The bulk of the NBA’s offseason business is done. The big signings are done, the second-tier players are almost all off the table as well, and for the most part, rotations for next season are set.
That said, there are always a couple of players who, even at this relatively late stage, are still unsigned. With the bulk of NBA places gone, so too now are the bulk of the EuroLeague and Chinese league places, the two next best-paying leagues in the world. Those who remain unsigned therefore have limited spots to fight over, and might be fighting each other.
Here, then, in absolutely no order whatsoever, are some of those remaining who could still potentially help a an NBA team.
Jamal Crawford
Crawford opted out of a $4,544,400 contract with the Timberwolves, as his one year with the team was not a happy union. He had the third-lowest points per game mark of his career (and the lowest since the first two years of his career), a joint-lowest assists per game mark, and a career-worst DBPM of -4.0. He still make a lot of tough shots off the dribble, as is his way, but he was ineffectual defensively, and measured out as an overall net negative. Nevertheless, Crawford’s ability to save plays should still get him another contract somewhere. It is however surprising that now, in the first week of September, he still hasn’t got one.
–
Joe Johnson
After playing well in a part-season at a new position of power forward on the minimum salary for the Miami Heat down the stretch of the 2015-16, Johnson signed for big money the following summer to do the same for the Utah Jazz. In the first year with them, he did so, being a productive half court offensive player via a barrage of floaters and turnarounds. Last year, however, Johnson looked slowed, losing his scoring efficiency (a .542% true shooting mark plummeted to .490%) while being ever more attacked defensively. With career-lows in his advanced stats across the board, the Johnson of last season is no longer an NBA player. The Johnson of the year before, though, was. And so he may get one more contract if is believed that last year was just an aberration.
–
Jordan Crawford
Jamal’s namesake started last year with the Pelicans and ended last year with the Pelicans, despite being out of the NBA for the majority of the year. In the short time he managed on the court, he proved as ever that he can score the ball at the NBA level, doing so via a ball-dominant style reminiscent of a slightly overzealous Jamal. In his eight professional seasons, Crawford has recorded NBA career averages of 12.2 points and 3.1 assists per game; the scoring is inefficiently, the play often wild, the rhythm never really there, the defence similarly short, but that has to count for something. In the half court, Crawford can score with almost anyone.
Brandan Wright
Wright played for both the Memphis Grizzlies and Houston Rockets last year, but after a decade of being a very productive backup, he struggled with both his health and performance. Health problems are nothing new for Wright, who has managed only 68 games over the past three seasons, and only 428 over his 11 year career; a dodgy knee is now the main cause of his repeated absences. In the past, when healthy, he would at least be an athletic paint finisher, lob catcher, shot-blocker and occasional mid-range shooter. If the Brandan Wright of old can be found, he can still be that.
–
Willie Reed
The NBA has gradually moved away from players of Reed’s ilk, and contracts to non-stretch fives are getting shorter and rarer. Nevertheless, with an always-excellent rebounding rate and the ability to finish around the basket, take a couple of dribbles and drop righty hooks, Reed has always been an effective one. He isn’t a new-era centre, but there is still room for productive, strong and athletic paint players.
–
Quincy Acy
Offensively, Acy is seemingly a shooter now; 80% of his shots last season came from beyond the three-point line, and 34.9% of them went in. If that number was 5% higher, he would probably have a job by now; it is not as though those shots were contested. Acy’s hustle, strength and effort saw him play a stretch-five role, despite standing only 6’7 and entering the league as awing player, and while he does not contend shots much above the rim, he does counter this by taking charge. He is thus a candidate for a stretch four role somewhere. The stretch five thing, though, was sub-optimal.
Derrick Williams
Eight years ago, Williams was a #2 overall pick. He has been in the NBA for at least part of every season since, yet his lustre has diminished to the point that his only NBA work last year was a single 10-day contract with the L.A. Lakers. For a long time, the knock against Williams was his lack of position; he was either a power forward without interior size or game, or a perimeter playing small forward who neither handled nor shot as well as his peers. It should surely figure that the evolution of the NBA game towards more stretch play from all frontcourt positions would benefit a player like Williams. Yet he cannot make it stick, and remains unsigned for now.
–
Errick McCollum
C.J.’s older brother is the rare example of the undrafted 30-year-old with no NBA experience who might nevertheless have a chance at this level. McCollum has yet to get beyond the summer league level in the NBA, yet he has twice led the Chinese league in scoring, and last year averaged 14.6 points per game for Anadolu Efes in the EuroLeague. It is true that Efes finished last in the EuroLeague, and that they had the worst offence in the competition, one often guilty of overdribbling and not being able to regularly create high-efficiency offence. But this was more a case of the team not knowing (or refusing to accept) the profile of who they signed and then wondering why he wasn’t a half-court point guard. Like C.J., Errick is a scorer by trade, who just happens to be a short one. Having improved to an average three-point shooter over the years to flank his dynamic driving, step-back driven scoring game, he may have a small NBA window.
–
Phil Pressey
Three-year NBA veteran Pressey has been out of the league for a couple of years, spending one in the G-League and one in the EuroLeague with Barcelona. Falling out of the league is not the same as falling off the radar, and, as a pesky defender with excellent ball control, he embodies a lot of the indelible qualities coaches like to have from reserve point guards. His lack of size, athleticism and shot though made him an overall net negative in the NBA, and remain true even after his time out of the league. So to make it back in, someone will have to really like him.
Festus Ezeli
Ezeli played four years for the Golden State Warriors, and although he struggled with his health in that time (missing the entirety of his second season and managing only 92 regular season games over the final two), he nevertheless developed in that time to become a very solid backup post centre. However, while he signed a two year, $15,133,000 contract with the Portland Trail Blazers in the summer of 2016, he never played for the team at all due to injury, and has been out of the league for a year. Ezeli has now has multiple surgeries on both knees, and his health is the primary if not only concern; when he was healthy, he was certainly good enough.
–
Dwight Buycks
Buycks started last year on a two-way contract with the Pistons, yet worked his way up to a full contract midseason, and ended up averaging 14.7 minutes per game between January and March. He was however only a stop-gap solution as the Pistons ran out of ball handlers, and was waived to open this summer in favour of Jose Calderon. Buycks’s aggressive driving game nevertheless saw him provide a useful scoring option alongside and around Andre Drummond’s dribble hand-offs, and while his age (turning 30 in March) does not convey the upside that a fringe NBA guard would ideally have, he does have least have some citeable experience now.
–
Rodney Hood
Hood is the best player on this list, a scoring wing who averaged 16.8 points per game over the first two thirds of last season, and who scored double figures in two NBA Finals games as recently as three months ago. His unsigned status is not down to whether or not he can get a contract, but merely a question of how big it should be; Cleveland have leveraged his free agency to temper suitors in a marker that is largely positioning itself for the summer of 2019, while Hood is reconciling potentially positioning himself in the same market with the understandable desire to get as much as he can now. In tandem, then, the two have seen Hood remain unsigned, while the bulk of the available money out there has been spent. Cleveland have been down this road before with both Anderson Varejao and Sasha Pavlovic some years ago, and would rather the situation not extend into training camp like those two did; nevertheless, it seems likely Hood will be back with the team, in some form.
Lucas Nogueira
The irrepressible Nogueira lost his rotation spot as the Toronto Raptors’ main reserve centre to Jakob Poeltl over the course of last season, and although Poeltl has now been dealt to the San Antonio Spurs, the Raptors have made no obvious signs of re-signing Nogueira, instead signing Greg Monroe for depth and intending to play Serge Ibaka more regularly at five. Nogueira is therefore out of work, despite his length and athleticism making him an active defensive presence who wins possessions. There has never been much polished or consistent about Bebe, but there does not really need to be for him to be effective.
–
Alan Williams
In the first year of a three year, $17.04 million contract with the Suns, last season was a nothing year for Williams. He missed almost all of it due to a torn Meniscus, and although he returned for the final five games, that was not enough time to show that he could still be the player he had been in 2016/17 when he earned that contract. A healthy, in-rhythm Williams is slow and undersized but also a rebounding magnet, with a rebounding rate of 22.4% that season to pair with a refined level of offensive skill. He is a pure paint player and a slow one who will be limited to a reserve role even at his best, but at his best, Williams is a solid NBA player.
–
Spencer Hawes
At a time of stretch fives, it is of note that an early subscriber to the model, Hawes, was out of the NBA all of last season. He never made it to the end of the four year, $22,652,350 contract he signed with the Clippers back in 2014, waived by the Bucks last summer under the stretch provision, a team that latterly proved suitably short of shooting that they keep bringing Jason Terry back, and proved suitably short of help of the five spot that they actually traded for Tyler Zeller. This is not a great endorsement of Hawes, a non-factor defensively at an important defensive position. Nevertheless, with a high level of offensive talent highlighted by a jump shot the modern game allows him to embrace, Hawes could surely still score at the NBA level.
Jared Cunningham
Cunningham played for a couple of teams in 2015/16, including 40 games in the first half of the season with the Cavaliers, then spent the following year in China. He went to summer league with the Wizards in 2017 in a bid to get back into the league was unsuccessful, and instead went to Bayern Munich in Germany, for whom he averaged 12.2 points, 2.1 assists and 1.2 steals in 21.5 minutes per game. The athletic Cunningham is a limited shooter and ball handler; that said, he runs the court well, slashes and is a great athlete. His NBA stints thus far have been built on the idea that he can convert that athleticism into above average perimeter defence to pair with incremental shooting and plenty of run-outs. He has yet to do the defensive part of that consistently, but there is still projectability there.
–
Josh Huestis
Three years after being drafted, Huestis got his first significant NBA minutes last season, recording 982 regular season minutes versus a mere 86 prior to that point. He appeared in 69 games and started 10 of them; he was however also removed from the rotation come playoff time, as Corey Brewer (below) took the role Huestis had once assumed as Andre Roberson’s replacement on the wing. Brewer took this role because Huestis didn’t fill it – while his length and determination saw him win possessions on the defensive end, he contributed incredibly little offensively and was overall a distinct net negative. The defensive profile intrigues enough for Huestis to be on NBA team’s radars, but to get another contract right away, he will need to find a team that can both mask his deficiencies and commit to fixing them.
–
Luol Deng
We suggested last week that Deng could be a buyout-and-stretch candidate for the Lakers as early as this Saturday, and it came to pass that that is exactly what happened. We further proffered that, if he were to be a free agent, Deng might be of interest to the Houston Rockets. Maybe he will be. Yet it seems also that the Minnesota Timberwolves are interested (inevitable, considering Tom Thibodeau’s love of what he already knows), and GiveMeSport has also learned that the Toronto Raptors have expressed an interest as well. It appears, then, as though Deng will not remain a free agent for long.
DeAndre Liggins
Liggins tends to sneak into the NBA at the back end of seasons as a defensive specialist role player picked up by teams for single-possession turns on the court. This happened again with the Pelicans last season, and so although they waived him this week, Liggins’s chances of another NBA contract must be considered fairly high. After all, he stuck to the brief.
–
Patrick McCaw
2017/18 was a significant sophomore slump for McCaw, who failed to capitalise on his late-season momentum as a rookie and instead fell out of the Warriors’ rotation for much of the season, including the post-season. Nevertheless, McCaw received a qualifying offer from the Warriors, a standing offer of a guaranteed $1,699,698 that is still extant today. A report at one time said that McCaw as likely to sign it, but he has not yet done so – the Warriors will be hoping that if he does return to the team, they can get him back to the heady, wiry, part-time handling versatile perimeter threat he once looked to be. There is still plenty of time on his side.
–
Tyler Ulis
Waived by the Phoenix Suns to open the offseason, Ulis was the most used of all the patch-up point guard options the team deployed last year. Playing in 71 games and starting 43 of them, Ulis appeared in 2,781 minutes over his first two seasons in the league with Phoenix, so it was a surprise to see him waived when he was set to cost only the minimum this season. Nevertheless, they did so presumably on account of not seeing much potential to improve within Ulis, a player who struggles to score the ball, defend his position or move opponents around on either end with his severe lack of size. The raw numbers of 7.8 points, 4.4 assists and 1.0 assists per game last year with a 2.5:1 assist to turnover ratio somewhat draw the eye, yet Ulis should be considered a deep reserve, That said, every team needs a third string point guard.
Jarrett Jack
After falling out of the league through aging and injury, Jack made it back with the Knicks as the veteran on-ball help that a struggling Frank Ntilikina needed, and that Ramon Sessions proved not to be. He was thoroughly unspectacular in his role, robbed of the speed of his youth (not that he was ever especially quick) and undynamic in every sense, yet in recording 7.5 inefficient points and 5.6 solid yet unspectacular assists per game, Jack helped aid the developments of Ntilikina and Kristaps Porzingis, inasmuch as he helped get the ball to them in the positions it was deemed correct for them to be in, even if such determinations seemed incorrect. Teams looking for a Raymond Felton type of veteran reserve point guard could look to Jack, then, as a player who knows what to do on the offensive end of the court, even if he can no longer do much of it himself.
–
Sean Kilpatrick
Kilpatrick played for four teams last season, his fourth in the NBA. He did little for the Nets, having lost the rotation spot with them that he held the previous year, then underwhelmed in a part-season stay with the Bucks and a 10-day contract with the Clippers, before rebounding to average 15.4 points per game over the final nine games of the season for the tanking Chicago Bulls. Kilpatrick now sports a 10.3 points per game career average over four seasons, and while he has been inefficient in doing so (never being as good of a three-point shooter as he is a turnaround two-point shooter), and the consequence-less nature of many of those points on poor Nets teams, he can also score the ball at the NBA level for the minimum. It should be worth something.
–
Jarell Eddie
Eddie keeps sniffing the NBA on account of his sweet shooting. He has spent four years bouncing between the NBA and the D-League/G-League, but is yet to get a long term contract or full-season stay out of it. Lacking elite athleticism, Eddie is not the ideal candidate for a three-and-D role, and while his shooting stroke is very appealing, players like Ryan Broekhoff get the shot away slightly quicker. Nevertheless, in a league looking for shooters, Eddie’s perennially above 40% three-point stroke keeps him on the cusp.
Dwyane Wade
If Wade wants to play, someone will surely have him. As of the time of writing, Wade is undecided on whether he will play another season. But should he decide that he will, the Miami Heat will surely be the first if not only port of call.
–
Jameel Warney
Warney has been on the cusp of the NBA ever since turning professional in 2016, and made it in briefly with a 10-day contract and the Dallas Mavericks partway through last season. There is not an awful lot else he can prove; an excellent rebounder, post player and interior finisher, and has even started to add jump shooting range as a professional. However, he cannot become an athlete, and as a slow-footed 6’8 post player, it is hard to project him defensively. Nevertheless, as per the above, Alan Williams made it in the NBA with a similar remit of skills, so there xists a chance for Warney in the right situation.
–
Tony Allen
In his first season outside of the security of Memphis for a long time, Allen struggled. His 4.7 points and 2.1 rebounds per game were career lows, and the trademark intense defence was much less effective in a team defence that was neither good nor accustomed enough to operate as a cohesive unit. At that point, Allen was a decent one-on-one defender with negligible offensive skill. If he can get back to a situation that will maximise his off-ball cuts, not need him to do much offensively from the perimeter and provide good interior defence behind him, he might have some years left in him. Ironically, the late-season Pelicans could have been that, but only after trading him away.
Nick Young
Last year, Nick Young won an NBA title and earned $5,192.000 for his troubles. He never played all that huge of a role for the Warriors, appearing in 100 games overall but playing in only 10 minutes per game in the playoffs, and although he hit his open threes well (the main if not only thing he was brought in for), he did typically little else but that. This is a shooter’s league and Young is a shooter, but as a shooter with a sideshow and little to no interest in doing anything else, Young limits himself and his desirability.
–
Eric Moreland
Moreland was a surprise waive by the Pistons to open the offseason, with Zaza Pachulia apparently preferred to him as the backup centre option, despite Moreland making a pretty good first of his first extended NBA run. Last year for Detroit, Moreland averaged 2.1 points, 4.1 rebounds, 1.2 assists and 0.8 blocks in only 12.0 minutes per game, the rebounding rate being one of the best in the league, and the latter two pretty good for a centre as well. It is true that the points total is very low, and that as a wiry athletic with little offensive skill, Moreland is very little scoring threat. But his physical profile allows him to defend all areas of the court and still get back to clear the glass. He contributed, consistently, and it is a surprise to see him still unsigned.
–
Gerald Henderson
Henderson did not play professionally last year as he sought to recover from the hip injury that had derailed his career, on which last summer he had a third surgery in six years. The surgery, which involved replacing worn-down bone with metal caps, had previously been performed on Tiago Splitter, so it was not without NBA precedent. Unfortunately, Splitter recover to play only a handful of minutes before retiring early, so the precedent is not strong. When he was healthy, Henderson, never a high-volume or high-efficiency outside shooter, scored well at the NBA level through probing, cutting, curling and open-court athleticism, which he flanked with some effective perimeter defensive decision-making. All of those things rely upon a good level of athleticism, though, and Henderson will need to prove he has that back in order to get back in.
Corey Brewer
As mentioned above, Brewer made for an excellent patch-up job on the Thunder’s wing rotation after joining them from the Lakers after a midseason buyout. He posted a+16 net rating and blended in well as a streak-shooting, hard-running opportunity scorer alongside Russell Westbrook, scoring consistently while almost never dribbling, while also providing energy defensively. He was no Roberson on that end, gambling rather than thwarting, yet it was a useful combination, and it is a surprise that he remains as yet unsigned for 2018/19. He can do a lot by himself to pick up a team’s pace.
