2019/20 Players' Transactions: Breaking News , Trades, Free Agents, And Rumors

getting AD/James via Rich Paul is like making a deal with the Devil, as the saying goes.....Pelinka and Jeannie are going to have to pay with their souls eventually

 

Who are some low key targets that make sense?

Lakers biggest need last night was another playmaker who can get inside and create for himself and others. This was clear even with Rondo. Maybe Rondo is enough with Kuzma back too, but I am not sure, especially if we have to play Lebron with Rondo and AD.

Need a guy who can run pick and rolls and score.

Here are some names, many are underwhelming, but realistic. Some are underrated when looking at pick and roll efficiency as ball handler.

Reggie Jackson (KCP, Cook, Cook, Cousins to cut, and cash)
Dj Augustin (KCP, THT, 2nd, cash. I don't think its enough tbh)
Trey Burke (for troy daniels or cook, more spacing for them)
JJ barea (for troy daniels)
Schroder (for KCP, Cousins to cut, Daniels)
Patty Mills (KCP, Boogie to cut, 2nd)
Austin Rivers (KCP, THT, 2nd/cash for Rivers and Mclemore, who is less useful than KCP somehow)

Only way to get a much better guard would be to use Kuzma and I don't know if we do that this year.

Edit:

Waiters possibly? Not a great fit with Lebron though as we saw in CLE 1st time

 

I like the effort and consideration bro, but the tricky part of involving Kcp in anything is his no-trade clause and essentially if he waived it, his bird rights (that took 3yrs in the making) go bye bye. The only team that can take him in via trade and then give him “bird-type” money is a team that is projected to have cap next summer and can give him whatever amount he wants that way instead of with his non-bird rights. So if Kcp wants to stay with the squad that traded for him and he wants to get paid as well, waiving his no-trade and getting sent to a cap-strapped team is a no-go. That eliminates a lot of options right off the bat.

There is a way to bypass it and that’s if he agrees to opt into his 2nd year @8.5m. That way the team that traded for him can use his bird rights to bypass the cap and give him what he wants in terms of payment...but only in the summer of 2021 when his current 2yr deal expires.

Also his 15% trade kicker can help grease a trade as well, but essentially Kcp will be getting paid a 2yr sub-MLE and I’m sure dude thinks he can score a slightly higher bag on the open market next summer or stay with us via his bird rights.

So bottomline when it comes to trade scenarios involving Kcp: it’s our balls firmly placed in the klutches of his hands. Essentially, our balls and him are cellmates. Who’s the manna that gave dude that contract this summer?

 

Why should I care about KCP's bird rights lol?

I rather him not even be on the team or play.

This is all assuming he would agree to waive kicker (more money, more opportunities to shoot so more money in future by tricking a team that hes decent, etc).
Maybe Klutch pays him to agree or Klutch threatens to drop him and he would be out of a job real soon.

 

you should care, since kcp has a defacto no trade clause, he has to consent to any trades n with ad impending fa. i doubt rob will do anything to anger his daddy Rich Paul

 

To add to what Kh said above, this is why if a Klutch tax existed, you hand it to AD. I have a hard time believing AD makes an extension/re-up decision on Kcp, which is why if Kawhi wasn’t in the deck, you shuffle up and add that kicker back to the AD trade. Kcp want going to get paid had Kawhi signed so him as the klutch tax is something I’m not entirely buying. AD is not going to demand a trade to play with Bron and in the LA market to only feel slighted if Kcp wasn’t resigned. In fact, go back to the tape and AD isn’t even saying much about Kcp when he mentions how the roster shaped out.

But I agree, we shouldn’t care about Kcp’s bird rights. However indirectly, it does impact how can improve the roster...which is something we all should care about greatly. Cause if it’s not obvious already, this roster has holes if the endgame is a title.

 

i mean, it's the klutch tax. it's obvious and has been for a while. it's not about AD; it's about rich paul and not pissing him off. this is the bed we've made. it's not ideal, but it's more comfortable than the urine-soaked egg crate that we've been using for half a decade.

 

How does his bird rights help improve this roster?

His 8M hit isn't very high to get a big time overpaid guy with many years left and we have no assets but like a 2nd I believe really to get a guy around his salary

 

It doesn’t. That’s the point...his contract in itself is a deterrent and not really a trade asset.

I’m right there with you in terms of having a limited asset chest. It’s why I wanted to use our cap space in the summer to gain assets back we lost in the AD trade.

I’m not the biggest fan of Vogel and he was worked by Doc in the opener. But I don’t think it’s fair to blame this entirely on him.

Vogs options are Cook, Caruso, AvBrad and Rondo. Other than Rondo, none of them have proven to be 30mpg playmakers in their career. But Vogs has to work with what the FO gave him.

