade with the Jazz was made with Timofey Mozgov in mind, according to Windhorst, who says the Cavs continue to try to pry the center from the Nuggets. The Cavs envisioned flipping some combination of those three for Mozgov, as Windhorst indicates. Still, the Nuggets are reluctant to give him up, Windhorst adds, even though the Cavs offered a first-round pick as part of a deal for him, as Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo! Sports reported a few weeks ago.
The Cavs tried to acquire Alexey Shved in the Love trade, in part because of his connection to coach David Blatt from their time together on the Russian national team, Windhorst says. Shved went to the Sixers instead.
Windhorst asserts that the Cavs will sign Tristan Thompson to a rookie scale extension, suggesting that it would make the power forward a trade asset. An extension would complicate any trade involving Thompson because of the Poison Pill Provision, however.

How The Cavs/Jazz Trade Worked Financially

July 24th, 2014 at 12:20pm CST by Chuck Myron

It seemed from the moment that news of Tuesday’s trade between the Cavs and Jazz surfaced, the deal was somehow more significant than a swap involving four backups normally would be. The Cavs reportedly see some value in John Lucas III, Malcolm Thomas and Erik Murphy as players rather than simply as non-guaranteed contracts, but an earlier report indicated the team had been looking for non-guaranteed deals specifically to strengthen its bid for Kevin Love. The trio doesn’t represent an overwhelming step toward Love, but the move gives the Cavs more options they can present to the Wolves, which might make the difference as Minnesota president of basketball operations Flip Saunders sorts through several competing packages.

A key part of the trade involves a separate transaction. The Cavs struck a deal that same evening with No. 33 overall pick Joe Harris worth precisely $2,710,369 for three years, including a guaranteed $884,879, according to Mark Deeks of ShamSports. That it runs three years indicates that the Cavs need to use cap space to complete the transaction, since neither the minimum-salary exception nor the room exception, the two vehicles other than cap space the Cavs have for signing free agents, allows for contracts longer than two seasons.

The Cavs have yet to officially announce their deal with Harris, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they haven’t officially signed him. Sometimes teams never make official announcements when they sign draft picks, for any number of possible reasons. The Bulls never announced having signed 2008 No. 1 overall pick Derrick Rose to his rookie scale contract, as Deeks pointed out earlier this month (on Twitter). The RealGM transactions log shows the Harris signing as having taken place, and the presence of his salary figures on Deeks’ database is further indication that the Harris signing is official. That means the signing had to have taken place prior to the trade, which the Cavs did officially announce, since Cleveland wouldn’t have had the cap room necessary to sign Harris to his deal had they executed the trade first.

The Cavs entered Tuesday evening with $56,030,677 in salary and a cap hold of $4,592,200 for Andrew Wiggins, who remains unsigned. That left them with $2,442,123 worth of space beneath the $63.065MM cap. The Harris signing brought that room down to $1,557,244. The Cavs, as the NBA allows them to do, then appeared to split the Jazz trade into two parts. The first involves taking on Lucas’ $1.6MM salary and Murphy’s $816,482 salary in exchange for Felix’s $816,482 salary. Murphy and Felix essentially cancel each other out, so it amounts to an absorption of the $1.6MM Lucas salary, putting the Cavs over the cap by $42,756. The NBA lets teams complete trades that take them as much as $100K above the salary cap without conforming to salary-matching rules, so the Lucas salary just barely squeezes in under this requirement.

That move puts Cleveland over the cap, leaving the Cavs to execute the rest of the trade, a simple acquisition of Malcolm Thomas, using the salary-matching rules required of a capped-out team. The incoming $948,163 salary of Thomas is obviously greater than nothing, which is what Utah is getting in this side of the deal, but fortunately for Cleveland, players on minimum-salary contracts don’t count as incoming salary in the NBA’s matching game. Thomas makes the minimum, so the trade is kosher.

The Jazz needn’t worry about splitting the transaction or dealing with any salary-matching requirements, since they were well under the cap before the trade and are even further beneath it in the aftermath of the deal. The Cavs must continue to deal with the ripple effects of having landed over the cap. By all appearances, that bars them from aggregating Thomas in a subsequent trade for two months. While the Cavs can trade Thomas by himself, no trade limitation applies to either Lucas or Murphy, since Cleveland acquired them while under the cap. Cleveland nonetheless appears ready to sign Wiggins, triggering a 30-day waiting period before he can be traded, and since the Wolves are insistent that Wiggins be a part of any deal for Love, it doesn’t appear as though Cleveland is in any position to rush to make a Love trade official.

All of this hinges on the Harris signing truly having already taken place, as all indications suggest. If it weren’t official, it’s possible the Cavs could have structured the trade differently with the intent of later opening up the cap room necessary to formalize the Harris signing. Still, it appears as though deft management of timing gave Cleveland the opportunity to sign its second-rounder to a three-year deal, which is significantly more valuable to the team than a two-year contract would be, as I explained last year. The Cavs did so while still acquiring non-guaranteed contracts that they can flip, sooner or later. Utah receives some more cap space, as well as Felix, ostensibly the player with the most upside in this transaction, having been picked 33rd overall just a year ago. Time will tell if it was indeed a trade that helped both teams, but the deal has the makings of being just that.

Cavs Acquire Three In Swap With Jazz

July 22nd, 2014 at 7:21pm CST by Ryan Raroque

7:21pm: The Cavaliers have officially announced the deal, per a team press release.

7:16pm: Out of the three players heading to Cleveland, Minnesota actually had some interest in Murphy after he was waived by the Bulls last season, tweets Jerry Zgoda of the Star Tribune.

7:03pm: The pick that Utah will receive in the deal will be a 2015 second rounder from Cleveland, tweets Aaron Falk of the Salt Lake Tribune.

6:21pm: According to one Cavs source, Cleveland likes Lucas, Thomas, and Murphy and doesn’t necessarily view them as stepping stones to a bigger deal, tweets Jason Lloyd of the Akron Beacon Journal.

6:00pm: The Jazz are expected to trade the non-guaranteed contracts of John Lucas III, Malcolm Thomas, and Erik Murphy to the Cavaliers for Carrick Felix, a future second rounder, and $1MM, a source tells Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo Sports. Felix’s contract is guaranteed for $816K in 2014/15, whereas Lucas III, Thomas, and Murphy combined for roughly $3.3MM in non-guaranteed deals for the upcoming season. Wojnarowski adds that Cleveland had been looking to make this type of deal recently in order to help facilitate a trade for Timberwolves star Kevin Love (Twitter links).

Minnesota has been determined to unload Kevin Martin and J.J. Barea in a deal involving Love, says Wojnarowski, who also notes that the Cavs would have to find a third team in order to make it work. Nonetheless, whether Lucas, Thomas, and Murphy’s contracts are used to bring the former UCLA big man to Ohio or are included in a separate trade, this deal at the very least has given Cleveland some “buying power” (Twitter links).