–
Cole Aldrich
Aldrich signed a three-year, $21.9 million contract with the Timberwolves in the summer of 2016 as a part of the large 2016 overspend, mostly on big men. Up until that point in his career, Aldrich had been a very productive reserve post player in limited minutes, sporting a strong rebounding rate, a natural affinity for shot blocking and a good-enough interior finishing ability, and was coming off the back of the two best seasons of his career for the New York Knicks and L.A. Clippers respectively. With the Timberwolves, though, he barely played, managing only 580 total minutes, only 49 of which came last year, before being waived to start this summer. As with others above, the league has somewhat moved away from Aldrich-style players in those two short years, yet having been healthy in that time, it is hard to imagine that Aldrich somehow stopped being effective in that time, especially as he has yet to hit 30.
–
O.J. Mayo
It has been two years since Mayo’s suspension, which means he is eligible now to apply for reinstatement. Given the agreement between the NBA and FIBA to respect each other’s suspensions, Mayo has barely played in that time, save for a 21 game stint with Bayamon in Puerto Rico, for whom he averaged 13.4 points, 3.9 rebounds, 3.5 assists and 1.1 steals on 39% shooting in 21 games. Mayo’s career was spluttering even before the suspension, having put up his best seasons all before 2013; now having turned 30, he does not exactly have momentum behind him. But what Mayo does have is a reputation for talent that, even though he never truly capitalised on it in his first eight years, might still prove tempting to someone who imagines they can tap into his as-yet largely untapped talent resource.
How the Oklahoma City Thunder saved money – and whether they might have to save more
August 31st, 2018
The early days of NBA free agency saw the Oklahoma City Thunder go big early. In a move that was known to be happening long before it happened, they agreed to re-sign 2018 NBA All-Star Paul George to a four year maximum value contract, and within hours also agreed to re-sign key reserve forward Jerami Grant to a three year, $27.35 million deal.
This was both somewhat surprising and distinctly strong from a team that entered the offseason in a state of flux. In acquiring George and Carmelo Anthony in the summer of 2017, the Thunder strove to make a big stride back to the postseason and to relevance after the departure of Kevin Durant the previous summer. But to do so meant piling on the payroll, and to not take a stride backwards in 2018 meant piling on even more, keeping George and Grant on raises with a payroll that was already hefty without them.
Immediately after those moves, reports came out about how, once luxury tax calculations were factored in, the Thunder were looking at a $300 million total commitment for their team this upcoming season. The reports of a $300 million total payroll were accurate enough at the time. However, they were normally taken out of context during their aggregation and sharing.
That figure came about because of the heavy amount of repeater luxury tax that the Thunder were facing. Historically not a taxpaying team, the franchise has now paid luxury tax in the last three seasons, triggering the more punitive repeater tax rates for this upcoming season. The 2011 CBA created greater deterrents for teams crossing the luxury tax threshold; whereas before teams would previously pay a simple dollar-for-dollar tax on any amount they went over by, there are now various thresholds over which the amount increases (much like how standard income tax rates increase for you and I the more we earn), plus a stipulation that these rates get even higher if you are a “repeat payer” (defined as being payers in at least three of the previous four seasons). Once all this was added up, then, a circa. $157 million projected payroll was set to cost the Thunder nearly $300 million after tax.
The amount a team pays in luxury tax, however, is calculated only from a specific point in time. That time is the last date of the regular season, which will be some time in mid-April. And a team’s luxury tax position is calculated based on its team salary, i.e. the status of its salary cap at at the time, and not the amount of money it has actually paid out in salary (the two can be and often are different, usually by virtue of mid-season trades, as mentioned in our earlier look at the situation of Luol Deng).
Given that a team’s luxury tax expenditure is calculated based on their position on the last day of the regular season, this meant that the Thunder had plenty of time to make inroads into that amount. And this, they soon did.
Most notable was the Carmelo Anthony trade. Melo simply never helped the Thunder that much in his one season with the team, yet was set to earn $27,928,140 after declining his option to terminate the deal this summer. He arguably was not wanted by them as a player at all, he definitely was not at that price, and thus his departure was inevitable. And after lengthy deliberations, the Thunder eventually settled on a trade that sent Anthony and a top-14 protected 2020 first-round pick to Atlanta in a three-way deal that yielded Dennis Schroeder from Atlanta and Timothe Luwawu-Cabarrot from Philadelphia.
Combined, the Schroeder and TLC pairing are to earn $17,044,951 in 2018/19, a full $10,883,189 lower than Anthony’s $27,928,140. Opportunities to fully divest themselves of Anthony’s salary through a salary dump trade were limited by the few teams capable of doing such a deal, opting to pursue other options, if even they were pursued at all, and while Atlanta’s acquisition of Anthony was contingent on him taking a buyout with the team, thus reducing the amount owed to him, Anthony gave up only $2,393,857, a much less significant saving than the $10,883,189 saved by the Schroeder option.
Into that came some further salary dumping. Although he was set only to earn the second year minimum salary, third string centre Dakari Johnson (whose role last year had been that of very limited minutes spot starter as Grant and Patrick Patterson took the main reserve minutes, and who had surely lost any role at all with the acquisition of Nerlens Noel via free agency) was traded to Orlando for the unguaranteed salary of Rodney Purvis, who in turn yielded the partially guaranteed contract of Abdel Nader from Boston via another deal. Nader’s contract is only $450,000 guaranteed this season until 1st September with an additional unguaranteed season, which, as explored in our look at Luol Deng’s options, can be stretched if waived today (stretched over five years at $90,000 each, or, if his fourth year team option is exercised, $64,286 over seven).
Then as of yesterday came the easiest move of all. Kyle Singler, who received a five-year contract for some reason back in 2015 (presumably to outbid the hot competition for his services), was under contract for $4,996,000 next season, fully guaranteed, with a fully unguaranteed $5,333,500 season after it. By virtue of the stretch provision, however, the Thunder could stretch that level of guaranteed base salary over five years, at a cost of $999,200 per annum. And this, they did.
With that, they were down to $145,582,564 in committed salary, $75,077,297 by my maths in luxury tax, for a $220,659,861 total commitment. With the seven-year stretch for Nader, they would be down to $144,268,608 in salary, $68,044,138 in tax, $212,302,746 in tandem, with 14 guaranteed contracts in place. In cutting surplus players who didn’t play anyway in the forms of Johnson and Singler, retaining their star and their only good bench player from last season, while adding productive players in the forms of Schroeder and Noel, Oklahoma City have added much needed talent while just about keeping their payroll manageable.
It is not however going to be easy to trim much more off of that this year.
The salaries of George ($30,560,700), Russell Westbrook ($35,654,150), Steven Adams ($24,157,304) and Andre Roberson ($10,000,000) are too core to the team to move merely for financial reasons, while Grant ($8,653,847) was not re-signed to be dumped straight away. Neither was Schroeder, not so much because he would not be, but because he cannot be; as one of the few non-rookie scale contracts in this league to run beyond the summer of 2020 currently, yet under-performing on it, Schroeder’s salary has negative value, and Lord knows the Hawks had previously pursued all avenues before opting for clean dumping it via Melo. The mid-size salaries of Patterson ($5,451,600) and Alex Abrines ($5,455,236) may theoretically be moved to save money down the road, but there are not many draft assets available to faciliate such dumps.
This is a significant departure for a team that, a few years ago, would not pay tax at all. Back in 2012, it was financial pressures like these that cost the Thunder James Harden.
In extension negotiations, the Thunder offered Harden very nearly the maximum salary, yet Harden wanted a full max, and knew he could get it elsewhere. Under threat of signing a maximum offer sheet in free agency next summer, Harden asked to be traded from the team; unwilling to pay the luxury tax, and also seemingly unwilling to use the amnesty clause on then-starting centre Kendrick Perkins to dodge it for Harden, the Thunder traded Harden before losing him, and although the trade package returned yielded Adams, Harden has gone on to be an all-timer. It is impossible to know for sure how much losing Harden has cost Oklahoma City, yet it is self-evidently a lot.
To go from being the team that lost a future MVP over a few million dollars to a team prepared to pay a potential $74 million tax liability for Dennis Schroeder and Jerami Grant is quite jarring. Nevertheless, as easy to cite of a criticism as that is, it is not a fair one. No one should be compelled to make the same mistake as they did once before purely for the sake of consistency; we should all seek to learn from our mistakes, and that starts with not making them again.
Furthermore the franchise’s financial position is different. Since that time, the Thunder have experienced changes in their ownership structure, including bringing in new investors with particularly deep pockets. Sam Presti and the front office are empowered to spend more money on the playing roster now not only because of the fallout from the Harden situation, but also because they simply can. There is more money now, and thus more spending power.
The question is, how long for.
Per the above, the core of the team is the quartet of Westbrook, George, Adams and Roberson. That foursome is a fearsome defensive group – Westbrook can do it, even if he so often chooses not to, while the other three are among the league’s best at their positions. Roberson in particular provides invaluable help all over that half of the court, as seen in the team’s second-half struggles last season without him before Corey Brewer provided a patch-up job to close things out.
That quartet, however, is also terribly spaced. George is a plus outside shooter as long as he is not in a three-point competition, but the rest are not at all. Adams leaves the paint on offence only to screen, Westbrook has never been a good outside shooter (perhaps because he jumps so high and does not hold onto his follow-through), and Roberson is infamously a non-shooter.
It does not help that the team’s best shooting options outside of George are Abrines and Patterson, the two movable expiring mid-range salaries per the above who could otherwise theoretically be moved to provide short term financial relief. It further does not help that Grant is a limited shooter from the outside, and Schroeder is a sub-par one for a lead guard as well. It only makes it worse that both Noel and third string point guard Raymond Felton are also not plus shooters, and that while Terrence Ferguson projects to be a decent shooter in his future, he is not one yet. Luwawu-Cabarrot has a similar projection yet has not done enough in two years to show himself as being worthy of a spot in the rotation; the rotation, then, features one good shooter (George), two decent ones who do little else, don’t do anything significant to get open and who would ideally be salary dumped (Abrines and Patterson), and a bunch of mediocre to bad shooters.
As a one-year aberration, this is navigable, albeit not ideal. The concern though is how it shapes the core going forward.
Of the core four, Westbrook is the flagship of the team, the designated Supermax recipient, the one posting historic numbers, the flawed genius who will never give up. Adams is almost as invaluable at centre, and George, while the most movable of the three, is also in theory the perfect counterbalance to those two.
That, then, leaves Roberson. The defensive specialist, the rebounder, the man most noticeable by his absence, yet maybe the one whose salary may prevent the team from making the required upgrades that it needs, through no fault of his own.
Until Brewer plugged the gap, the Thunder struggled horribly without Roberson last year. Much as we may cite their good defensive units and personnel, Roberson is the hub of it just as much as Adams is. as evidenced by the team’s defensive ratings last year. Prior to his injury, with him on the court, the Thunder had a 96.4 defensive rating that climbed to 108.3 when he was off of it.
That said, the struggles without him were only partly due to Roberson’s own impact. In large part, they were also due to the lacklustre options that replaced him. Abrines was a timid shooter who had too many nothing games, Terrence Ferguson took even fewer dribbles than he, and although he was the best defender of the bench, Josh Huestis was somehow even less of an offensive threat that Roberson, while not being the tour de force on defence. Singler wasn’t trusted at all, and ultimately, two point guard line-ups featuring Felton became a turned-to option, such was the plight at the position sans Roberson. Brewer shined in relative terms by virtue of being able to play both ends of the court capably, not because he was especially good.
It is to the Thunder’s credit that they have been able to upgrade their team despite the cap crunch this summer, even if it relies upon a favourable projection of the remainder of Dennis Schroeder’s career to do so. The Thunder are a good team, finishing last season with a 48-34 record and the fourth overall seed in the Western Conference despite a slow start adjusting to their new personnel, one they quickly remedied. But the path from there to a title is a long one that relies upon the right balance of players, both core and role, which they are unlikely to have given their significant outside shooting dearth. They surely cannot achieve great success when they are so likely to be either league-worst or second-worst in such a vital efficiency category.
Internal growth projections for the Thunder’s shooting disparity are not favourable. Westbrook would have to make a significant post-30 improvement, and in five years, Schroeder has somehow gone back under the 30% mark again. Felton has managed only a 32.9% career mark in 13 seasons. Abrines has the best looking stroke, but his physical profile makes a high volume of shots hard to foresee, while Patterson’s knee problems have seen him really regress as a player. Ferguson could be a good one, but needs to prove himself capable of a sizeable role for that to be of true value. The same is true of rookie HamIdou Diallo, whose form thus far has been better than his results. Adams and Noel have shown no signs and should be on the offensive glass anyway. And although Grant is now likely getting the starting stretch four role, he has never been a good one anyway.
Additionally, the need to move either Abrines or Patterson may be too strong to resist. Starting from the above post-Singler, post-Nader tax position ($212,302,746 combined tax and salary expense), that number would plummet to a combined $182,904,953 if Abrines was salary dumped for no returning salary, or $182,924,042 if Patterson was. If we play devil’s advocate for a moment (and conveniently ignore minimum roster size rules for the sake of argument), that number could be $158,590,895 if both somehow were.
The Thunder need both plenty of outside shooting, and salary cap flexibility. And yet they could save $54 million by getting rid of Abrines and Patterson. $54 million they could reinvest, both immediately and in the future, on better players, and via otherwise exhaustible assets they currently stand only to lose. Do they really need Abrines and Patterson that badly?
It is of course neither hugely realistic nor ever required to completely pass off their salaries for nothing in return, particularly in the case of Patterson, who is older and who has an option for next season. Yet were it to be done, those are the savings that could be recouped. Savings which could then allow the team to utilise its as-yet mostly unused mid-level exception and eight figure trade exception to get better quality players than those two. They are the two best shooting role players that the Thunder have, but this does not make them good value.
As constructed, the Thunder are looking at significant expenditures both immediate and longer terms. The remedies for the two are different; as above, sacrificing either or both of Abrines and Patterson can save more money this year, if so required. Abrines however expires after this season, yet the Thunder already have a near-$150 million committed payroll for next season. Short of something shocking regarding Westbrook, George or Adams, if savings to the core are required, Roberson thus defaults to being in the firing line. Grant is also far from immune, earning much the same amount as Roberson, yet it is hereby assumed that Roberson has the better trade value, thus moving him better aids the competitive window. He has been treated as a core player hitherto for a reason, after all.
It will be hoped, then, that remedies are not required.
Shooting isn’t everything, but to be a title winner, a team cannot have such a glaring weakness. If the Thunder feel they are able to keep the core four together and work the margins sufficiently well to get into legitimate contention without the need for cost-cutting, that would be grand. If they feel they need to change the core talents without having to cut salary, and can compile trade scenarios to remake yet improve the team without a focus on saving money, that would also be fine. The check book has been wide open of late, and were it to stay as much, this may be a non-issue.
But if they cannot keep this spending up, perhaps Roberson will have to be on the chopping block. May I suggest Dallas?
With a deadline coming up, the Luol Deng situation could soon be resolved
August 29th, 2018
In the summer of 2016, the L.A. Lakers, armed with cap room, tried to make a free agency splash. They signed centre Timofey Mozgov from the Cleveland Cavaliers to a four year, $64 million contract, and followed it up with signing Luol Deng from the Miami Heat to a four year, $72 million deal.
They then almost immediately changed plans. Both players got out to slow starts and then never really sped up; in their first seasons, Mozgov averaged only 7.4 points, 4.9 rebounds and 0.6 blocks in 54 games (52 starts), while Deng averaged 7.6 points, 5.3 rebounds and 1.3 assists in 56 games (49 starts). Designed to be veteran help alongside D’Angelo Russell, Julius Randle, Brandon Ingram and Jordan Clarkson, the pair both struggled to get going throughout and recorded career-worst years.
The Lakers shifted their direction pretty much immediately after this. They revamped the structure and personnel of their front office, and opted to up their standards when it came to the players they were pursuing. In the midst of an uncharacteristically long playoff-less streak, the team decided, explicitly, to target only the game’s very best in free agency. No more Mozgovs.
It worked this summer when they signed LeBron James as a free agent. But to do so again next year may require freeing themselves of Deng’s contract.
Earning $18 million this season and $18.81 million next, Deng’s contract vastly outweighs his performance. Indeed, as of last season, there was no performance. After starting him in the first game of the season but playing him for only 13 minutes, the Lakers had another quick rethink and benched Deng for the young forward quartet of Brandon Ingram, Kyle Kuzma, Julius Randle and (until the trade deadline) Larry Nance Jr. Despite being ostensibly in good health, Deng never played another minute all season, consigned to the bench for the sin of being too old, married to the team for the sin of being too expensive to divorce.
The Lakers clearly do not want Deng at this price, and have been quite overt in pursuing their options to move his contract, free up cap space and acquire more stars. They did this already with Mozgov, moving his deal with formerly highly touted prospect Russell to the Brooklyn Nets in exchange for Brook Lopez and the pick that became Kuzma, in a deal that looks to be heavily in the Lakers’ favour after the LeBron signing (especially since Kuzma is every bit the prospect that Russell is, if not better). But there has been no such deal available for Deng.
There are myriad factors in play as to why that is. In part, because others teams in the league know of the Lakers’ intent, the few teams that are willing and able to take on Deng’s deal are also able to leverage that fact and demand a high price from the Lakers in return, clearly with prices prohibitively high for a deal to take place. (This is the downside of the Lakers making it so well known how committed they are to targeting stars in free agency. The upside is that it worked with LeBron.) Theoretically, the Lakers could move Deng for another of the big 2020-expiring salaries. But to do so gains them nothing, and so Deng remains.
In part, the wider tightening of league spending given all the oversized contracts out there means there is less money to spend, and in a year of greater salary prudence, teams have to be more judicious, just like the Lakers are trying to be. Further to this, with so many teams already having one big unwanted salary of their own, they cannot afford a second no matter the sweetener.