And frankly I’m tired of folks continuously thinking we didn’t have options this summer. If Green was the major get this summer, that’s roughly 14.6m from a potential 33.8m in cap space. Y’all telling me we couldn’t do other things with that 20m in space along with the 4.4m in the room exception?

We gotta ride Bron into the starting point cause we have no other options. For instance Miami was hard-capped and tried to pawn off Dragic with a pick to Dallas before they called it off. Dragic makes 19m. That’s just one option for a playmaker along with some draft incentive. And that 19m can bring back as much as a 24m player by himself. Since Dragic would have been acquired via our cap, he can instantly be rerouted without waiting 2 months had he been acquired in the traditional sense.

Bottomline: Vogel is the easy target but our FO put us in this position (ie next to no depth at our star positions; next to no legit playmakers to play along or stagger off Bron for a lengthy duration; forcing AD to play a position he doesn’t want to). We chose to scramble into signing Kcp, Daniels, AvBrad at the SG slot and using (about) vet mins to address the PG void.

And not only that, those contracts, like the one Kcp has, are the ones we gave him. As a result we’re stuck with what we gave for the time being.

 

sighs. miami wasn't dumping dragic with assets. it's why the mavs deal didn't happen. almost all of the hypotheticals you put out weren't likely to happen, and as we established in the other thread(s) in which this dominates all conversation, any of your myriad non-plans don't appear to generate superior on-court products and generally involve grabbing picks that either a) weren't explicitly offered or moved or b) are going to be so low as to not be worth much. even if the picks had any value, they don't help us win now, which is the current mode.

we gave kcp the contract to keep his agency happy. the agency that runs our team and got us lebron and AD. so factor that into every single alternative reality offseason plan that still had no chance of trumping a kawhi leonard/paul george coup. kcp is a not a sensible debate topic, imo. he was going to be here, at market rates or higher, period. unless we wanted to risk making an enemy of paul. i would have loved to use that money otherwise, as would...everyone f***ing else! but you insist that our FO is just super dumb and thinks kcp is great. the manna from heaven thing was obviously lip service, else maybe he wouldn't have taken 30% pay cuts each successive year he's been here. this is all to do a solid for klutch, who bungled the living s*** out of kcp's shot at a big payday in detroit. he's still not whole from that, and i'm pretty sure he's been promised he will be.

 

ABeer: To get Butler via S&t, the deal involved Philly and the Mavs. Dallas would take on Dragic with picks using their cap space.

Seeing how they had Luka, maybe they didn’t want Dragic to control the ball too much and instead wanted Olynyk and Jones Jr.

Clips and Portland join the dance. It can’t be just Portland cause Miami is hard capped and you need the salaries to match. So essentially it was Whiteside and pick with Portland rerouting the pick to the cLips with Harkless. So no the pick was not hypothetical...it was something Miami was ready to do to get Butler via S&t.

Why is acquiring a pick so important? Cause we can’t trade our 2020 1st round pick without knowing how Griff/Nawlin treats our 2021 pick. So any trade to improve on this season has really only Kuz, AvBrad and Green as viable trade options since nearly all our other players have defacto no trade clauses.

Savs: Kcp was manna for opening up lines to Klutch before Bron got here. Once Bron was here, you knew he was going to find a running mate one way or another. We traded alot for AD and brought his bird rights along, so that’s the klutch tax right there. Once we got Bron, all Kcp became was a cap placeholder. We opened up 2 max slots for Bron and someone to step into these last 2 summers. Kcp took a one year deal the summer we got Bron so that we can dip into free agency again with the max. He was also part of the final offer to get AD last season via trade. So I really don’t think Kcp was our contingency if we struck out. Next summer, we don’t need cap to lock in AD. We have his bird rights. So why not offer Kcp some real cash this summer on a long term deal then? IMO the Kcp klutch tax is a farce.

Thats’s why I wanted the AD trade kicker, cause at least you can offer dude a max extension that way. That’s clearly something Rich Paul has been angling for with nearly all his klients now. DeJounte Murray and the Spurs is the most recent example...and that’s after his other klutch klient, Morris, spurned the Spurs. The AD extension was a viable solution, but we didn’t reintroduce in the trade after Kawhi spurned us. There is no way AD f***s up his money for Kcp.

But let’s say Klutch makes it where Kcp HAS to be here. With Kawhi, Kcp adds depth to our SG rotation and we know he wants to play big minutes so Kawhi can get his load managed and it’s a win win. In that scenario, all we had to offer was the 4.4m room exception. So I’m good with a Kawhi/Kcp summer.

