Official 2016 Free Agency Thread

the second rounders are super meh. it's the bkn pieces that matter. can't believe they worked themselves around the stepien rule with the pick swap next year. is billy king the worst gm in history? i think so.

anyway, i don't care who else is bidding--i don't go above russell in my offer. if boston wants to move a high lotto and jaylen brown, they can be my guest.

 

That's why I bolded the Brooklyn picks. Yeah, and Billy King is an idiot.

 

I think bos "assets" are overrated....their players are nothing more than avg role players and even though IT was an all-star, i cant imagine teams would expect to be a serious threat to contend with him as your lead guard....the bk pick wont be better than this past draft imo, bkn new gm is quite good and doing a solid job this off-season, better than what mitch/jim just did with their 60mill

 

i didn't realize they had the 2018, too--because i thought it was impossible. then i remembered the swap. unbelievable. interesting that they didn't try to double down with wild spending in FA. boston has to be glad, as there's almost no way bkn doesn't give them a top 5 pick next year and the year after.

the luxury of being a new gm (for marks in this case) is that you don't have to fall prey to sunk costs. ironically, boston would be in a worse position if king was still there...

 

totally agree on their players. as rrofy laid out, it's the two bkn picks that sort of trump everything. if they were lotto protected or something, then boston would be sort of asset-less. but they're not. huge difference.

 

Not when it comes to trading.

 

A package of AVERAGENESS imo...the bkn picks are questionable assets and their players are avg role players, i would even venture to say brown could turn out just like smart, avg shooter and ok defender

 

Besides harden trade, which isnt all that bad considering they netted Adams out of it, show me a trade he lost? He got kanter for peanuts and just bent over orl hard for an expiring/declining ibaka

 

presti's made some head-scratching decisions, imo, but part of that is that okc's owner is cheap. the harden trade was simply awful, and it was compounded by them letting kevin martin walk in FA for nothing the next year. i didn't like the jackson/kanter trade, either. i'd argue they'd be better off with jackson right now, and i think he's the better player.

presti has consistently drafted well, but signings (singler?!) and trades haven't been fantastic, nor have other personnel decisions (paying ibaka over harden, keeping perkins instead of dropping him, letting martin walk).

 

If Westbrook, 27, is willing to keep trying, he will have to be more patient than ever in pushing but not steamrolling Adams, 22; Victor Oladipo, 24; Kanter, 24; Roberson, 24; Cameron Payne, 21; Domantas Sabonis, 20; and perhaps free agent Dion Waiters, 24.

But if Westbrook is not committed, Presti has to trade him, targeting the clubs that may lack the confidence they could sign Westbrook outright as a free agent next year. The C Bags, with all their rebuilding assets ready to be moved, are the most logical option. Boston could audition him with hopes of selling Westbrook on staying long-term with an Eastern Conference contender.

That may not be the preferred option, but it is a possibility OKC has to explore.

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/...t-westbrook-and-okcs-belief-in-his-leadership

Ding commentary.

 

you obviously dont know the back story of Jackson, he wasn't going to re-sign, the OKC players hated playing with him and he wanted to START ahead of Westbrook, he thought he was better than westbrook as well. He was throwing shades at OKC after the 3-1 collapse to GSW.

 

Assuming you are speaking of the Harden trade, here is an interesting tidbit from r/nba:


"I apologise if the following is common knowledge but I've heard people talk about the Harden trade a lot (shout out to Simmons) and can't remember ever hearing this story. I was going to paraphrase what Windhorst said but the filibuster he gave was so good I decided to transcribe it. I edited what he said a bit to make it easier to follow. This story is taken from the true hoop podcast from yesterday, starting around the 34 minute mark if you’d prefer to listen to it.