But for the most part, it is because Deng is not wanted as a player any more.
Since his heyday, Deng has been on a steady decline as an NBA player. His heyday was excellent – without ever having explosive speed or a rangy jump shot, Deng was a triumph of guile, awareness and IQ, a strong mid-range shooter who cut, rolled, dove and ran to the rim where he could, contributed on the glass, and stood out defensively with his reads and discipline. He only twice cracked the All-Star level, but he was very close to it for a long while.
However, with some injuries in his past, Deng has an awful lot of miles on his body clock. He has combined 14 long NBA seasons (including some long postseason runs) with heavy international duties for Great Britain (for which we will forever be grateful), and famously played a very large portion of the available minutes in those 14 seasons, health permitting. Averaging nearly 39 minutes per game for the Chicago Bulls in the four season stretch between 2009 and 2013 seemed to take it out of him; in subsequent stints with the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Miami Heat, the still-wily Deng had lost a step, and in his first season with the Lakers, he had lost two.
One cannot know for sure Deng is unwanted as a player overall, however, only that he appears to be unwanted at that price. A player’s salary determines their value, but not their ability. The true test of whether he would be wanted as a player would be to see what would happen were he a free agent again. And perhaps he soon will be.
Given that the trade option seems to be a non-starter, the only other way for Deng to leave the Lakers before his contract expires in 2020 is to be waived. This could be done via a straight waiving (option A), or a buyout (option B), both of which could through something called the stretch provision (option C).
Option A is, essentially, just cutting him. Cutting a player is known as waiving them because players pass through a “waivers” procedure when cut, a mechanism which allows other teams to claim the player before they enter free agency, on the same contract that the other team just cut him from. If a player is claimed, they move to the new team on the same contract, whether the player likes it or not, in what is essentially a trade. If they are not claimed, the player is a free agent, and the other team is on the hook for all the money still owed in the previous contract. Players are very rarely claimed off of waivers, though, and considering it is his current contract that is the problem, Luol absolutely 100% would not be. This move would thus save the Lakers no money.
Option B would save the Lakers some money, but would involve Luol sacrificing some. A buyout is the term given to a player and team mutually agreeing to lessen the amount of money owed to a player, then immediately using the waivers procedure outlined in option A. To use Deng as an example – he is owed $36.81 million guaranteed over these next two seasons, and if straight waived in option A, he would still get all of that. But in a buyout, if he agreed to cut his owed amount to (for example) $30 million before being waived, that is the amount he would get. The player gives up money in order to get his freedom, and a chance at signing/playing elsewhere; the team pays a lot of dead money to a player they no longer wanted in order to save on a bit extra, money which they can then reinvest on other players via the opened-up roster spot. On non-minimum salaries, this is more common than a straight waiver.
The stretch provision, option C, is a relatively new salary cap mechanism whereby, if a team cuts a player be it via a buyout or a straight waiver, the outstanding amount is paid out over a longer period of time than the contract initially called for. The payments are literally stretched over future years, hence the name. This is something that happens automatically when it comes to the salary actually being paid to the player, but it is also something that a team can opt to strategically employ on their salary cap. [It is often assumed that a team’s salary cap number, the amount of money it has to spend on players and the amounts it has already spent, comport 100% with the amount that actually changes hands those years. This is not the case. The two are mostly the same, but not always. Luckily, the amount that actually changes hands and matters such as payment schedules only really matter to the team’s and player’s accountants.]
Under the stretch provision, if waived between 1st July and 31st August inclusive, a player’s contract when waived has their remaining outstanding salary stretched over twice the number of remaining years, plus one. A player with two remaining years would thus be paid over five. If waived between 1st September and 30th June inclusive, though, the current year is not stretched, but future ones are. A player with two years remaining would thus get their full salary for the current season, and their second one over the following three.
This upcoming Friday, then, could be a key date for the future of Luol Deng with the Lakers.
The question then becomes what is most beneficial to the Lakers. The only advantage to not waiving and/or stretching him at all is that the amount of owed salary/clogged-up team salary expires quicker. But considering the Lakers have free agency aspirations in the summer of 2019 – hence the one year deals to Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, Rajon Rondo, Lance Stephenson and Michael Beasley – that is not the priority for them at all. They could use the PR boost of resolving the Deng situation, too – the Lakers benched a relatively healthy player all of last year, which is never a good look.
With the 2018 free agency market having almost entirely closed now too, there is not much incentive for the Lakers to prioritise opening up 2018/19 money, which the bottom option would do. It is theoretically possible that opening up a few million in cap flexibility would help the Lakers in mid-season trades, or potentially be used in the pursuit of Rodney Hood or the few other better-than-the-minimum free agents remaining on the 2018 market. However, $11 million in reduced salary cap commitments does not automatically mean $11 million in cap space – the Lakers are currently approximately $7 million over the salary cap after contracts to JaVale McGee, Jonathan Williams, Jeffrey Carroll and Joel Berry (who all signed for the minimum salary, which does not require cap space to do), plus the $3.5 million given to Beasley (signed with the cap room exception, an exception teams with cap room are given to use after they have used it). Having fractional cap space now, when they wouldn’t wish to sign or trade for anything longer than a one year contract anyway, is of no urgency.
If the priority for the Lakers truly is the summer of 2019, then, there seems to be no reason to stretch Luol before Friday. But afterwards?
Maybe. Maybe, as of next week, we are finally going to see a resolution.
–
In addition to the importance of the 1st September date outlined above, there is also the buyout potential as outlined in option B still remaining. In conjunction, the two might provide the path to freedom.
Luol surely knows he will not corral big money on the market any longer. After sitting for a year and playing poorly in the one before it, progressing through his early 30s along the way, he has not the leverage to get much. The best years were five years ago, and in relative terms, that is a long time. But Luol would not need to give up big money to set the wheels in motion. If the Lakers granted his representatives permission to canvas potential suitors as to what they would offer Luol as a free agent – which they certainly would do, since it would be in their interest and serve them well in buyout negotiations were he to have other offers – then whatever amount Deng could corral on the open market could be a starting point for buyout talks. Even two minimum salaries over the next two seasons that he would otherwise be benched for on the $72 million deal would pay Luol circa. $5 million dollars.
Taking $5 million away from the $36.81 million remaining gets the parties down to $31.81 million. Let us reduce that to $30 million for the rounding purposes of this hypothetical. At that point, if Deng agreed to take $30 million in a buyout on or after 1st September, the Lakers would pay him $14,669,910 this year, then a mere $5,110,030 for each of the next three years.* A $5.1 million dead salary is not ideal, particularly to a team with lofty cap aspirations, but it is a manageable one, a relatively small one (essentially 5% of the cap), and a considerably smaller one than the $18.81 million he may otherwise cost. At that point, the Lakers will surely say yes and grant Deng his release. And at that point, his value on the market can be seen publicly.
[As an aside – over the course of the 2017/18 season, there was some discussion about perversely offering Deng an extension for a far smaller amount of guaranteed money than he was currently getting. The idea was that this would lengthen his contract in years without making it much bigger in salary, which in turn would make the per-annum amounts paid after stretching him even smaller. This however was built on a nebulous foundation; such a move would be done to circumvent the cap, and cap circumvention is illegal. Other teams would have a very valid grievance under those circumstances. That said, there must have been a cut-off somewhere. If the Lakers extended Deng for a guaranteed $18 million per season, obviously this would have been fine (if ludicrous), but an extension to add a mere $1 million guaranteed purely for stretching purposes surely would not have been tolerated. It is hard to know where the cut-off is, as such a situation would be unprecedented. But the lower ends of that range would have been done purely to circumvent the cap, and thus been impermissible. If something looks like cap circumvention, it probably is.]
If Luol and the Lakers really are soon to divorce, he suddenly becomes eligible to play for any team in the world except for one. He will need a second wind to truly rebirth his career, but given that he was never a huge athlete anyway, he has not lost physical tools he required to succeed.
That said, considering his declined speed concurrent with the NBA’s increased pace of play, Deng’s days of playing the small forward spot in the NBA are likely over. Going forward, then, he figures to be either a slow four that does not stretch the floor as much as his peers, or a very undersized five who protects the perimeter better than the basket. Nevertheless, if he can make the adjustment to a small ball centre, or a power forward in the right match-ups, he can extend his career.
Perhaps with this in mind, the Houston Rockets would be the place to go. After losing frontcourt depth and key contributors with the departures of Trevor Ariza and Luc Richard Mbah A Moute, the Rockets have opted for a patchwork option in the form of Carmelo Anthony, yet even prior to these departures, they lacked for front court depth. Tarik Black is also gone, Nene looked considerably slowed last year, Ryan Anderson fell off even faster, Zhou Qi is not ready and may never be, and Isaiah Hartenstein is an untested rookie. Notwithstanding the excellence of their back court of James Harden and Chris Paul, the versatility of P.J. Tucker and the perfect fit that is Clint Capela, Houston could use someone in the Mbah A Moute role. With their spacing at four positions, and Capela to cover for him at centre, they are well equipped to handle a cutter, prober and defender who can take match-ups when Tucker needs a rest.
In theory, Deng could be it. In theory, after a year of sitting unwanted on the sidelines and of being thought of primarily as a contract rather than a person, he could find himself not only back in the league as a player, but on a pretty good team. In theory, the Luol Deng Career Redux will soon commence.
My use of the world “only” there was very deliberate. That is not a lot of money for a player of some calibre, and who is a roughly ideal fit for what the Rockets are doing with their team. It is considerably less than the maximum salary of five years and $147,710,050 (or four years and $109,509,175 with another team) that he could have signed for, and it is a lot less than Houston probably expected they could get him for when headed into free agency. In a tough free agency period in which they lost Trevor Ariza to the Phoenix Suns and Luc Richard Mbah A Moute to the L.A. Clippers, and given a maximum contract to Chris Paul that will be of questionable value in the back end, the Rockets needed to win on this one, and they have done.
In large part, this was due to their patience. Taking this full month allowed the relative impatience of the competition to take effect, and as the other cap space teams spent their money up, Capela quickly ran out of bidders. The Rockets have been significantly aided in this quest, though, not only by Capela’s restricted free agency, but also by a flat overall market for ‘big men’.
Positional distinctions are increasingly hard to do these days. Still, with that disclaimer in mind, here is a list of all the new contracts given out to veteran ‘big men’ in the NBA this summer, where ‘big men’ is not designed to include stretch fours. [Stretch fives are included, because this post is a look at value at the centre spot, but yes, the distinctions are pretty small if even present at all.]
Atlanta: Alex Len – two years, $8.5 million (signed from Phoenix) Boston: Aron Baynes – two years, $10,646,880 (re-signed, player option year two) Brooklyn: Ed Davis – one year, $4,449,000 (signed from Portland) Cleveland: Channing Frye – one year, minimum salary (signed from L.A. Lakers) Dallas: DeAndre Jordan – one year, $22,897,200 (signed from L.A. Clippers) Dallas: Dirk Nowitzki – one year, $5 million (re-signed) Dallas: Salah Mejri – one year, minimum salary (re-signed) Denver: Nikola Jokic – five years, $142,710,045 (maximum salary; re-signed) Detroit: Zaza Pachulia – one year, minimum salary (signed from Golden State) Golden State: DeMarcus Cousins – one year, $5,337,000 (signed from New Orleans) Golden State: Kevon Looney – one year, minimum salary (re-signed) Houston: Clint Capela – five years, $90 million (re-signed; only $87.5 million against the cap at the outset) Indiana: Kyle O’Quinn – one year, $4,449,000 (signed from New York) L.A. Clippers: Montrezl Harrell – two years, $12 million (re-signed) L.A. Lakers: JaVale McGee – one year, minimum salary (signed from Golden State) Milwaukee: Brook Lopez – one year, $3,382,000 (signed from L.A. Lakers) New Orleans: Jerome Randle – two years, $17,714,050 (signed from L.A. Lakers; player option year two) New Orleans: Jahlil Okafor – two years, minimum salary (signed from Brooklyn; team option year two) New York: Luke Kornet – one years, $1,619,250 (re-signed) Oklahoma City: Nerlens Noel – two years, minimum salary (signed from Dallas; player option year two) Orlando: Amile Jefferson – one year, two-way contract (signed from Minnesota) Philadelphia: Amir Johnson – one year, minimum salary (re-signed) Portland: Jusuf Nurkic – four years, $48 million (re-signed) Toronto: Greg Monroe – one year, minimum salary (signed from Boston) Washington: Dwight Howard – two years, $10,940,850 (signed from Brooklyn; player option year two)
Legitimately good players were available for low prices. Some stand-out examples include Lopez (who took only a bi-annual exception for one year from Milwaukee, quite the pay cut from his $22,642,350 last season), O’Quinn (who did not deliberately opt out of a $4,256,250 one year player option just to sign a one year $4,449,000 but found he had little choice), Alex Len (who signed a mere two year, $8.5 million contract with the team closest to his own name despite how good he was at times last year) and Nurkic (a restricted free agent post player like Capela, who, like Capela, seemingly drew no significant-enough offers from other teams). And some got even less attention than that – after being waived by the Pacers, Al Jefferson went to China, while Lucas Nogueira has not signed at all. Which might explain why he has changed agency.
The market was dry overall, but based on the numbers above, it was particularly dry at the five spot. Some money was still spent elsewhere, in a few instances in sizeable amounts, but little of it went to centres. In a market in which Jabari Parker got $20 million per year, Zach LaVine signed for $78 million over four, Ariza got $15 million for one year, Aaron Gordon got $76 million from the Magic and Will Barton got $53 million from Denver, you could have gotten all of O’Quinn, Lopez and Ed Davis ($12.28 million) for the price of one year of Miles Plumlee ($12.5 million). Or, if you’d rather, Mason Plumlee ($12,917,808).
Miles signed his deal in the summer of 2016, a year of significant overspend, particularly at the frontcourt spots. Mason was signed in the summer of 2017, when there was still some residual cap excess to be had. The summer of 2018, though, had no such overage. It is telling that Mason Plumlee signed for more per year than the man he was traded for (and the man who latterly easily surpassed him on the court), Jusuf Nurkic, to the tune of $13.7 million per year compared to $12 million. Such is the difference between the 2017 and 2018 centre markets.
Indeed, as shown with O’Quinn, the bevvy of exercised player options in the run-up to free agency was a clue as to how dry the big man market was going to be this summer, even for those who can stretch the court. Jason Smith ($5.45 million), Enes Kanter ($18,622,514), Mike Muscala ($5 million), Dewayne Dedmon ($7.2 million) and Kosta Koufos ($8,739,500) all opted into player options for this upcoming season, as did power forwards Thad Young ($13,764,045) and Darrell Arthur ($7,464,912).
Dedmon in particular was something of a surprise; perhaps buoyed by the fact that he earned an extra $900,000 on his contract by virtue of his play last year meeting the threshold for previously unlikely incentives, he opted to stay with the Hawks and his below-MLE deal, despite being ostensibly everything the league is supposed to now want. A below-30 genuine five man who can stretch the floor, protect the rim and clear the glass could not get enough interest to opt out of a good value contract. As it turns out, it was not just the post centres who suffered – the market even for good quality stretch fives was not there, either.
For comparison’s sake, here is the same style of list as above, with the same criteria, taken from the summer of 2016.
Atlanta: Dwight Howard – three years, $70.5 million Atlanta: Kris Humphries – one year, $4 million Boston: Al Horford – four year, $113,326,230 (maximum salary) Boston: Tyler Zeller – two years, $16 million Brooklyn: Justin Hamilton – two years, $6 million Charlotte: Roy Hibbert – one year, $5 million Cleveland: Chris Andersen – one year, minimum salary Dallas: Dwight Powell – four years, $37,268,750 Dallas: Dirk Nowitzki – one year, $25 million Detroit: Boban Marjanovic – three years, $21 million Detroit: Andre Drummond – five years, $127,171,313 (maximum salary) Golden State: Zaza Pachulia – one year, minimum salary Golden State: JaVale McGee – one year, minimum salary Golden State: David West – one year, minimum salary Golden State: Anderson Varejao – one year, minimum salary Houston: Nene – one year, $2,898,000 Indiana: Al Jefferson – three years, $30 million L.A. Clippers: Marreese Speights – one year, minimum salary L.A. Lakers: Timofey Mozgov – four years, $64 million Miami: Hassan Whiteside – four years, $98,419,537 Miami: Udonis Haslem – one year, $4 million Milwaukee: Miles Plumlee – four years, $50 million Minnesota: Cole Aldrich – three years, $21.9 million Minnesota: Jordan Hill – two years, $8.18 million New York: Joakim Noah – four years, $72.59 million Orlando: Bismack Biyombo – four years, $68 million Portland: Festus Ezeli – two years, $15.133 million Portland: Meyers Leonard – four years, $41 million San Antonio: Pau Gasol – two years, $31,697,500 San Antonio: Dewayne Dedmon – two years, $6,375,600 Toronto: Jared Sullinger – one year, $5,628,000 Washington: Jason Smith – three years, $15.675 million Washington: Ian Mahinmi – four years, $68 million Washington: Andrew Nicholson – four years, $26.08 million
The summer of 2016 was a one-off disaster of financial planning, to be sure. And a lot of that overspending went on post players. But maybe that in turn is a factor as to why the big man market of 2018 has run so dry.
The summer of 2016 was the summer of the salary cap spike, up from $70 million in the 2015/16 season to $94.143 million that summer, an amount that saw almost every team have cap space. Knowing this, agents positioned a good many of their players to be free agents that summer to take advantage of the expanded market; knowing that they would lose the cap space in future years if they did not use it due to re-signing other players and the cap spike being a one-time deal, many teams spent as much as they could that summer. To compare the 2018 big man market purely to the anomaly that was the 2016 market, then, is to miss out of a lot of key context.
