Today is the best day of the NBA offseason. Say what you want about the draft, which is a spectacle unto itself. But the start of free agency operates on a whole different level. It is not a televised event, but rather a phenomenon that ebbs and flows by the hour, best covered and followed on Twitter. About 99 out of every 100 tweets are relatively worthless. “Team X has interest in Player Y, sources tell Reporter Z.” Yeah, you will
The countdown has begun, and all heck breaks loose at 12:01 a.m. EDT Wednesday. We have The Decision II on our hands, but nobody is talking about it because everyone knows what LeBron James is going to do. Kevin Love, however, is this year’s mystery man. DeAndre Jordan is one of the most coveted pieces out there. Mitch Kupchak would still love to have DeMarcus Cousins patrolling the middle, but he and the Lakers have a ton of fallback options. Short contracts
The Toronto Raptors are flush with salary cap space. Yes, they need to re-sign Sixth Man award winner Lou Williams, and they’ll likely need to give him a significant raise after what he gave them. But what about getting unrestricted free agents to come to Toronto? It has never been an easy thing to do (last summer’s Kyle Lowry re-signing notwithstanding), and Masai Ujiri is going up against some awfully heavy hitters when it comes to going after the likes of
With the draft in the rearview mirror, July 1 is the next big day on the NBA calendar. That’s the day teams can start negotiating contracts with free agents. And every year, the few days right at the end of June are a unique window where teams’ plans start coalescing and reliable information about where some of the top names might be headed starts to leak out. We’ve already seen indications that LaMarcus Aldridge is preparing to leave the Blazers. LeBron
I had a long talk with DeMarre Carroll of the Hawks on the night Atlanta eliminated Brooklyn from the playoffs, and the discussion turned toward money — as in how much money Carroll will be worth on the open market, and whether it would be worth the risk for him to sign a one-year deal and then hope to cash in big-time in the summer of 2016 when the salary cap jumps to $90 million. Since our conversation, Carroll has had
BROOKLYN – You don’t need a watch to know the time for the Memphis Grizzlies to win a title is now. If you did, acquiring Jeff Green was the beeping alarm clock that woke up the rest of the Western Conference. With Green, Memphis has the missing piece to compete atop the vaunted West. [Read more…]
Young players having the best seasons in their careers right before they’re due a new contract is hardly a new phenomenon, but it takes on new significance due to the NBA’s current economic situation. A likely escalation in the salary cap this summer will allow free agents to obtain more expensive contracts from a larger pool of teams with newfound cap space. A quartet of these young, emerging stars— Milwaukee’s Brandon Knight, Chicago’s Jimmy Butler, Orlando’s Tobias Harris and Golden State’s