2022-23 Team Developments: News / Trades / Free Agents / Rumors

I'm not sure that KCP and Green's defense, were more important than Lebron and AD's dominance. The big scorers we faced that season still lit us up like they did everybody else. However the rebounding edge we had that season, was an overlooked big time factor. We wore teams out with our size.

 

Our D can be better now with AD and Reaves. Rozier doesn't improve our defense any. Plumlee and Washington doesn't improve our defense either. Now Bogdanovic isn't some kind of defensive upgrade at all, however he is a scorer that can hit the 3 at an efficient clip. I like that idea, as I said already.

 

The only problem I have with Bogdanovic is that I wouldn't give up a FRP for him. This is why I'd trade Bev and Walker for him. Lonnie is a good young prospect and he's on a reasonable contract for his potential. Detroit gets a quality young talent that has NBA experience and some salary cap relief by dumping Bev. They could move Bev on to another team for something. I'm not convinced that they will get a better deal than that for him.

 

i don't think they're going to get an attractive unprotected 1st for him without taking on bad salary. i also don't think they'll get a good young player AND an unprotected 1st years out, either.

but a team like dallas might offer a fully unprotected 1st along with hardaway or bertans, for example. would detroit prefer that to a protected pick from us plus expiring money? could they re-route bev for something they want? lots of variables.

btw, saw something out of toronto today saying they wanted a couple cost-controlled young talented players plus a 1st for OG. sounds like christie/reaves/2027 pick. pretty steep.

 

I'm not on this OG train myself. It might just be bad timing, but the last 3 or 4 Raptors games I've seen, didn't leave me all that impressed with this kid. I wouldn't give up that kind of package for him at all.

If Detroit only cares about getting a FRP for Bogdanovic, then we will probably get outbid.

 

the dream isn't even russ and two picks; it's just being able to be in the bidding when the next donovan mitchell situation comes up. maybe that's AD and the picks 18 months from now. the point is if we trade picks six years out, we're out of every conversation.

the counter that you can recoup the picks in a later trade involving the current incoming player doesn't work for bogdanovic. it may work for anunoby. but you're not guaranteed, either. i like how rob put it: you get to spend it once.

 

I'm not knocking your opinion here Jones, I just like Bogdanovic, for slightly different reasons than you guys do. I'm all for keeping Westbrook, because he gets these young guys to play with confidence. This helps us,even when he's off the floor, and Westbrook pushes pace and is productive on the court.

Kyrie was the only guy I was interested in trading Russ and picks for. Beal and Lavine Meh. I still think that Bajan can be had for less than a FRP tho.

 

FWIW...Nunn and Walker match Jordan Clarkson's contract. Bev and Jones still gives 15 million to make another play.

 

Ainge isn’t dealing with us. He would demand a first back- even for Clarkson.

 

I appreciate the discussion as well like always!

You’re right, a few months ago everyone did want to trade Russ. But as we both know sports fans are very what have you done for me lately and short sighted. It’s why everyone wants to trade our first round picks and don’t care/understand the ramifications for the next 8 years.

Russ was poor last season, but impact wise he has greatly improved this year. I feel like we are getting a real multiplier effect because of him to our bench. And it’s become the one consistent weapons we have - we know when our bench comes in, it’ll claw us back into the game or extend the lead. I don’t want to lose that competitive advantage this year.

As for his post season results, it’s hard to blame him;

- Post KD year: averages 38/11/11 with some of the highest on/off numbers in history. That team had nothing.

- PG years: two hard fought series. One against Utah with Donovan Mitchell, Gobert, Joe Ingles, Derrick Favours, Crowder, Royce O’Neale, Ricky Rubio and Alec Burks. That was a sneaky good team. And the following year against Portland when they made the WCF with Lillard’s peak.

- Hou: this is the one everyone brings up. But no one brings up that he tore his quad and was playing on it still injured in the bubble. Look at his regular season games that year against us: 15/23 and 17/28. No one was stopping Russ going to the rim that year with that much spacing and D’Antoni ball.

In the bubble he just didn’t have any athleticism because he was on one leg. People make it out to seem like we just stopped him flat, but even then he had 3 good to great games and only 2 bad ones. With a healthy Russ I think it’s fair to say that’s a 6 or 7 game series. But we still beat them size.

Washington: check that team back. They shouldn’t have made the playoffs but they did because of Russ’s plays.

I don’t equate it to Russ not being a winning player. But I want us to make the playoffs healthy and then to prove that in action.

As for my plan with Russ, he is producing in the 20-30m range this season. I would try to resign him at 10m per because the value of his play makes that a great contract.

But more than that, I understand the appeal in getting underneath the tax threshold for a season so we can reset the repeater measures. Ultimately I think that’s the play for our front office. So I expect us to resign some of Russ, Bryant, Reaves and Schroeder while Christie grows into a better player, we develop some more picks and get a good vet minimum or two next year. Hopefully the added pieces and continuity has us top 4.

 

He already traded us Bev for Tucker, and gave up Bogdanovic for no FRP.

 

Sign me up for any of:

- Bogdanovic for a top 10 protected 1st
- OG for an unprotected 1st and a top 5 protected first
- Crowder for some seconds
- Alec Burks for some seconds

 

Saw something about Grizzlies being interested for OG and might offer 3 firsts alongside Danny Green and filler.

That’s frankly terrifying to me. They’re missing a big SF and have to use Brooks to defend them. OG and losing none of their young pieces pushes them to the top of the heap.

 

The signs are pointing to me, that we intend to bring Westbrook back next season. I don't know at what salary, but we have Bird rights on him. They can save him until the last move, and resign him to any amount they want. This tax payer stuff, I think it really depends on how the team performs for the rest of this season.

 

Right.

Not to mention that I still think Bojan is a better fit for us than those rumored stars.

 

It’s not as simple as that. He has a cap hit of about 50m. So if we do decide to bring him back we’ll renounce his bird rights and sign him into cap space/with the MLE or resign him first without renouncing him.

The first option is the more likely, we renounce him.

 

But what's going wrong in Toronto though? They have shooters, all this size and length that everyone covets, and they still suck.

 

See I'm not understanding it that way. According to this we will have 30-34 million in cap space period. Renouncing our cap holds doesn't effect our available cap space at all. However Renouncing guys, means that you can't turn around and go over the cap to resign them. So again I think Russ and Reaves will just be our last two moves and we'll go over the cap to resign both.


https://www.spotrac.com/nba/los-angeles-lakers/cap/2023/

 

can't we extend him prior to the opening of FA?

https://www.hoopsrumors.com/2022/07/2022-23-nba-contract-extension-tracker.html

so we can use bird rights and just operate over the cap. if his salary is low enough, we'll have full mle AND get under the tax for a year. i think i've gamed this out a couple times somewhere already.

this works best if we take on salary in a bev/nunn deal, imo.

could allow us to return bev/nunn trade piece (rozier? burks?), lebron, AD, russ, reaves, christie, gabriel, and probably walker just using the raise on the mini mle we can offer. now your full MLE goes to a guy that just needs to be a rotation player, and you've returned 7-8 of your best guys. you're out of financial hell; you've retained your picks; you have guys on deals close to their value, and you have the guts of a team that won at about a 45-50 win clip. also have our first round pick, which in this case, you'd actually use and hopefully get another reaves/christie level player for the future.