But what is of note is that, while the 2016 overspend was not exclusively limited to ‘big men’, they did nonetheless seem to be the main beneficiaries. Although the NBA was fairly far along in accepting the post-Warriors pace-and-space mentality into the new orthodox way of thinking, 2016 was still only two years removed from the second of two consecutive Eastern Conference Finals runs by Frank Vogel’s Indiana Pacers, a team built around an unforgiving halfcourt defence, itself built around the play of Roy Hibbert. So when teams had an overage to spend, they were still often of the mentality that spending it on defensive-looking five men was the way to go, hence the big deals to Mozgov, Mahinmi and Noah.
Many of those deals have not aged well. Indeed, of the above list, eleven (Hill, Sullinger, Zeller, Howard, Nicholson, Aldrich, Andersen, Varejao, Ezeli, Jefferson, Hamilton) were waived before their contract’s natural expiry date. Eleven others (Nowitzki, McGee, Pachulia, West, Gasol, Dedmon, Haslem, Humphries, Hibbert, Nene) have expired, and of the remaining twelve, four (Marjanovic, Mozgov, Plumlee and Biyombo) have been traded at least once already. That leaves only Horford, Powell, Drummond, Whiteside, Noah, Leonard, Smith and Mahinmi as veteran big men still on the deal they signed in 2016 with the team they signed it with. And in at least five of those cases, the team would like a do-over if they could.
Whiteside in particular is a good point of comparison here for Capela. The two are reasonably similar players; long, wiry-strong five men with good rebounding rates, some natural shot blocking ability, no shooting range and limited offensive skill. Capela is considerably more efficient than Whiteside overall; offensively, he does not insist on getting half-court paint touches (and has both Chris Paul and James Harden to set him up), while defensively, he is more positionally aware, does not overly chase blocks, and steps up to the perimeter more effectively. He is the better player of the two. And yet despite that, he is now on the lesser deal, earning $17.5 million a year versus $24.7 million a year. You could get a whole Dewayne Dedmon in that gap.
Team-specific circumstances play a part in some of the 2018 variance above, with a particularly obvious example being the Warriors and Cousins. There are also some obvious and distinct variables in play that explain much of the above 2016 contracts. But taken generally, what we are instead finding in this market is that the bigs no longer get the overage. The shooters do.
Take the Pacers, for example. They found $22 million over three years for the bench shooting of Doug McDermott, and gave Tyreke Evans $12.4 million for one year, yet needed only a third of that to get O’Quinn, a man not without his suitors. The one-year deals to both Evans and O’Quinn were deliberate – much like 2016, the summer of 2019 is shaping up to again be a free agency boon with more than half of the teams in the league having cap space, and players and agents are positioning themselves accordingly to capitalise. Only players getting at or above their perceived market value next summer chose to sign for more than one year, hence the outlier of the McDermott deal. Yet it is surely telling that Evans got nearly three times as much as O’Quinn. Evans is a very good player, but so is O’Quinn. One, however, has a more progressive, en vogue skill set. And can shoot.
For those with a professional need to understand where the next great market inefficiency lies, then, the fact that the money now goes to the shooters is definitely worth noting. Houston and Capela were one such situation – considering the teams with cap space were either taking on draft assets to use it, giving out extremely large contracts to reclamation wing players or just deciding Jeremy Lin would do, not all that much free agency money of note outside of the stars changed hands this year outside of the very top.
It is true that as of today, $2,636,951,824 was given out in 194 new contracts this summer (including rookie contracts and extensions, and excluding two-way contracts). But is is also true that $932,617,593 of that went to LeBron James, Paul George, Chris Paul, Nikola Jokic, Devin Booker, Kevin Love and Kevin Durant, all max recipients (except for Durant, hereby grandfathered in because his new deal was close enough and he is a clear tier 1A player). Of the next tiers down, the only players to get salaries between the full amount of the non-taxpayer MLE ($8.641 million) and the max next season are Evans, Ariza, Barton, Gordon, LaVine, Parker, Avery Bradley, Jerami Grant, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, Dante Exum, Derrick Favors, Rudy Gay, Fred VanVleet, Rajon Rondo, Marcus Smart and J.J. Redick … plus Jordan, Nurkic and Capela.
Of that $2,636,951,824 figure, $402,748,523 went to centres, per the above numbers, and of that amount, more than half went to Jokic and Capela only. The rest of the league’s veteran centres got only $172,538,578 combined. Trevor Ariza got near enough the same as Clint Capela next season. Brook Lopez got less than Glenn Robinson III. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. In contrast, back in 2016, per the above numbers, veteran post players received a combined $1,060,725,516. The Plumlees it seems have good timing.
Capela could in theory have taken his qualifying offer and re-entered the free agency market in 2019, the one that stands to be a 2016-esque boon for players. It is however easier to take that gamble when you have already made big money once before like Evans, or when your one-year gap-bridging deal is of some significant size like Jordan. Precedent for this is not strong; both Nerlens Noel and Alex Len took their qualifying offers last year, for various reasons, yet both now earn a relative pittance (especially Noel, who went from wanting the maximum to getting the minimum in twelve short months). Having never yet been paid adequately for his services on his rookie contract, Capela will understandably have wanted to start drawing in the big bucks when he could. Houston wanted him to do that, too. But on their terms.
In the summer of 2016, although the Golden State Warriors revolution was some years old, the idea of the post defensive anchor was still alive. Indeed, those self-same Warriors had been using a lot of Andrew Bogut until that point. The egregious overspend of that summer, though, had its repercussions. Teams had less money to spend on players in general, but they particularly had less to spend on centres; more pertinently, they were once bitten, twice shy.
Dovetailing with that is also an excess of quality big men, and a permanent premium on shooters. At a time teams want fewer post players than ever, there are more and more good ones available. It was only a few years ago that real stiffs could be found on NBA rosters, and marginal talents were overexposed and overplayed purely because they fit the right remit and grabbed enough rebounds to hold their own. Yet now, any team wanting a big man can pick from the litter; see also, the number of decent big man options theoretically available on the trade market who won’t now corral any value (Robin Lopez, Tyson Chandler, Kenneth Faried etc), as well as the relative plethora of first-contract bigs of some calibre (even down to players such as Justin Patton and Deyonta Davis, who would have been Jackie Butler-style revered not so long ago, when any combination of 6’11 and offensive talent was rare).
The money for good quality centres, then, is down. But the money to the second and third tier players at all positions has gone down too. And in putting the two together, reconciling the league-wide eye on 2019 with the cap stagflation and incumbent dead post player money, Houston took advantage with their third tier centre. Some teams needed Clint Capela, but only some, and almost no one could afford him. And thus the one team that needed him the most got him back at a discount. Fortune favours the patient.
After a couple of months of deliberation, San Antonio Spurs guard Manu Ginobili today announced his retirement.
In a tweet sent out this evening, Ginobili said; “Today, with a wide range of feelings, I’m announcing my retirement from basketball.” Ginobili had been working out with the Spurs in the offseason, testing his body to see if he would want and be able to play to play one final season with the team.
Now, it is clear that he won’t.
Ginobili is calling time on a professional playing career that goes back 23 years, the last 16 of which have been spent in the NBA with the Spurs.
Drafted with the penultimate pick of the 1999 NBA Draft, Ginobili’s success as a player predated his time in the NBA; he won a Euroleague title in 2001 with Kinder Bologna, leading the Finals in scoring along the way and being named Finals MVP, and also won consecutive Italian League MVP titles in 2001 and 2002, before leaving to join the NBA.
Manu also had plenty of success on the international level, too. He was the leader of the Argentina team that won the silver medal in the World Championships back in 2002, and was the leading scorer on the subsequent 2004 Olympic team that beat the United States in the semi-finals, went on to win the gold medal, and ended the American dominance of the international game.
It was in San Antonio, though, where he had his greatest success. The trio of Manu, Tony Parker and Tim Duncan were the foundations of a dynastic run for the Spurs that featured a 14 consecutive playoff-season run that continues to this day, that featured four NBA Championship wins in that time.
During this reign, the Spurs were venerated for their consistent success, and about how they were always able to find great players and great value to keep the title window open. Of no one was that more true than Ginobili, a lowly #57 pick out of the Italian second division who now, after 1,275 NBA games, two All-Star appearances, one Sixth Man of the Year award and two spots on the NBA’s third team, may be headed to the Hall of Fame.
Today, with Manu’s retirement, coupled with Parker’s highly unexpected decision to sign with the Charlotte Hornets earlier this summer and Duncan’s retirement back in 2016, all three of those players are no longer with the team.
Although the Spurs were hoping to hear that Ginobili had one more go-around left within him this upcoming season, they had nevertheless planned for the eventuality that he did not return.
This summer, they have acquired All-Star shooting guard DeMar DeRozan from the Toronto Raptors as a part of the Kawhi Leonard trade, and signed Marco Belinelli from the Philadelphia 76ers in free agency to compete for a spot in the wing rotation. They also re-signed reserve shooter, Bryn Forbes, so as to be well covered for options regardless of what Ginobili does.
Ultimately, knowing that Ginobili (who turned 41 last month) was uncertain of his own future, the Spurs took some steps to determine their own. The playoff streak is still intact, but now it will have to continue without both parts of the great back court that for so long made it work. It is, truly, the end of an era.
The Nets’ four point strategy for asset accumulation has worked – mostly
July 31st, 2018
The Brooklyn Nets’ ill-fated trade for Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett in July 2013 left the team with bleak short, medium and long-term futures.
On the court, the pair did not work out. Ageing very quickly after leaving Boston, the two never bettered the team; Brooklyn only got as far as a 44-38 regular season record the season immediately after the trade, which was actually a backwards step on their 49-33 campaign previously, and loafed to a mere 38-44 the season after that. Thereafter, the bottom fell out completely, and the Nets have not cracked 30 wins since.
The bigger problem, though, was off the court. To acquire the duo (plus veteran reserve Jason Terry, young forward D.J. White who was soon out of the league, and the #57 pick in the 2017 NBA Draft), the Nets gave up a bevy of assets. They gave up unprotected firsts in all of 2014, 2016 and 2018, and only because of the rule (colloquially named the Stepien Rule) that prevents teams from leaving themselves without a first-round pick in consecutive future seasons were they able to keep a first-round pick in 2017. Even then, though, they traded the right to swap it.
In total, this trade cost Brooklyn all of James Young (#17, 2014), Jaylen Brown (#3, 2016), Markelle Fultz (#1, 2017; or Jayson Tatum at #3 if you’d prefer) and Collin Sexton (#8, 2018). With all due respect to Aleksandar Vezenkov, the saving grace of the #57 pick in 2017 coming back the other way probably doesn’t salve the pain much. And that was a lot to pay for no discernible improvement.
Ever since that trade, the team has been in a quagmire, with an assets cupboard barer than any asset cupboard should ever be, and no obvious way out of it. Rather than just wait, though, the Nets under Sean Marks have instead been on a four-stage plan of asset accumulation that has not realistically been able to include acquiring any elite assets, but which has at least yielded a volume with which to begin again.
Part one was to get as much as could be for what was left in the chamber. This did not take long, and was not easy considering there was so little in there. Yet in being able to turn Kevin Garnett into Thaddeus Young into a first-round pick, the Nets were able to get Caris LeVert out of it. Trading Mason Plumlee when Brook Lopez was still on the team ahead of him yielded Rondae Hollis-Jefferson, and trading Lopez ultimately later brought back D’Angelo Russell as well. And Bojan Bogdanovic was dealt to the Washington Wizards for the pick that later became Jarrett Allen, with both that deal and the Lopez one including a hefty dose of part two below as well.
Part two was to trade using the cap space, acquiring into that space surplus yet expensive players of other teams, with some draft assets attached. The Nets needed some replacement draft assets given the above, and had both the cap space, spending power and lack of spending alternatives to be able to do this, and this has subsequently become the most obvious piece of the puzzle. Both the Lopez (via Timofey Mozgov) and Bogdanovic (via Andrew Nicholson) trades were of this nature, and the deal with Toronto that brought in DeMarre Carroll was the most obvious success of this type. Not only did it bring in the picks that have subsequently been used on Dzanan Musa and Rodions Kurucs, but Carroll also had a career-best season, and now has resale value of his own.
Part three was to target young veterans headed into restricted free agency, with a few to being able to buy them at the time of their second contract. This has not been a particularly successful bit of strategy – they did sign Tyler Johnson, Allen Crabbe, Donatas Motiejunas and Otto Porter to offer sheets, but all got matched, and a similar pursuit of JaMychal Green was rebuffed before even getting to that point. Buying players in this way is hard to do precisely because of the restricted free agency designed to protect the interests of that player’s first team – the Memphis Grizzlies had to give their full mid-level exception with a trade kicker to Kyle Anderson to persuade the San Antonio Spurs not to match their offer sheet to him, for example – and this past summer, despite rumoured interest in candidates such as Aaron Gordon of the Orlando Magic, it appears as though the Nets opted not to try.
When unsuccessful with that, part three (b) was to instead sign decent slightly older veterans to reasonable contracts with a view to getting some decent play out of them for a bit (purely to aid development of youth and individual resale value; it is not as though they could submarine a tank), then selling them wherever possible. The signing of Trevor Booker was able to yield a second-round pick in this way, and it was hoped until his injury that Jeremy Lin could do the same. Even minimum salary third stringer Tyler Zeller was, amazingly, able to garner a second-round pick when traded this past deadline, one subsequently used on Hamadou Diallo (himself part of the small price of two future second-round picks the Nets only had to give up to move Mozgov’s extra year of salary onto the Charlotte Hornets).
And part four was to seek out reclamation projects, redrafts and sneaky-good minimum salary pick-ups. Zeller, as above, was one. Joe Harris and Spencer Dinwiddie have been emphatic successes as others. Nik Stauskas and Jahlil Okafor, less so, but the aim is not to realistically win them all; it is merely to have as many options as possible, where once there were so few.
In the course of two trades amid the third wave of this summer’s free agency business, the Nets did a bit of all of this. They first traded Lin to the Atlanta Hawks for essentially nothing (Nets also gave up a 2025 second-round pick and the right to swap 2023 second rounders for whatever reason; Hawks gave up the draft rights to Isaia Cordinier, who will likely never join the NBA, along with a top 55 protected 2020 second round pick, which will not convey), and then used that space to take on more salary. They acquired Kenneth Faried, Darrell Arthur (both unwanted veteran power forwards), a protected future first-round draft pick (top 12 protected for the next six drafts) and an unprotected 2020 second-round draft pick from the Denver Nuggets in exchange merely for little-used guard, Isaiah Whitehead.
This was a very Netsian deal, for all intents and purposes nigh-on identical to the successful Carroll deal. Indeed, it was arguably better, as both Faried and Arthur expire after one season whereas Carroll had two remaining. It likely was a deal available to the similarly-rebuilding, cap space-rich Hawks, yet their priorities instead seemingly lay with the cash cow of Lin (who does not have a cheap salary, but who does more than make it back in secondary revenue via his marketability to the Chinese market). And yet because they prioritised the draft assets over the financial benefits, the Nets came out of that exchange as the only one of the three teams with tangible assets and players going forward.
Another job well done, then. The strategy came through for them once again, the patience paid off, and another asset or two is now on board. On the surface, all seems well, and it pretty much is below deck as well, relatively speaking.
It is worthy of exploration, however, as to whether this ostensibly successful rebuilding strategy has actually been optimal.
Optics are important here. Relative to what went before, pretty much any level of rebuild and hope-acquisition will have looked good. The mistake of the forebear is not the fault of the replacement, and to be sure, the team-building strategy under the new regime has been much more successful (and makes a lot more strategic sense) than what went before. But those optics run the risk of clouding our judgement to be overly favourable. There have been mistakes here, after all, ones that have slowed the rebuild and cost the team precious assets.
The most obvious of these is the repeated valuation of Allen Crabbe. It was the Nets who signed Crabbe to an ambitiously large four year, $74,832,500 offer sheet back in the overspending summer of 2016; they paid him to be someone he had never been, and then added extra money on top to make it impossible for the Portland Trail Blazers to match. Remarkably, though, despite spending more than a quarter of a billion dollars that off-season on Evan Turner, Festus Ezeli, Meyers Leonard, Mo Harkless and C.J. McCollum, the Blazers still felt able to match that deal for Crabbe, even though they had no designs on a starting spot for him at any point during that deal. For one team to see so much in Allen Crabbe was kind of bewildering; for two to do so, especially considering their overall roster management circumstances, was amazing.
It also didn’t last long. The Blazers soon had buyer’s remorse on their egregious overspend, and have been in a cost-saving mode ever since. They cut Ezeli, who never played for the team, and traded Noah Vonleh to the Bulls for no return at the last trade deadline. They stopped spending significant money on anyone they din’t already have, and thus have not much improved their team. But most obviously of all, they wanted to get away from one of the big contracts. And thus they moved Crabbe back to the Nets at the first possible opportunity (Crabbe could not be traded to the Nets for a year after the offer sheet was matched).
To finally get Crabbe cost the Nets only the contract of Nicholson, who they had never wanted anyway. (Nor did the Blazers, who immediately stretched him.) Nicholson’s contract was another of the bad 2016 signings, but not all bad contracts are created equal; his four year, $26,080,000 pact still had three years and $19,991,007 left to run was still a world better than Crabbe’s $56,332,500, and even if the Nets viewed Crabbe as being a circa. $12.1 million per year player when taken in the aggregate with the amount they already owed to Nicholson, this is still too much for Crabbe. It is also not fair, considering there were other options for Nicholson’s deal, and the chunk of cap that it took up.