Some Context:

Ethan Strauss asks the guys if the Harden trade “lit the fuse” for Kevin Durant’s decision to join Golden State and ultimately ruin OKC's roster. Windhorst says he thinks the Thunder losing a 3-1 lead in the WCF was the key factor. Someone else (Tom Haberstroh?) tries to clarify Ethan’s point by asking would the Thunder have lost that lead with Harden on the team? This sparks Windhorst to get something off his chest…

Brian Windhorst:

“So here’s the thing guys, I have to step in here, you cannot look at that trade and say either/or. The Thunder were the product of their own misjudgements but they were the product of some terrible misfortune along the way. And one of the misfortunes was in 2011 a new CBA came in with extremely penal luxury tax penalties and as part of that CBA, without Durant even asking for it, [the league] grandfathered his contract in to giving him the ‘Rose provision’. When the CBA opened (the next year) it was like “by the way, you now have a luxury tax that’s twice or three times as penal as it was before, when you were planning your team. Oh and by the way, we decided we’re giving Kevin Durant three more million dollars over every year of his contract” and the Thunder we’re like “umm…WHAT?!” And it was such a bad deal for the Thunder that the league later refunded them the money but it was too late because they had to make the decision on Harden. Now if you wanna retort and say…

Someone else on the panel interrupts with a big “wait, whaaat?” because, like me, they can’t believe this s*** either

BW (cont.)

“…So as you know, there’s this thing called the ‘Rose provision’. It was called the ‘Rose provision’ but it might as well have been called the ‘Durant provision’ because he was the first person to actually get it. (It allows a player) to get extra money if you made two all NBA teams or were voted into two all-star games. Durant had signed his extension before the CBA and it was kicking in as soon as the new CBA came in. He didn’t have the opportunity to get the ‘Rose provision’ (in this contract because it didn’t exist when he was negotiating his contract). And somewhere in the lawyering…

Amin Elhassan jumps in to mention that the Rose Provision is negotiable between the player and the team from 25%-30% of the cap. However, in Durant’s case the league gave him the full 30% retrospectively without negotiation.

BW (cont.)

“They just gave it to him and it was a crazy decision and pardon my podcast French but they absolutely screwed the Thunder on it. Now, you’re gonna say “what are you complaining about? So what you have to give KD more money” but it screwed the Thunder’s planning. All of a sudden it meant that they had to account for three million dollars more per year for the next five years when they had to try and decide on Harden. And you may say to them “well you’re still an idiot because you should still pay Harden and pay the luxury tax. What’s your freaking problem, Thunder?” and the answer is they were horribly afraid of the repeater tax which they’d be in right now if they had signed Harden. So yes, if you want to frame the decision that they screwed up with Harden – yeah - but they got a terrible piece of misfortune there.”

And in case anyone wants to ask “well, why not still blame the Thunder’s cheap owners for not paying the repeater tax?”...

BW (from a little later in the pod):

“All I’m saying is, the thunder’s point of view of it is, that we’re now in year 6 of the CBA and the Thunder would have been a tax payer for 5 of those 6 years had they done the Harden deal and therefore they would not be in a position to do anything. As you know, the repeater tax even scared away Prokhorov. He fled on the repeater tax. The Miami heat fled on the repeater tax. [The league] has been trying to figure out ways to create a hard cap – well you’ve finally found it. Everybody’s afraid of that repeater tax, even guys like Micky Arison who are worth like 8/10 billion and Prokhorov, one of the richest people in the world, are afraid of the repeater tax. And that’s what OKC was afraid of and that’s what was put on their plate (by the league). They knew that because they had Durant and Westbrook and if they added Harden they’d be deep in the repeater tax by now and they still couldn’t afford them.”

https://m.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/4rg0o2/transcript_of_an_amazing_brian_windhorst_story/

BLIND EDIT: This surely isn't an absolvement of Clay Bennett or Sam Presti. They still had 3 top 10 players and a top 25 player all at once and have nothing to show for it. But it's easier to see the decision beyond "lol dumb/cheap thunder".

 

Thanks for adding context to that. That was eye opening for me. Great, great stuff.

 

BS.

The Thunder would have been able to stay under the Lux tax threshold and pay Harden the max if they decided to amnesty Kendrick Perkins. They chose not to.

 

All they had to do was amnesty Perkins? I'm not that familiar with their salary cap situation at the time.

 

Either that, or the OKC brass didn't like Harden and figured they could win championships without him. Sometimes it's personality clashes. We'll never know for sure. I was surprised at the time because I expected them to amnesty Perkins and keep that gang together.