But once Kawhi went elsewhere, it became about Danny. Let’s say it was and Kcp has to part of the deck, the room exception is still there (which he was ready to take for Kawhi)...that leaves roughly 20m in cap still to flesh out the roster or acquire assets via trade.

Let’s say it absolutely had to be an he 8.2m he ended up getting...then I’m sorry but Green ain’t here then and he goes to the Mavs....leaving about 26m in cap space for trades and asset reacquisition.

Bottomline is Kcp served his purpose to set up shop with Klutch and then he was free to go about somewhere else. If we truly were paying him royalties/klutch tax for the hookup, his current deal would be longer and more robust (pause). Like I said before, Kcp’s money has no bearing on our cap next summer to re-up AD. So if Klutch really wanted to tax us, this wasn’t the most punitive way in doing it.

Btw, Kcp played decent D on Kawhi in 27 mins and took only 3 shots (aka wasn’t doing a Kobe impression). Without bodying up Kawhi (who clearly is taller and longer that Kcp), Green doesn’t choose green for his number on offense. He had that extra juice cause he wasn’t on Kawhi the whole game. So Kcp could do way better obviously, but y’all need to lay off the kid cause it wasn’t entirely his fault we lost.

We lost cause our stars couldn’t bring it home. They was clearly gassed. But who put em in that situation? Vogel did! But Vogel can only play with the pieces he has...so who put this roster together? And there’s your culprit.

 

so...all that is saying that kcp isn't a favor to klutch...because he's not paid enough.

another take would be that our shrewd management was able to pull rich paul off an initially higher demand for kcp--probably one that made him whole on what he lost in turning down det's offer.

my speculation is as valid as yours.



anyway, our superstars can't carry the load like trez and lou, so management sucks. bring back magic.

got it.

 

Right 1st three words but here comes another paragraph detailing how Magic in the most magnanimous of all magnanimous moments gave Jeanie time to (implied fire Rob) and bring in a new FO or turn on its head the existing front office. While also magnanimously going on national TV and calling the current GM a backstabber. (that part won't be included)

 

Right. Not a thing to do with missing Cousins, Kuzma, Caruso and Rondo in the roster they assembled.

 

Gained an asset like capspace for 2 years and lost assets in the process to gain it....all in a blink.

I had a wait and see approach to this. This summer came and unfortunately I didn’t. Now I’m feeling blue and when you look at means of improving IF this current roster doesn’t have it, we don’t have the assets. Balls...

Current contracts that will be hard to move were offered to players by them.

Our current coaching tree was by their design.

Our limited executive hierarchy is of their own choice. They could have brought in more worker bees but chose not to.

Listen, even his man Kob can’t say with certainty if the Lakers have what it takes to get it done this year. And Kob’s the dude with all the Details...so if that guy has his doubts, mine are perfectly reasonable.

Btw, I’m not saying Rob sucks, but our FO didn’t close on their plan As. They obviously wanted Lue and Kawhi...that was their endgame. They didn’t close and that should tell you at the very least that there’s room for improvement. So our FO sucks vs our FO is culpable yet capable to improve are two very different things.

 

Abeer and LT continue with your Magic witch hunt.

If Magic was still here, he’d get it from metoo (still waiting on that harassment article btw). This summer imo wasn’t ideal and what makes it worse is our limited options to improve or right any wrongs.

But keep using the that as your shield to deflect from a very real problem on this roster. AD/Bron don’t have much depth behind them at the forward positions and the onus of playmaking falls on our 35y/o star.

Now if there was some way we could have address that appropriately this summer.

#34mProblemsButOurGMaint1

 

Our original roster healthy (first time out of the gate) (with still an open spot on it to fill) still likely beats their roster healthy with Paula playing. And they are a well functioning unit out of the gate with familiarity and picked to win the chip.

Trumps your argument with paragraphs of

"But Vogel can only play with the pieces he has...so who put this roster together? And there’s your culprit."

Since we are using the first game of the season for validation.

 

your plans had us doing things like getting whiteside's 30 million, which...doesn't address your concerns in any way.

and investing in backups for superstars is silly, imo. THAT's a waste of money. if they can't play 32-34mpg for 70+ games, they're not worth the fuss. when we got lebron and AD, we basically had 34 million to spend and nothing at any other position. we needed shooters, desperately. so we got some. we needed a guy who could defend sgs, so we got the best one on the market. we needed competent centers, so we got two. pg was the problem, but the truth is the market wasn't flooded with quality pgs that fit our needs. we were going to be in trouble there, almost no matter what.

nobody said we'd do everything the FO did. but nobody is on a months-long crusade to claim that basically "anything else" was an improvement, either.