The cap space that Crabbe now takes up is the issue here. As the Nets have proven in the above, they have sought to acquire assets from other teams in exchange for burning up their cap space on buyer’s remorse contracts. And yet with the biggest contract of all, with a team pretty desperate to shift it, the Nets got no such sweeteners. The Blazers were trapped in a situation of their own making, and yet the Nets let them out of jail, purely it seems because they rated Allen Crabbe that highly.
It is hard to see why, but let’s try.
Working in Crabbe’s favour is that he is a shooter in a league permanently on the lookout for them. A wing with decent-enough size who can always get them away, Crabbe is streakier than many shooters, but the upside of that is occasionally game-winning performances from outside. Even if he only has one plus-NBA skill, it is one he won’t now lose. It is particularly one valued on this Nets team that values the three-pointer so much as to have encouraged Mozgov to take some last season; in terms of fit, there could not be a better team for Crabbe. [The Rockets take more threes, but offer fewer guard minutes, and, with respect, have higher defensive standards.]
Yet the cost going forward is highly detrimental. For Crabbe to have any trade value going forward, he needs to perform at a higher level much closer in value to that large contract, and considering the limited improvements throughout his NBA career to date, that does not look likely. Crabbe is still not active enough off the ball, still does little with it, is too passive at times, needs more motion, and makes no significant impact defensively. He may have been essentially free to acquire, but he will not be to rehome.
Also counting against Crabbe is the fact that Joe Harris is just as good, if not slightly better, and is to be paid much less. More aggressive, more consistent, better defensively and less prone to long periods of just standing there, Harris stood out last year, for only the minimum salary, and has agreed to re-sign with the Nets for only roughly $8 million per, despite outperforming Crabbe last season. It is true to say that the Nets could not exactly predict Harris’s development in this way, yet it is even truer to say that never was there ever going to be a time where Crabbe was the only shooter available, or that all shooters should cost that much.
Crabbe’s contract has not cost Harris his spot. But Crabbe’s contract is no virtue, and his presence is more awkward than beneficial. At a time when teams around the league are feeling the cap space pinch due to the 2016 overspend and would be more prepared than before to give up assets in order to move bad deals, the Nets spent a big chunk of their potential to help with that on Crabbe’s bench-player-for-All-Star-price play.
The wider worry here is whether or not the Nets have fully leveraged the power that this cap space has gotten them. They have done well with several deals, as above; the core trio of D’Angelo Russell, Caris LeVert and Jarrett Allen, possibly with Dzanan Musa to come, only came because they did these deals. But the cap space may have given them a greater leverage than they have used. For all the good things they have done with it, there were some urgent teams out there that needed the Nets’ help, and whom only the Nets could help.
Teams and executives feeling the pressure of urgency can act in desperation. And the Nets know this first hand, because no one ever fell more victim to this urgency than they themselves did with the Garnett and Pierce trade.In this instance, they failed to take advantage of the Blazers’ urgency.
There may also have been opportunities to further leverage the pressure release valve of their cap space than they did. For example, at the time of the Carroll trade (reported 9th July 2017, consummated 13th July), the Toronto Raptors were somewhat desperate. They were roughly $11 million over the luxury tax line, having committed to re-signing Kyle Lowry and Serge Ibaka, yet had not improved their previous season’s team at any point – the only other moves that they had made were to let Patrick Patterson and P.J. Tucker walk in free agency, and to draft O.G. Anunoby in the first round. They simply could not afford to improve their team beyond this; having almost never paid the luxury tax in their team’s history, the Raptors are generally mandated by their ownership to operate below the threshold. The one they were $11 million over at the time.
The Raptors, then, had to do a deal. Having underwhelmed in Toronto, being deemed surplus and on a big salary, Carroll was the obvious target. But there were not many suitors for him. The other teams who had cap space last summer had spent theirs up by that time. The only ones with enough space remaining at that time who could incorporate Carroll’s contract were the Sixers (who prioritised the renegotiation/extension of Robert Covington), the L.A. Lakers (who were hell-bent on keeping open their cap space in 2018 for a run at LeBron, and who instead spent their remaining money on Kentavious Caldwell-Pope in a bid to woo over their mutual agent, both of which were prescient, correct and successful decisions), the Nets and the Hawks.
Considering their disinclination to take on the same deal from the Nuggets this summer, instead opting for Lin, can we say with any certainty that the Hawks were a realistic competitor for this package from the Raptors? And if they weren’t, leaving Brooklyn as the only bidder, did they again let a team out of financial jail for less than they could have gotten?
Whereas the Raptors had to do a deal, the Nets didn’t. There is, of course, supposition and guesswork in the implication above. It is impossible to know what deals were discussed and turned down, and what machinations were realistic/fanciful. Maybe they played an absolute blinder and extracted the maximum possible value in every deal other than the Crabbe one. But there is some circumstantial evidence to at least theorise otherwise. And in the case of Crabbe, they definitely didn’t.
Trading on desperation works, as does capitalising on buyer’s remorse. Three different examples from two different iterations of the Philadelphia 76ers iterate this point well.
Firstly, in their 2015 trade with the Sacramento Kings to open free agency, the Sixers yielded all of Nik Stauskas (thought of at the time to be a young player worth having, although he did not ever do much for the Sixers), the right to swap first-round picks in 2017, and a 2019 first-round pick that is unprotected from 2019 onwards. The Sixers latterly packaged those last two to Boston in exchange for the rights to Markelle Fultz, thus yielding a #1 overall pick purely for having to take on Jason Thompson and Carl Landry’s salaries for a bit. It should be noted that the Kings did this deal to open up cap room despite not having anyone to open up cap room for, eventually using the majority of it on Rajon Rondo, who signed only a one-year deal and then left afterwards. With their greater foresight and patience, the Sixers got every good bit of that deal.
Secondly, on the night of the 2014 NBA Draft, the Sixers leveraged their draft patience to gain yet more pieces worth having. Picking 10th, Philadelphia selected Elfrid Payton, yet the Magic, picking 12th, really wanted Payton instead. In their desperation to get their guy, they gave up not only a valuable 2015 second-round pick (later used on Willy Hernangomez), but also gave back Philadelphia the very same 2017 first-round pick the previous regime had given up in the aforementioned Dwight Howard deal. That same 2017 pick is the one that, after the swap with the Kings and the trade to the Celtics outlined above, became Fultz. (It should also be noted that not only did Saric not immediately come over, thus aiding the next two years of tanking and lengthening the 76ers’ team control – he is also a much better player than Payton.)
And thirdly, the 2018 Sixers did much the same when they moved from #10 and Mikal Bridges to #15 and Zhaire Smith, bagging an unprotected 2021 first-round pick from the Heat for their troubles. One team’s must-have is another team’s meh, and the 76ers exploited that.
But let us counsel come caution here. The Nets, by and large, have done this too.
The four-part plan has been executed as designed, with some good results. There is, or might be, a core now to be found with this team; the tank-or-rings hive mind so prevalent in the NBA today would suggest that more star talents are needed before this can be considered a core of any stature, yet the idea of a team just wanting to be a solid 45-50 win, playoff team is fine, especially if said team is reasonably young and reasonably flexible with its construction and willing to be selectively aggressive where they can. This is something that Brooklyn can soon realistically be. And that is fine.
To do so has required great patience on behalf of both the front office and the ownership. Having no expectation or time pressure does empower the decision makers to act free of the urgency that so often overwhelms others, and gives them the time needed to try and get as many decisions as possible in, and to get as many of them right as possible. As seen above, they aren’t all right, and as seen above, there is plenty of reason to suggest that they could have done better. But by no means have they done badly.
The Nets have a future now. And even if the future has Allen Crabbe in it, that is considerable progress.
Keeping a close eye on your financial activities while using an online betting platform like Jeetwin is essential for managing your bankroll and staying in control of your gaming habits. Fortunately, Jeetwin provides a transparent and user-friendly way to track your deposits, withdrawals, and betting history all in one place.
This guide will walk you through the process of checking your transaction history, explain why it’s important, and highlight how it can benefit both casual players and serious bettors alike.
Accessing Your Account Dashboard
To begin tracking your transaction history, you first need to log into your Jeetwin account. Once you’re in, navigate to your Account Dashboard, which provides a central overview of your activity.
Steps:
Log into your Jeetwin account.
Click on your profile icon or username at the top of the page.
Select Transaction History or Account Statement from the dropdown menu.
This section includes filters to help you view activity by date, type (deposit, withdrawal, betting), or payment method.
Viewing Deposit and Withdrawal Records
Within the transaction history section, you’ll find a clear record of all deposits and withdrawals made through your account.
What You’ll See:
Date and time of each transaction.
Payment method used (bKash, Nagad, Rocket, etc.).
Status (completed, pending, or failed).
Transaction reference number for tracking.
These details help users verify completed payments and troubleshoot any potential issues with customer support if needed.
Checking Betting Activity and Winnings
Apart from financial transactions, Jeetwin also logs your betting history, including wins and losses.
Features of the Betting History:
List of bets placed (game name, odds, stake).
Outcomes (win/loss).
Net result for each bet.
Time and date of bets placed.
This helps players analyze past performance and adjust their strategies moving forward.
Exporting or Downloading Your History
For users who want to keep personal records or analyze activity offline, Jeetwin offers the option to export transaction history as a downloadable file, usually in CSV or PDF format.
How to Export:
Go to the Transaction History page.
Select date range.
Click the Export or Download button.
Keeping backups of your gaming activity is a good practice for budgeting, tax reporting, or personal tracking purposes.
FAQ
1. Can I see my entire transaction history on Jeetwin?
Yes, Jeetwin allows users to view complete transaction logs, including deposits, withdrawals, and betting history. You can filter by date range and type for better insights.
2. What should I do if a transaction is missing or incorrect?
If you notice a missing or incorrect transaction, contact Jeetwin’s customer support immediately. Provide your transaction ID and any relevant details for faster resolution.
3. Can I download my transaction history from Jeetwin?
Yes, Jeetwin provides an option to download or export your transaction records, usually in CSV or PDF format, directly from the account dashboard.
Live betting, also known as in-play betting, is one of the most exciting features offered by Jeetbuzz. It allows users to place bets while a match or event is still in progress. With shifting odds and real-time updates, it adds a dynamic layer to sports wagering. Whether you’re betting on cricket, football, or tennis, Jeetbuzz’s live betting section offers a fast-paced, immersive experience.
This guide will walk you through how to use live betting features on Jeetbuzz effectively and safely.
What Is Live Betting?
Live betting enables users to place wagers on various outcomes as an event unfolds. Unlike traditional pre-match bets, live bets adjust in real time based on:
Game progress
Player performance
Score changes
Time remaining
This allows bettors to take advantage of momentum shifts and capitalize on in-the-moment decisions.
How to Access Live Betting on Jeetbuzz
To use the live betting feature on Jeetbuzz:
Log in to your account via the app or website.
Go to the “Live” or “In-Play” section from the main menu.
Browse the list of ongoing matches available for live betting.
Select your desired sport and event.
View real-time odds and place your bet instantly.
All live events are organized by sport, league, and match for easy navigation.
Understanding Live Odds and Markets
Live betting odds fluctuate quickly. Here’s what you need to know:
Decimal odds are most commonly used and change frequently during the match.
Markets available may include:
Next goal scorer
Winner of the next set or half
Total goals/runs
Over/under markets
Time-specific outcomes (e.g., goal in next 10 minutes)
Make sure to confirm your selection and amount before submitting your bet, as odds may change in seconds.
Tips for Successful Live Betting
To maximize your live betting experience on Jeetbuzz:
Follow the match live via stream or scoreboard.
Act quickly, but avoid rushing—timing is key.
Use cash-out features when available to secure profits or limit losses.
Bet small amounts initially to understand patterns and pace.
Avoid emotional betting; use logic and stats over personal bias.
Mobile vs Desktop Live Betting Experience
Jeetbuzz offers a smooth live betting interface on both desktop and mobile:
The mobile app provides faster navigation and one-tap betting.
The desktop version allows for a wider viewing experience with more data.
Choose the platform that suits your preferences and connection speed.
Live Betting Availability and Restrictions
Live betting is typically available for:
Cricket (T20, ODI, Test matches)
Football (league and international games)
Tennis (ATP, WTA, Grand Slam)
Basketball, esports, and more
Note that live betting may not be accessible during server maintenance or for certain jurisdictions. Ensure your account is fully verified for unrestricted access.
FAQ
1. Can I cash out my live bet on Jeetbuzz?
Yes, Jeetbuzz offers a cash-out option on select live bets, allowing you to secure profits or cut losses before the event ends. Look for the cash-out icon in your bet slip.
2. What happens if the odds change before I confirm my live bet?
If odds change before confirmation, Jeetbuzz will alert you. You can either accept the new odds or cancel the selection before placing your final bet.
3. Is live betting available on all sports at Jeetbuzz?
Live betting is available on most major sports including cricket, football, tennis, and basketball. However, availability may vary depending on the event and time of day.
Apakah Slot Gacor Hanya Mengandalkan Keberuntungan?
March 2nd, 2018
Banyak pemain bertanya-tanya apakah slot gacor hanya bergantung pada keberuntungan atau ada strategi yang bisa diterapkan. Secara umum, slot Depo 25 Bonus 25 online menggunakan sistem Random Number Generator (RNG), yang berarti setiap putaran bersifat acak. Namun, ada beberapa faktor yang bisa mempengaruhi peluang kemenangan.
1. Peran RNG dalam Slot Online
Setiap mesin slot menggunakan teknologi RNG (Random Number Generator) yang memastikan hasil setiap putaran adalah acak dan tidak bisa diprediksi.
Tidak ada pola tetap: Tidak ada cara pasti untuk mengetahui kapan slot akan memberikan kemenangan.
Setiap putaran independen: Hasil putaran sebelumnya tidak mempengaruhi putaran berikutnya.
Tidak bisa dimanipulasi pemain: Slot bekerja secara otomatis dan transparan sesuai dengan aturan permainan.
Meskipun begitu, ada faktor lain yang bisa membantu meningkatkan peluang menang dalam permainan slot.
2. Faktor yang Mempengaruhi Kemenangan di Slot
Selain keberuntungan, beberapa faktor berikut bisa membantu pemain dalam meraih kemenangan lebih sering:
a. RTP (Return to Player) dan Volatilitas
RTP tinggi (di atas 96%) cenderung memberikan pengembalian lebih besar dalam jangka panjang.
Volatilitas rendah cocok untuk pemain yang ingin menang lebih sering, meskipun hadiahnya kecil.
Volatilitas tinggi memberikan kemenangan besar, tetapi lebih jarang terjadi.
b. Pola dan Waktu Bermain
Meskipun tidak ada pola pasti, beberapa pemain percaya bahwa:
Bermain saat waktu sepi meningkatkan peluang menang.
Spin manual bisa memberikan hasil yang lebih terkontrol dibandingkan auto spin.
Melakukan uji coba dalam mode demo sebelum bertaruh dengan uang asli membantu mengenali pola kemenangan.
c. Manajemen Modal dan Strategi Bermain
Tetapkan batas kekalahan agar tidak kehilangan semua saldo.
Gunakan metode bet bertahap, mulai dari nominal kecil sebelum meningkatkan taruhan.
Jangan terpancing untuk terus bermain setelah menang besar, karena slot bisa kembali ke mode “dingin” kapan saja.
3. Apakah Ada Cara Memastikan Slot Gacor?
Tidak ada cara pasti untuk memastikan slot dalam kondisi gacor karena permainan ini berbasis RNG. Namun, pemain bisa:
Memilih slot dengan RTP tinggi untuk peluang menang lebih besar.
Memantau RTP live yang disediakan beberapa platform.
Bermain di situs terpercaya yang tidak memanipulasi permainan.
Kesimpulan
Slot gacor memang sebagian besar bergantung pada keberuntungan, tetapi pemain tetap bisa meningkatkan peluang menang dengan memahami RTP, volatilitas, dan strategi bermain yang tepat. Manajemen modal dan pemilihan slot yang tepat juga berperan dalam meraih kemenangan yang lebih optimal.
Amidst the aftermath of the Kyrie Irving trade, the D-League – still finding it difficult to call it the G-League – held an expansion draft tonight for its four new franchises for the 2017/18 season.
In a D-League expansion draft, incumbent teams are allowed to protect the returning player rights to nine of their players, with all unprotected players put into the pool, able to be selected by the four newbies. Selecting a player’s rights does not mean that that player will play for that team next season; that player will need to sign in the D-League next season, and these rights ensure only that if they do, this will be the team they must go to. Many have or will sign elsewhere, including the NBA in a couple of cases, and of course it is certainly normally the case that the best D-League (G-League, whatever) players will have their rights protected if there’s any realistic chance that they will return.
Nevertheless, some will. And for the 44 players drafted tonight, these will be the teams they now have to join if they sign in the next two seasons [after which they will have no returning rights and will enter the player pool, from which they can be acquired by any team]. Returning player rights can be, and often are, traded.
It therefore behoves the drafting teams to prioritise not only those whom they think are best, but also those with the best chances of returning to the D-League. And with all that in mind, here are the picks.
Round 1:Andre Dawkins (from Texas Legends) Round 2:Bryce Cotton (from Oklahoma City Blue) Round 3:Corey Hawkins (from Delaware 87ers) Round 4:Will Cummings (from Rio Grande Valley Vipers) Round 5:J.J. O’Brien (from Salt Lake City Stars) Round 6:Jamil Wilson (from South Bay Lakers) Round 7:Keith Steffeck (from Santa Cruz Warriors)
The beauty of following the D-League back in the day was the absolute WTFness of many of the players in it. As the standard has picked up over the years, though, this does not happen much any more. But then there’s Keith Steffeck. Now this is a weird career arc. Steffeck spent two years at Division II school Upper Iowa, then transferred to NAIA school William Penn, from which he graduated in 2013 with senior season averages of 15.4 points, 7.2 rebounds and 2.0 blocks per game. He then went to the Czech Republic for a year, averaged 10.6 points, 4.3 rebounds and 1.1 blocks per game for SLUNETA Usti nad Labem (nope, me neither), then went to Luxembourg to play for Sparta Bertrange and broke his foot. And then randomly last summer, after a self-funding campaign that raised about 14,4% of its intended target, he appeared on the Memphis Grizzlies’s summer league team.
Once on it, he and his John Stockton jump shot looked quite good!
Totalling 34 points and 12 rebounds in five summer league games is better than many players on this list have managed. It got Steffeck drafted in last year’s D-League draft, 66th overall by the Warriors, but he managed only one game and four fouls before being released, not playing again for the rest of the season
Beech was signed by the big league Brooklyn Nets as an undrafted free agent out of North Florida, as a confident 6’8 shooter whose headiness it was hoped could offset his lack of NBA athleticism. Beech is a shooting specialist, somewhat limited to the catch-and-shoot three with the up-fake into a long two being the only other consistent option. He has probably never dribbled all the way to the basket in his life. Nevertheless, in always spotting up, looking to shoot, doing so remorsely and efficiently, finding open spots, making good defensive reads, a decently quick release, NBA size, the occasional handle in transition and probe off the wing, the constant trailer threat and some good passing vision makes for an intriguing enough package. At the moment, Beech is recovering from ACL surgery – when he does so, the D-League is a plenty logical place to return and again prove his health.
Putney is something of a D-League success story. He started his professional career at age 24 as a local tryout player of the Rio Grande Valley Vipers, and had to make some summer money going to places such as Saudi Arabia, Malaysia and the Australian regional leagues. Yet a couple of years with the Vipers saw him develop from fringe piece to featured player. Putney became a more capable shooter and more confident offensive player, all the while retaining his length, athleticism, rebounding and free-roaming shot-blocking abilities. It’s amazing what consistent aggression can do. For next season, Putney is signed with Chalon in France having played in Italy with JuveCaserta the year prior, averaging 10.7 points, 6.6 rebounds and 1.2 blocks. Nearing 30, he is probably right to make money while he can. Nevertheless, he is suitably close to making the NBA nowadays that a D-League stint remains plausible.
Since his NBA days, Gody has put together a good European career. While admittedly at the back end of the rotation, and increasingly a jump shooting specialist (albeit a good one), he spent last season with the rejuvenated Turkish EuroLeague side Darussafaka, and is already signed with German team ratiopharm Ulm for next season. Gody has not played in the D-League since the 2012-13 season and does not look to be coming back any time soon, if ever; his returning player rights only exist in the first place because he was also selected in both the 2014 and 2015 D-League Expansion drafts as well.
The only player on this list to have played in the Developmental League back when it was still called the NBDL, Bynum spent half the season last year with the Windy City Bulls, trying to make it back to the NBA after two years away in China. In the sense that he is still a fairly dynamic point guard who can get to the rim and finish, as well as handle the ball with increased dependency, he could have a role. “Experience” – that is to say, age – is also on his side. But Bynum never was, and still isn’t, a defender or a shooter. You would require one of those two things in a backup NBA point guard, and ideally both – see also, Ronnie Price or Norris Cole. With time against him, another D-League season as a valuable veteran (especially now the money has increased) might be a good idea for Bynum. However, being drafted this late suggests the team does not think this too likely.
Hello! I am Mark, the owner and sole proprietor of this website, ShamSports.com.
A few months ago, someone said to me, “why don’t you produce NBA content any more?” The comment, meant with genuine intrigue, still proved irksome. “I do”, I answered. “I watch more than ever. I talk about it. I still write a bit. I’m working on projects.” All these things were true.
Still, they had a point. Look at the dust on this website, after all, and this is supposed to be the pinnacle of my CV. The comment was irksome because it was correct – I wasn’t actually producing enough stuff publicly. “What happened to that English guy who we briefly heard of?”, said no one ever. But they could have done, and that resonated. So I thought I’d make some NBA content.
Over the last few months, I have created what I am calling my 2017 NBA Manifesto. I hereby launch it below.
The idea of the manifesto is thus. It outlines the assets available to every NBA team. It looks at what their financial situation is, what instruments and exceptions they have for spending, and their total salary outlook. It does the same with their draft position. It looks at the players they already have on their roster, plus the issues that need addressing as a team. And then it thinks aloud about what to do with it all.
It does this 30 times for 30 teams. All in all, it gets quite big.
Every word in here is mine. Every opinion is mine. No one paid me to write it, and no one will pay to read it. This is me and what I think, based on facts as correct as an outsider can ascertain. This is my work and my thoughts, on the current NBA, its teams, where they are at, what they can do, and what they should do. I hope it makes for a fun and informative read.
I want it to make cases, with evidence, as to how to build the best basketball teams possible.
Because that is what I want to do with my life.
Please enjoy, and for the love of God, please share it.
(click to open – download from the menu in the top right hand corner)
DISCLAIMERS: Every word in here is mine and mine alone. Please don’t worry too much about the more subjective and inconsequential pieces of information and/or opinion, especially the listed measurements or positions players are listed as playing at. It’s close enough! Salary info/tax calculations do not account for bonuses, as that information is unknown. The remainder is believed correct, though as ever, all corrections welcomed. If you’re an agent who doesn’t agree with what I’ve written on your client, that’s cool, but let’s not have a tedious exchange of emails about it, and instead part as friends. All data intended to be correct as of midnight, June 27th 2017, British time. So Jordan Hill is included, because that news broke here just after 12. I hope the font isn’t too small. If I used one of your photos, please understand there is no commercial intent here. Not a designer. Gave it a go. Will try to do better next time. One or two pages not completed at the moment of publication because my work laptop failed me and I’ve run out of time. Enjoy!
An asset is an asset: How the shifting market has stifled the Milwaukee Bucks’ best intentions
September 25th, 2016
This week, Milwaukee Bucks wing man Khris Middleton suffered a torn hamstring, and will miss the majority of the upcoming season. Over the last three years, Middleton has made himself into a quality player. Coming into the league as a sub-par outside shooter, Middleton is now one of the league’s best, and retains the quirky off-the-dribble game that got him to this point to now be a valuable and versatile scoring presence. He is not a star, but he is an asset on any team, and particularly on the one he is on.
Last year, the Bucks had only the fifth-worst offense in the league, based in large part due to their bad shooting. They made the most two pointers in the league, but both made and attempted the fewest three-pointers, and only because of Middleton were they close to being the second fewest. Only two players made more than 100 three-pointers (Middleton 143; Jerryd Bayless 101; the third highest was O.J. Mayo at a lowly 52.) The whole team made only 440 three pointers – for context, Steph Curry alone made 402.
Moreover, excluding the lone attempt of Johnny O’Bryant, Middleton and Bayless were two of the only five Bucks to shoot over 30% from three. Of the other three, Mayo’s 52 for 162 recorded a lowly 32.1%, while Tyler Ennis and Steve Novak combined for only 15 of 45 all year. Giannis Antetokounmpo, Jabari Parker and (to a much smaller degree) Michael Carter-Williams are all key rotation, future and offensive pieces, but all three do it without the three, shooting a combined 52-199 from there in a combined 6,880 minutes.
Middleton’s absence, then, will decimate the shooting. Making it worse, Bayless and Mayo have already left – Bayless has gone to the Philadelphia 76ers as a free agent, while Mayo is beginning his two year suspension. Novak is also gone – indeed, he was never really there – and Ennis is now gone too, having being traded to the Houston Rockets in exchange for Michael Beasley. Both good shooters have gone, and so have all the mediocre ones.
Over the summer, the Bucks have acquired noted shooters in Matthew Dellavedova, Mirza Teletovic and Jason Terry, whilst also hoping that second round draftee Malcolm Brogdon does not take too long to adapt to the increased range of the NBA. But unless he does, and unless there is significant internal development from the returning non-shooters (including Rashad Vaughn, who cast up many attempts as a rookie but missed most of them), the Bucks figure to be at the bottom of the shooting pile again.
The Ennis trade, which probably would not have been made without this injury to Middleton, speaks to a shift in the NBA landscape over the last few years. So does the Bucks’ aforementioned lack of wing shooting. The wing position has changed in the NBA, and the always-cyclical weighting of positional depth is currently heavy weighted towards big men. It comes at a time that big men are valued at less of a premium than they were. And this works against Milwaukee.
The Bucks have on their roster Greg Monroe, a quality centre by any metric. And yet they don’t really want him. Despite only signing last summer, Monroe was immediately involved in trade talks, with rumours of trades involving him flying from as early as his first trade deadline with the team. Those rumours have continued this summer, too, and so very rarely is there smoke without fire. It appears that Monroe was not signed for his talent (which he has) or for being a good fit (which he is not), but to have an asset that they can later deal. He was signed to be dealt.
In one sense, the Bucks are the beneficiaries of this weighting. Monroe’s redundancy was known from day zero precisely because of the league’s current big man depth, which Milwaukee shared in. Up front, the Bucks also have John Henson, a perennially underrated player in the Brandan Wright mould who is much better than everyone outside of Milwaukee seems to assume he is. They have Miles Plumlee, a quality backup centre capable of more, and in whom they just invested $52 million. And they also have this year’s #10 overall pick at centre, Thon Maker. These players, plus Parker’s hybrid-style forward game, plus Antetokounmpo’s Odom-like ability to play pretty much anywhere, make Monroe somewhat of a luxury. He is the best of the big men, but he is also the priciest, the less invested in (in terms of time and non-financial assets), the oldest, and the most unnecessary.
This idea of a delayed sign-and- trade is not unprecedented, unheard of or unfounded. A fairly recent and prominent example was that of the Denver Nuggets, who re-signed Nene to a five-year, $65 million contracts late in the 2011 offseason (back when that was a large amount of money), only to swiftly turn around and deal him to Washington for JaVale McGee. Denver were subsequently and logically accused in the media of buyer’s remorse, but not correctly. In actuality, re-signing Nene and dealing him for a young back as a de facto extended sign-and- trade was the plan. [Fun fact – the initial target was Tristan Thompson.] The Bucks have tried something similar with Milwaukee – they signed a good player at an acceptable cost, even if he did not fit their roster especially well because an asset is an asset.
The problem, however, is that Monroe and those like him are not the assets they once were. While admittedly flawed, Monroe is a quality big, averaging 15.3 points, 8.8 rebounds and 2.3 assists per game last year in only 29.3 minutes. He posted a 21.8 PER and an 113 offensive rating, the PER leading the team, the offensive rating being second only to Plumlee. But every team has a quality big man now. We are far removed from the days of Dale Davis’s All-Star appearance. Pretty much every team has a quality centre now, and many have two. Those that do have anything close to a hole in the middle do not typically have a surplus of wings they can just reshuffle to fill it with. And that is because as big man depth has grown, wing man depth has shrunk.
Additionally, the position has been under some redefinition. After Scottie Pippen redefined the small forward position with his do-it- all style, ability to defend anybody and ability to initiate the majority of the halfcourt offense, there became a desire to find do-it-all wing players that lasted for many years.
Nowadays, however, the preference in non-star wing players is for “three and D” specialists. This term is now common parlance when one needn’t go back more than about seven years to find it barely if ever used. Whereas we once looked for wing players who could do it all, we now look for wing players who can do two things. Whereas we once looked more for those who could do something off the dribble, we now look for those who can be frighteningly efficient without ever needing to take one. Whereas there used to be Von Wafers, now there are Troy Danielses. For every Antoine Wright or Kendrick Brown, we now have more Doug McDermotts and R.J. Hunters.
It is not without exception – Evan Turner’s massive new contract goes against this paradigm shift, for example. But just as Turner’s situation stands out as anomalous, Lance Stephenson’s offseason speaks to the new norms. Shooting has always been important, and shot creation still is, but there is a reason that Gerald Green types came back. And Michael Beasley is one such beneficiary.
Beasley is a weird player. This isn’t meant pejoratively, but he is an indisputably rare type of player who has had a very unique career arc. Drafted second overall by a man who absolutely did not want to draft him second overall, Beasley has fallen out of the NBA multiple teams, often through his own actions and lack of development in his play. But no matter how many times he goes to China, he keeps coming back.
His last comeback was his most successful. Beasley played only 20 games for the Houston Rockets last season as a late-season pickup, but they were a mighty fine 20 games, averaging 12.8 points in only 18.2 minutes per game and attacking the glass like never before. It was a steady stream of mid-range jump shots, as ever, but few do them quite like Beasley, and even in a small 363 regular season minute sample size, a 22.5 PER is highly noteworthy.
Beasley keeps coming back because he scores like this. He doesn’t do much else, normally, and his penchant for always thinking it is his turn to score alienates and aggravates in equal measure. But he can score. He can really, really score. This is always intriguing, always important. Especially to a poor offensive team like Milwaukee who just lost their best scorer.
But if Beasley is the best stopgap Milwaukee can find in the absence of Middleton, that is indicative of the point here. It didn’t exactly take Greg Monroe to get him. Regardless of Beasley’s individual talents, the situation is indicative of a point. The Bucks signed Monroe, even knowing they needed wing help and some shooting, as they reasoned they could trade their excess of big man talent for wing help at a later date. One year later, after giving Teletovic and Dellavedova $20 million combined in a desperate bid to shoot at least as badly as last year, they are finding now that they can’t.
Whereas a few years before each team wanted at least two quality big men are yet were sharing from a pot of about 30, there is now a pot of about 60, just as the need for them begins to ebb in the pace-and-space, small ball era. Monroe is exactly not a lame duck – he remains a quality player, even if the constant trade talks inevitably make him feel alienated. And the situation will resolve itself someday – Milwaukee’s talent level should allow them to eventually be able to broker a deal that rejigs the roster, balances the team, and sees them climb up the Eastern seedings, given a good deal or two. But they cannot find that good deal.
Instead, in the desperate need for a “shooter”, they can at this time only acquire a mid-range shooting specialist who, even after the best season of his career, was deemed available for a third string point guard. Milwaukee wants what everyone else wants, the efficient high-minute, low-dribbling wing shooting staple who betters the team by being there, but most other teams already have it, and they aren’t giving it up.
Indeed, even those who have one or two already want more. The one time dream ticket of having an excess of productive centres now carries less weight. Gone, too, is much of the market for the ‘playmaking’ non-star, non-Evan Turner swingman. The market inefficiency that was the oversight of the high volume outside shooter is no more. Shooting is everything now, and that is what now costs all of the assets. None of which bodes well for Rudy Gay.
Golden State’s efficient inefficiency stunned Cleveland in game one
June 7th, 2016
In game one of the NBA Finals, the defending champion Golden State Warriors beat the Cleveland Cavaliers in relatively comfortable fashion. Leading almost the whole way throughout the game, the Warriors led by as many as 20 points, and ultimately won by 15. And they did so with unanimous MVP Steph Curry far from his best, recording only 22 minutes and 11 points on 4-15 shooting, with a +/- rating of a compact 0.
The Warriors won this game with their depth, and specifically the depth behind Curry. Backup point guard Shaun Livingston scored 20 points on 8-10 shooting, while backup shooting guard Leandro Barbosa made all five of his shots in scoring 11 points. That is 31 points on 15 possessions from two players who normally contribute 12 on 10. There is a reason Steph only played half the game.
This is not to say that the duo did this entirely unexpectedly. Barbosa has long been a scoring super-sub, winning the NBA’s Sixth Man of the Year award in 2007, and Livingston has been a fine NBA player for the last five years or so since finally finding his health and his niche in this league. They are key rotation players on a historical great because they are good at what they do, so it should not be news when they are good.
They also did not do anything stylistically that they did not already do. Livingston was not pulling up from 30 feet and bombing away like Curry, and Barbosa was not crossing people over and finishing in traffic at the rim. Rather, they just picked their spots, found where to go, and did what they did best.
What is noteworthy, however, is the juxtaposition between how they do it, and all that which was focused on before the series began. The NBA today is in an era of heightened scrutiny from which it will never now be free, and an unshakable belief in the paramount importance of offensive efficiency. We know now of the importance of such because of the mathematical invasion in the league, because there are so many more people to give so many more informed opinions, and because as access to information improves, so does the results of its analysis.
The consensus finding on the question of offensive strategy is easy to simplify – layups, free throws and (most) three-pointers are good, while anything in the mid-range area is bad. Some lament the loss of the mid-range game, but more for methodological and nostalgic reasons than analytical ones; many more approve of its demise. This is how it is now, and how it should always have been since the three point line was invented.
While they are admittedly few and far between, there are a few players in the NBA who favour the mid-range still, and who are allowed to by their teams. The most obvious example of the success of this is Chris Paul, whose offensive game – both his individual scoring talents and his playmaking abilities – are both built around a foundation of his ability to hit the mid-range shots that convention determines he should not be looking to take.
Paul hits mid-rangers so well that he cannot be given them, and because he cannot be given them, he has to be played in such a way that protects against them (riding him close and denying the shooting space normally afforded to others for a dribble or two). This opens up both driving and passing lanes, and Paul promptly exploits both better than most.
In Washington, Randy Wittman had been one of the few to shake the unshakable and advocate his guards taking open mid-range shots. John Wall has particularly been the recipient of this – emboldened by Wittman’s permissive attitude towards the mid-range area, Wall has long since taken far too many pull-up free throw line jump shots with about 17 seconds left on the shot clock.
Wittman’s offensive philosophy involved the simple message “if you’re open, shoot it”, without much thought being given to the different levels of “open”. It seemed to matter not that the free throw line jump shots were open for a reason, looks considered acceptable for the opponent to take by defences trained in the art of prioritising inefficiency. (In possibly related news, Randy Wittman was fired in April).
These examples are few and far between, though. Paul is the exception to the rule, and Wall is the embodiment of why the rule exists. For the most part, and rightly so, mid-range jump shots are things that sometimes crop up during an offence, not things to plan for. And yet in step Livingston and Barbosa, who do exactly that.
The demand for efficiency is different from a backup. The need for scoring is more important than the efficiency of how it is done so – after all if a backup can score heavily and consistently efficiently, they are not often going to be a backup. If a scorer comes in off the bench and is not shooting well, they can go back to the bench. Barbosa and Livingston are scorers, Barbosa especially, and with this tag line comes some free reign offensively. But the way in which they do so tests the dichotomy between themselves and the efficiency model.
This is particularly true of Livingston, a guard who has hit 12 three pointers in 12 years. Livingston is long since departed from the perceived pass-first, playmaking point guard who entered the league. He is not a creator individually, or at least, he does not try to be much anymore. The system he plays in does not really fit for it.
It also does not need it. It just needs players who can make shots, pick spots, move around, play smart and play within themselves. He is that. Barbosa is that. All of the Warriors’ supporting cast are that.
Almost all of Livingston’s shots were contested, but that makes them neither inefficient nor ‘bad’. 6’7 with a 6’11 wingspan, Livingston shoots with a high release point, thus making the shot almost unblockable. He can see over the smaller defender and release over the most outstretched of their arms. And he then makes the shot.
When matched up against him in game one, Irving mostly contested Livingston well. It didn’t matter. Livingston’s shot, the floating mid-ranger off the dribble, is the very shot most teams want to give up. Yet against him, it is a shot that cannot be taken away.
This was supposed to be the series of the three point shot. The Warriors have changed the NBA with their unconscious and spectacularly effective three-point shooting, while the Cavaliers have been matching them shot for shot (their 14.4 three-point makes per game prior to the Finals actually being higher that Golden State’s total). The focus was on the Splash Brothers, whose nickname comes from precisely that act, and also on the Cavaliers’ flexible and balanced offence featuring shooters all over spearheaded by a legend in LeBron James who can find them all.
However, never has either team been limited to that, and Golden State especially. In Livingston’s sneakily good (and from a defensive standpoint, no doubt highly frustrating) mid-range game lies one weapon; in Barbosa’s transition and relentless aggression lie another. The Warriors’ bench, led by Livingston and Barbosa, is efficiently doing inefficient things, and it will not simply stop being this way. This is what they do.
Cleveland were so successful against the Toronto Raptors in the Eastern Conference Finals because they were mostly able to make Kyle Lowry and DeMar Derozan take the shots they wanted them to take, and denied them that at which they were best. But this is harder to do against the Warriors. There are more pieces to the puzzle, and the pieces are more diverse.
It is far beyond my pay grade to try and identify how to contain them all. But in being the decisive factor in game one, Livingston and Barbosa served to show that they must do so.
Bismack Biyombo: A walking contradiction of Charles Barkley’s pessimism
May 30th, 2016
“People think us old guys hate when we talk about it. It has nothing to do with the Warriors’ greatness, LeBron’s greatness. But I’ve never seen the NBA as bad as it is, and I’ve been saying it the last three or four years. We’ve got too many young players coming out of college that don’t know how to play. It’s frustrating for me because I want to see competitive basketball.”
Apparently not seeing the competitive basketball currently being played, or perhaps misremembering his own playing career and somehow thinking that everything was far more competitive back in an era where the same team won the title six out of eight years, Barkley rustles up the well-used mantra that the NBA is not as good as it was.
Many have stated this before, yet here, Barkley states it more bluntly, and in his own inimitable way. He later attempts to speak forebodingly of this summer being “do or die” for the NBA, as if ‘die’ were ever an option. (Maybe it would ‘die’ in Barkley’s mind. But on the basis of the evidence thus far, I suspect this will be his belief anyway.)
In contrast, not one week earlier, former NBA great and current Indiana Pacers president of basketball operations Larry Bird pretty much did the opposite when speaking to the New Yorker, championing the current era and celebrating the diversification of different styles over time:
“It’s funny how the game has changed,” Bird continued. “And my thinking about it. I was really worried—back sixteen, seventeen years ago—that the little guy didn’t have a spot in the N.B.A. anymore: it was just going to be the big guards like Magic Johnson. But then players started shooting more threes and spacing the court, and everyone wants small guards now. Watching these kids play now, I’m like everybody else: Wow, man. They can really shoot! They have more freedom to get to the basket. The ball moves a little better. These kids are shooting from farther, with more accuracy. Now some teams shoot up around thirty threes a game. My era, you always think that’s the greatest era. But I’m not so sure anymore.”
Bird’s timescales might be a bit off – as we will see below, 16 or 17 years ago was not the era of the dominant big guard (nor was it the era of Magic Johnson, who retired for the first time 25 years ago and who was playing exhibitions in Sweden 17 years ago). Nevertheless, his point strikes a much more conciliatory tone than that of Barkley, or of all those like Barkley before him (including Gary Payton, Oscar Robertson, and about a million more besides) who confuse evolution with degradation.
Both have vested interests in their comments here. Barkley is currently employed by an NBA media partner, and while this statement somewhat lies in conflict with his position with his employer (it is surely not a good idea to put down the product your employer is trying to sell, after all), Barkley essentially gets some immunity from this from years of being Barkley. His personality sells, and his personality is reliant upon speaking matter-of-factly and in seemingly not caring for the repercussions. He speaks from the heart, if not the brain.
Meanwhile, Bird is currently employed by, and pretty much in charge of, an NBA team. Understanding the modern NBA is a daily task for him, as is the championing of the product he needs paying fans to come and see. Bird has a team and a league to sell, while in comparison, and notwithstanding the fact that such comments are a terrible self-marketing strategy should he still have any front office aspirations of his own, Barkley has only himself to sell.
The difference is that Bird looked. Because of his role, Bird analyses the modern NBA for a living. Barkley should do this too, but his is a part-time job with not nearly the depth of analysis taking place, not the myriad conversations with other NBA personnel paid to apply the same level of analysis in the pursuit of an accurate, contextualised overall picture. TV analysis is not an analysis as much as it is entertainment, and that is Barkley’s industry.
(It is also worth remembering that Barkley, the man currently lamenting that players leave college with no idea of how to play, also thinks players should stay in college for longer to ‘learn how to play’. And in his 2009 defence for such a position, whilst he conceded that “[t]he NBA is back on the upswing”, he felt that there had been “a few years where we had a bunch of talented players who didn’t have a clue how to play”. Apparently, he still thinks we do. And so maybe we always have. Maybe we’re meant to.)
There is no right or wrong answer to the overall question of which is the best era in NBA history, nor is there any reason to even ask such a question, unless you find it entertaining. But the biases employed by those sharing their opinions can be taken into consideration when interpreting their value, and some of the points of fact raised can definitely be disputed.
To that end, Barkley’s opinion and the little corroborating evidence he offers for it (“I want to see competitive basketball”, the blatant inference being he does not currently see it; “we’ve got too many young players […] that don’t know how to play”, the assumption being this is an endemic problem and something found only in modernity) struggle to hold water.
Without meaning to, however, Barkley’s comments accidentally highlight a shift in the NBA. Skip back ten to fifteen years, to that era between roughly 2000 and 2004. The post-Jordan depression, the pre-LeBron doldrums.
All-Star players between those years included Dale Davis, Antonio Davis, Glenn Robinson, Michael Finley, Allan Houston, Theo Ratliff, Anthony Mason, Stephon Marbury, Antonio McDyess, Antoine Walker (starter!), Steve Francis (multiple-time starter!), Shareef Abdur-Rahim, Brad Miller, Wally Szczerbiak, Elton Brand, Zydrunas Ilgauskas, Kenyon Martin, Sam Cassell, Andrei Kirilenko and Michael Redd.
Those players were good, no doubt. Yet they were far from great. In that era, they were amongst the best. But this was an era in which Tracy McGrady and Jerry Stackhouse were scoring champions and no one seemed to mind how they went about it, in which a title team’s best player was Chauncey Billups, and in which Bruce Bowen was considered an elite role player.
This, surely, is the kind of era Barkley is referring to. This was the anti-competitive era, when Shaq would win the title if he wanted to, the Eastern Conference was about as much use as a chocolate teapot, and the copycat nature of the NBA brought in an influx of high schoolers who had little foundation on which to succeed and then promptly didn’t.
Perhaps he is just ten years too late. Perhaps Barkley still thinks Antonio and Dale Davis, the Davii, are All-Stars. They aren’t. Nor, frankly, is anyone of their calibre. Apart from perhaps Kyle Korver, the uber-Bruce Bowen, this isn’t the era of the decent role-player All-Stars anymore. And this is especially true when it comes to big men.
As evidence, we need not look at who the starting centre for each NBA team is. Instead, we need only to look at their backups. Backup five men in this league today include Enes Kanter, Willie Cauley-Stein, Kelly Olynyk, Bismack Biyombo, Aron Baynes, Joakim Noah, Timofey Mozgov, Jusuf Nurkic, Myles Turner, JaMychal Green, Gorgui Dieng, Nikola Pekovic, Boban Marjanovic and Nene. Some of those are plausible circa-2002 All-Stars.
One name, in particular, shines forth right now; Biyombo.
In the Toronto Raptors’ playoff run to the Eastern Conference Finals – where they currently trail the Cleveland Cavaliers by three games to two, but certainly have a chance at the upset – Biyombo has been something of a revelation. Or rather, he has been something of a revelation to those who were not already aware he was good.
Prior to this year, Biyombo’s name was perhaps most likened to spectacular offensive inefficiency. There have been many big men over the years who were not even average on offence, many of whom still went on to be good players – a recent example, Ben Wallace, was arguably pretty great. Yet Biyombo stood out not only for being clumsy and under-skilled on offence but for not being allowed to try at all.
He was the most invisible offensive presence in the league, and this after several years in it, not appearing to get any better. As far away as possible from the old school belief that young big men should get touches in the post to learn the basics, Biyombo was actively avoided to a staggering level.
Now, though, Biyombo is hot property. It no longer matters so much in the public narrative what he cannot do, given how ably he has been demonstrating what he can.
Biyombo is a force defensively around the basket right now, perhaps even better on switches, and one of the game’s very best rebounders. He was always good in these facets, but never this good. Perhaps most importantly, he was never recognised for being this good, nor trusted to sustain it over starter’s minutes.
While he is still capable of terrible offensive play, even that side of his game has shown signs of life. Biyombo has shown this year that he is capable now of setting screens without pushing someone over, and no longer is he always dropping the ball, limiting himself to only occasionally doing it.
He even hit a jump shot the other day, doing so with unprecedented confidence. He is still a significantly below par individual offensive player, but he has found his role, and he is absolutely thriving within it.
To resort to an overused cliché, but one which is entirely accurate here, Biyombo does stuff that can’t be taught. You either have that reach or you don’t. You either have that timing and those instincts, or you don’t. Biyombo still can’t dribble, shoot a hook, post up, consistently finish anything at all, or catch the ball in traffic, but it has never really mattered, and it really doesn’t matter now. Biyombo is good now, a developed talent in a league Barkley seems to think has little of that.
Perhaps, then, Bismack Biyombo is a better embodiment of the new NBA than Barkley’s words. Biyombo is a testament to the depth of the league today, a league in which all but the very bottom have legitimate quality throughout, a testament to the development offered within, and to the new scouting and analytical techniques available to all and proffered by most.
Infuriating at times he may still be, but Biyombo has long been pretty good, and now he is very good. He is somewhat of a unique player, especially with those arms like fallen sequoias, but not a unique case.
There is plenty of talent in the NBA, regardless of Barkley’s beliefs. The race is to find it first and find it cheapest. That is a race that is only possible if there is plenty of talent on offer. There may have been a time that Biyombo could have been one such young player who “didn’t know how to play”. But if he was, he isn’t now. Biyombo had the physical tools and the instincts, if not the skills. And his progression is an endorsement of not only the talent spotting/developing abilities of Masai Ujiri and the Toronto Raptors, but also the NBA as a whole. Players come to the NBA to learn how to play the game, and always have. This is to the league’s credit, regardless of what most former NBA greats will tell you.
Biyombo had the physical tools and the instincts, if not the skills. And his progression is an endorsement of not only the talent spotting/developing abilities of Masai Ujiri and the Toronto Raptors, but also the NBA as a whole. Players come to the NBA to learn how to play the game, and always have. This is to the league’s credit, regardless of what most former NBA greats will tell you.
Dwight Howard’s recent ESPN interview shows he needs to take a long, hard look at himself
May 24th, 2016
This week, Dwight Howard of the Houston Rockets (for five more weeks, at least) was the subject of a rather illuminating interview with Jackie McMullan at ESPN.com.
Although contracted through the end of next season, Howard has the ability to opt out of his deal this summer, and considering the huge salary cap spike that is about to galvanise the upcoming free agent period, he is almost certainly going to do so.
This does not prohibit him from remaining in Houston, but in light of the lacklustre Rockets season, his own reduced role and his supposed terse relationship with James Harden, it has long been assumed that he was going to leave the team this summer. And if anyone still thought there was a chance, there probably won’t be now after this interview.
Asked why he was (by his own admission) clearly disinterested at parts of this season, Howard responded in part by calling out Rockets general manager, Daryl Morey: “I felt like my role was being reduced. I went to Daryl and said, ‘I want to be more involved.’ Daryl said, ‘No, we don’t want you to be.’ My response was, ‘Why not? Why am I here?’ It was shocking to me that it came from him instead of our coach. So I said to him, ‘No disrespect to what you do, but you’ve never played the game. I’ve been in this game a long time. I know what it takes to be effective.'”
This is what you do when you have no intention of staying. When a situation is irretrievable, and you really need people to think it wasn’t your fault. And Dwight really does need that.
In his 12 year career thus far, Dwight has played for three teams, yet he will now leave all three under a cloud. This interview was a PR move made with that in mind. Whatever he gets in free agency this summer will almost certainly be the final massive contract of Howard’s career – his age and mileage are creeping up, his impact diminished, his star power has already dimmed, and all these things are going to get worse.
Moreover, there is a perception of Dwight Howard, and he knows it. It is not a favourable perception. It is a perception of a player with tremendous physical gifts that have gone somewhat wasted. I wrote about it myself a fortnight ago:
“For all the athleticism and dunking of his youth, Howard has never used those skills in an efficient way. So much of his career arc has been about his abilities or inabilities in the post, where he has good post moves, just not much natural touch outside of this. Tyson Chandler in his prime scored about as much as Howard does now without the abilities to catch, dribble, shoot, score with his left hand, score with his right hand, five hundred free throw attempts given to him per night or create on the block.
“He [Chandler] could do this because he knew when to run, where to be, how to play pick and roll, and how to be an alley-oop threat at pretty much all times. Most of that can also be said of DeAndre Jordan today. It is true that Howard has never had a Chris Paul (the common denominator in both the above examples) to make him look better at this in the way that Chandler and Jordan have. But for all the focus on his offensive skills, Howard has largely avoided scrutiny of the subpar way he has used all his physical tools. In light of his team’s offensive inefficiencies and inability to create nearly enough easy looks considering all their talent, this is now jarring.”
Combined with this is Howard’s reputation for being hypersensitive to criticism, another topic he addresses in his ESPN.com interview.
“I used to shoot 1,000 shots a day. I called Kobe when I was still playing in Orlando and asked him what I should do. He’s the one who told me to take 1,000 a day. So I’d practice and practice them but then I’d be so afraid to take them in a game because I was so worried I would miss. I hate messing up. I hate failure. I was just talking to (WNBA) star Tina Thompson the other day about it. I told her about my fear of missing and she said, ‘Dwight, you’re gonna miss. Everyone does.’ But I want to be perfect.”
And added onto that is Howard’s interest in his off-court brand, to which he gives a particularly insufficient rebuttal:
“I loved Orlando. I loved the city, but at that time, I didn’t feel winning was a priority. I really wanted to win. People will come back and say, ‘Well, you were all over the place making movies.’ Like I don’t love the game or something. I love basketball. It is my passion. But, I’ve always thought if you just sit back and stay in one lane your whole life, I’ll get old and be done with basketball, and I won’t be able to do anything else because I wouldn’t have planted any of those seeds in other places.”
Taking all these things in tandem, then, and Dwight mostly confirms his reputation in this interview. He is not sure what people want from him, but he knows they want a lot, and he will only let certain people try and tell him.
Additionally, Dwight’s answers to MacMullan’s questions, and the seemingly stream-of- consciousness form they take leaves other bizarre tangents sticking out.
“The backstory is that months before that, before the [2011] lockout, I had a conversation with Magic owner Rich DeVos. They flew me out on a private plane to Michigan. I was talking to him about how we could grow the team. When I first got to Orlando, he called us the Orlando “Tragic” and I hated it. I wanted to talk to him about how we could grow our team. I was saying, ‘Let’s have Magic cereal, Magic vitamins with our players’ faces on it so they can get to know our team.’ In the course of our conversation, we started talking about what’s going on with our team.”
So perhaps when piecing it all together, we can see what Dwight wants. He wants to move on and ‘plant more seeds.’ He wants to do so where brand development is a strong factor, and with ‘basketball’ people in key front office roles. He wants to be ‘involved’ more on the offensive end, and he wants to not be distracted by external influences while also seeking out future off-court plans. He wants to be liked, he wants to be revered, he wants to be popular, and he wants to be a thought leader.
And yet he is a man who says he knows what it takes to be effective without ever being as effective as he could be. He wants to be heard, in basketball and in marketing. Yet he still has some terrible ideas and takes it personally when they aren’t adopted.
It sounds complicated and fickle when put like that, neither of which are desired qualities in a free agent. To be fair to Dwight, much of the above is fairly synonymous with the demands and needs of most writers, the thinnest skinned and neediest people in the world. Most if not all people are insecure in some way. Insecurities aren’t a sin. But such inner thoughts are not normally so readily expressed by a sports star. Especially when the intent of the interview was image rehabilitation.
All these things matter when headed into free agency. If they didn’t matter, the Rockets’ plan would not have deflated as emphatically as it did. Curiously omitted from Dwight’s thoughts is much in the way of culpability – even when he did cop to letting his lack of offensive touches affect his overall play, he says he did so once someone alerted him that it would ‘make him look bad’, an illuminating look into his motivation.
Howard sulked, his team suffered for it, and yet he tried to un-sulk (or so he says) because of the perception. Not, it seems, because of the team.
This gets thrown into the mix for any team considering signing him. Whoever signs him will sign a player who wants a big role on both ends, bigger than his current level of play merits (now into his thirties, it is an optimist that thinks he achieves previous levels ever again), and who has by his own admission left acrimoniously on multiple occasions.
He has had problems at every street, with players, coaches and front office members. He asked for a coach to be fired in Orlando, he asked for a coach to be hired in Los Angeles, and left when he wasn’t.
He is a man hugely driven by image and brand, whose image and brand are both pretty woeful at the moment. He is inefficient and prone to turnovers in the low post, yet won’t easily temper his expectation of touches accordingly. And he also just admitted to being unable to develop his game due to a fear of failure.
None of that behoves a star player. And thus nor should his next contract. The four-year maximum didn’t work last time – Houston got only three years of diminishing returns, and it is surely telling that Morey, the man who targeted Dwight from a long way out, now seemingly no longer wants him. Howard readily goes to the media to tell his side of the story, but there is seemingly always a story, which is the problem. There is much more transmit than receive about him.
Howard needs to accept some things about himself and his career that he might not wish to. He cannot score consistently from beyond four feet, his free throws make him much more of a liability, he is firmly into the second half of his career, he is not good at marketing, receiving criticism does not mean that everyone is out to get him, and that if people do criticize him, even with only half the story, they often have a point.
He needs to accept that the thought process “[i]f I am utilized the right way, I know what I can do for a team” (actual Howard quote) needs to become “I will do whatever it takes for my team” (actual quote from basically every other NBA player) in way he simply has not done for a decade plus.
When he accepts all that and the humility that comes with it, he will be a fantastic player for wherever he winds up with. Yet if he doesn’t, it could be toxic.
Scott Skiles: Risking his and Orlando’s future with yet another early departure
May 17th, 2016
Yesterday, a particularly bizarre day in the NBA, began with the surprise resignation of Orlando Magic head coach Scott Skiles, who had been with the team for less than one year.
“Surprise” might be a bit of an understatement there. Skiles and those within the Magic who knew of this news managed to keep it entirely under wraps until the official statement was released – as can be ascertained from guard Evan Fournier’s slightly off-colour reaction, not even the players knew. In the Twitter era, this is no small feat. There are few genuine shocks left.
However, the unexpectedness of the announcement came only from the outside. Inside, the key players in the Magic’s front office set-up knew. Soon after the announcement, rumours inevitability filtered out as to why, and seemingly, discontent had been bubbling under for a while.
As the story goes, despite at one point heavily campaigning for the role, Skiles regretted taking it fairly soon after doing so and said as much to his hand-picked assistant coach Adrian Griffin (whom Skiles hired twice as an assistant and had twice as a player). In the first instance, it seems Skiles did not tell owner Rich DeVos, president Alex Martins or general manager Rob Hennigan, but instead only Griffin. And Griffin, caught in between a rock and a hard place, was the one to tell management.
(Seemingly, at the behest of Martins, it never filtered up to DeVos. We will never know if he reacted like Fournier.)
Skiles not knowing what he wanted is fine. We all do that. Skiles or any coach having bad days at work and speaking out of turn is also somewhat fine. We all do that too, albeit perhaps not to this degree. Skiles having second thoughts is fine, even if airing them might not have been. And Skiles losing heart and walking away is also fine. The alternative would be to stay in the job for the money or the obligation, without the passion, a situation from which no one gains.
However, no one really gains from this situation either. The Magic are now going to have to find a new head coach at a time when the choicest hires have started being snapped up. They are also going to have to deal with a public relations problem and working with the remaining players and incumbent coaches on presenting a unified front going forward while also entering the draft and free agency periods with significant work to do on a talented but slightly disjointed roster.
Skiles did not help this disjointedness. Rumours suggest there was a disconnect between Skiles and Hennigan, specifically on the team’s future at the point guard position, even more specifically on the style and ability of the second-year player Elfrid Payton. Other rumours further suggest that Skiles had made a power play to Martins against Hennigan, trying to obtain control over the player personnel (although it is unclear how this ties in with says he wanted to walk away, and eventually doing so).
If Skiles could not cohere the pieces he was given, work with the person who gave them to him, or believe he could function as a successful head coach without the power to build his own team, then that is not a good look.
Moreover, this may be the beginning of the end for Skiles’ time as a head coach. Even notwithstanding the fact that walking away from a job you only recently took amidst rumours that you never really wanted it is something of an insurmountable hurdle should you ever be in a job interview for an equivalent position again, Skiles’s future as an NBA head coach is a legitimate question based on what he does when in post.
Perhaps his best achievement as an NBA head coach was the way in which he and then-general manager John Paxson took the consistently moribund post-dynasty Chicago Bulls, and turned them from perennial last-place finisher to a surprising 47-win team in 2004/05, despite little in the way of talent additions and a 0-7 start to the season. Skiles did this with an intensive, defensive, extremely disciplined and regimented style that was much needed at a time when the inmates were said to be running the asylum. He was the right man for the job.
Up to a point, Skiles did the same in his most prior gig with the Milwaukee Bucks. Again playing a defensive and micro-managed style, Skiles started well, winning 46 games in his second season and going to a game seven in their first round series, the franchise’s first for four years. Skiles’ dogged persistence also saw Larry Sanders develop into a briefly brilliant player; despite it burning bridges at times, there is evidence in all his stints that Skiles as a coach can develop certain individual talents.
But the NBA has moved on from that staid, micro-managed, intensive style. Coaches known for it are losing their jobs, as almost all teams try to adapt to a quicker, deeper, freer, friendlier, shoot-ier method of team building. There is nothing to say that all teams must follow any given blueprint just because some choose to do so – not everyone has to be a Warriors clone right now, just as not everyone had to be a Triangle clone in the 1990s. But what is key is adaptability.
It is here in which Skiles falls down. His adaptability in Chicago was essentially limited to just playing more veterans and more point guards (Kirk Hinrich started multiple games at small forward during Skiles’ tenure). In Milwaukee, he continued the pattern he began in Chicago in benching younger, better but more mistake-ridden players for conservative, undynamic veterans, the victims this time often being Tobias Harris and John Henson. The offensive plays and playbook remained much the same throughout both, the talents involved mitigated by its inflexibility.
In Orlando, despite there being so much young talent on hand that it was not possible to avoid playing it, Skiles forced on a style that did not fit the pieces he was presented with, to little effect. Harris again was the victim of that infamous inflexibility – some players he can work with and improve, but some he cannot. And whichever side of that fence any given player falls, the playing style will not change to adapt to their needs.
Concurrent with this, Skiles also seems to have a knack for leaving behind some tension. There have been rumours of clashes with players or with front offices throughout his coaching career. Being headstrong is a virtue. Being stubborn and unworkable is not.
Going back to his playing days and continuing through today, Skiles commands respect in NBA circles. He got so much from so little as a player, and has done the same a couple of times as a coach, that he cannot fail to do so. His lifetime regular season head coaching record is 478-480, as near as is .500 despite not having coached anyone better than Larry Sanders in the past 15 years. That counts for something, and there will likely always be a need for a taskmaster in the Skilesian vein somewhere.
But he seems to have both a ceiling and a life span. The ceiling is the second round of the playoffs, and the life span is three years. In this latest instance, he did not come close to either, and walked away in embarrassing circumstances. Although this is a league where pretty much every coach now has a life span of about three years at best – only five current head coaches have actually been in their post that long – at this point Skiles’ future head coaching candidacy has a lot of questions. One that all the untested assistant coaches out there do not – Griffin included.
Regardless of whether it is Griffin or any other candidate, Orlando seriously need to make their next hire count. They have done a fine job, better than most, of assembling player talent and rebuilding a core for the future, but they have not been nearly as successful with their coaching hires. Not since Stan van Gundy left have they enjoyed any measure of success or been the kind of team to maximise their clear ability. They need stability, unity, and medium to long term success.
Meanwhile, Skiles needs a rethink. There are things he keeps doing right, but something keeps going wrong. Coaches can learn and adapt; Terry Stotts, one of the aforementioned five coaches to have been with their team for three or more years, flamed out with the Bucks not long before Skiles did, but relearnt his trade and is now one of the best. Skiles needs the same. He needs a change, before it is too late.
Frank Vogel: An unfortunate victim of the NBA’s ever-changing landscape
May 9th, 2016
After being knocked out in the first round of the playoffs by the Toronto Raptors in a game seven decider this week, the Indiana Pacers and their president of basketball operations Larry Bird announced head coach Frank Vogel would not have his contract renewed.
Tantamount to a firing, the news has raised many eyebrows, these ones included. Vogel has long been revered as one of the better coaches in the game, a defensive craftsman who has maximised the limited amount of talent available to him over the years and made the once-disappointing Pacers into a consistent threat in the Eastern Conference.
In announcing the news, Bird said he felt the team needed a “new voice”. But he did not say what that meant, or why he felt it. He just felt it.
At the start of the year, it was felt that the Pacers needed a new direction. Specifically, that direction was to abandon their largely halfcourt game and play a higher tempo, full-court brand of basketball with quicker offence and smaller, faster, more athletic players.
Notwithstanding the fact that such an offensive strategy generally relies on high efficiency outside shooting (which key acquisition Monta Ellis does not bring), this is the task Vogel was charged with.
He tried. He tried to convince superstar small forward Paul George to play power forward, to be the key piece in the Pacers’ paradigm shift to keep pace with the new NBA. When George would not concur, Vogel played onetime shooting guard C.J. Miles as a really, really smallball power forward.
He tried to pair up George Hill and Ellis (and, up to a point, Rodney Stuckey), despite them being in many ways the same player and an illfitting pairing. And he tried to make do with only one good big man (rookie Myles Turner, for whom the future is extremely bright even with a few missteps on the way) and a few merely decent ones. His best big man was a small forward who did not want to be one.
To decide that change was needed is fine. To decide that that change had to be the coach just because he has been there for nine years is not fine. Players are allowed to have imperfections, and so must coaches be. If there were things the Pacers felt that Vogel needed, they should have gotten them for him, and allowed him time to adapt to them.
Bird himself said when describing his team that there was George, Turner, “and the other pieces”. He knows there were only two core pieces in place, with the rest being a mishmash of pieces from other jigsaws.
Some were left over from the previous half-court, defense-first, grind-it-out Vogel Pacers of the recent past that were so effective, and some were just acquisitions that never truly fit even if the price of acquiring them was right. Vogel never had a team with sufficient talent to make sufficient noise. And so if it matters that he has been there for nine years, it surely matters that Bird has been there since 2003.
If the team is unhappy with Vogel’s ability to completely transform his previous (and highly successful) coaching style, maybe they shouldn’t have given him a team in which C.J. Miles was the second best four spot option.
Asked to play small and asked to do so without the adherence of by far his best player, Vogel tried anyway. And if he resorted to starting Lavoy Allen an unsavoury amount of times (while also relying on career backup Ian Mahinmi as often the sole and normally senior big man), it is because he was given little choice.
Ultimately, the coach has taken the blame for a systemic problem, one born out of a logical enough overall plan that was burdened by insufficient execution.
An obvious parallel here can be drawn to the situation between the Chicago Bulls and former head coach, Tom Thibodeau. Thibodeau built a team, a good team, built around defence, micromanagement, a staunchly inflexible and predictable playbook and his own raspy yelling.
He was demanding, sometimes painfully so, but the results were there. By being demanding of his players, Thibodeau got the best out of them. Yet by being demanding and inflexible, the front office found him impossible to work with, which ultimately led to his firing despite all the relative success he had brought.
Between 2010 and 2014, Thibodeau and Vogel played similar brands of basketball. Defensive, rather slow, highly effective. Both are now gone as their teams have tried to switch to a new brand – both, seemingly, were not deemed suitable to spearhead that transition. The difference comes in the execution.
In a nasty divorce, the Bulls cleared out Thibodeau last summer and brought in Fred Hoiberg, a man head hunted on as supposedly far more of a player’s coach (thus nullifying any of the dissent that it was said was increasingly rife behind the scenes) and who would turn the team into a faster, more athletic, more modern NBA team designed to compete at the highest levels. In both aspects, Hoiberg has thus far failed hugely – while it is certainly true to say that he has not yet been given the right players to fit the offensive style he has been asked to play, it is also indisputable that the infighting got worse, not better.
Vogel, meanwhile, was given the opportunity to try and make that change this year. But he was only somewhat given that opportunity. Vogel was asked to play smaller and faster with pretty much the same team that he had before – changing David West and Roy Hibbert to Monta Ellis and Myles Turner is not in itself enough to cause a shift.
The players have to be right, and the players have to be good. Hoiberg took what most if not all will agree is a more talented Bulls team, an expected Eastern Conference competitor, and missed the playoffs outright. Vogel took an expected lottery team to 44 wins and a game seven decider.
Along the way, Vogel has developed Turner (guilty at times of overly subbing out the young guy for the vet, perhaps, but Turner could be seen to improve throughout the year and that probably is not a coincidence). Yet when he did so, the small ball philosophy had pause for thought. More Raef LaFrentz in style than Serge Ibaka, Turner was good enough to be the one others fit around. But they didn’t. So what then?
Consider also that there has never been much in the way of rumours of discontent amongst the Pacers in Vogel’s entire tenure there. He ran a good clean ship, and won the respect of most, both within the team and amongst his peers.
Bird clearly felt that Vogel did not have the players’ respect sufficiently, and did not motivate them enough, but from this side of the fence, it is hard to see how. If ultimately the only thing that matters was that Vogel did not get his rotations quite right, or couldn’t make Paul George completely pliable to the front office’s will, that seems like a misunderstanding of the priorities.
It surely matters more that Vogel took a team led by C.J. Miles, Rodney Stuckey, an alarmingly past his best David West and the spluttering Roy Hibbert, and got them to 38 wins in 2014-15. When given little to work with, Vogel worked wonders. And when given a lot to work with….well, we’ll never know because it never happened.
As much as the Pacers have always been a little short of talent outside of George, It is, of course, understood that it is always hard to acquire talent. Yet, aside from superstar players, the hardest talent to acquire is that of a head coach, one with the interpersonal skills, vision and basketball nuance to create a competitor. As far as can be seen from this side of the fence, they had that, and they are letting him go.
If this is because he started Lavoy Allen over Myles Turner, never quite knew what to do with C.J. Miles or too often took out Paul George and George Hill at the same time, those are teaching points rather than reasons for a change.
It is extremely difficult to find all of the good that Vogel brought, as will be evidenced by how much he will be courted by all the teams with coaching vacancies this summer. Consider also that even when openly sacrificing defence (and his specific defensive philosophy), Vogel’s team still managed to hold both Kyle Lowry and DeMar Derozan to sub-32 percent shooting in their playoff series. That is a coaching success.
Bird’s stated reason for the decision was that the Pacers needed a “new voice”, a nebulous concept that doesn’t really mean anything. (What evidence was there that the old voice wasn’t being heard? What is the new voice going to bring? What wasn’t Vogel saying?).
This seems to refer directly to Vogel’s relationship with George, who was clearly coasting at points in the regular season and who took a while to engage after starting off the season being told he was moving position against his will. If Vogel is being replaced by George because Bird feels after six years that the two will never properly get on and George is the priority, then perhaps this is, and long has been, unavoidable.
Yet concurrent with this, Bird admits to a hands-off, distant approach to his front office management, one in which he does not speak to the players himself. The decision to move George to power forward was eminently logical, but no one asked or forewarned George of the intent, so it is surely no wonder he was unhappy with it. If a “new voice” is needed, maybe Bird could have been that new voice back then.
Beyond George, the “new voice” critique seems hard to evidence. Was a new voice going to invigorate the always lackadaisical Lavoy Allen, shorten Bismack Biyombo’s wingspan and keep him off the offensive glass, fix Miles’s jump shot, stave off injuries or stop Monta Ellis’ decline?
When Bird decided (he now admits) that Turner was good enough to abandon forcing the small ball brand and play in a more traditional style during the middle of the year, what chance does a coach have to succeed?
Set up to fail, Vogel still nearly succeeded. A new coach may come in and progress to the second round next year, but this is not a failing on the part of Vogel, who took injuries, a talent dearth, high roster turnover and a significant change in the NBA’s culture and still managed two Conference Finals appearances.
Change for the sake of it is rarely, if ever, anything but a backwards step. And if Larry Bird knows what he wants, he does not seem to have done a very good job of communicating it.
Vogel will land again somewhere soon. Of course he will – he is proven quality in a league that still trots out retreads due to the lack of said proven quality. It will be most interesting to see what he can do with a new team behind him.
Many a good coach leaves their team because of some animosity or some irretrievable situation that submarined an otherwise profitable tenure, as was the case with Thibodeau. But Vogel leaves under no such cloud. The only cloud is over the front office who let him go without much explanation, and for whose failings he is the scapegoat of.
Earlier this week, Houston Rockets guard Jason Terry guaranteed that his team would beat the defending champion and legitimate candidate for best team in history, Golden State Warriors, in game five of their playoff series, a game which would end the Rockets’ season if they lost. And yet despite missing defending MVP Steph Curry, the Warriors won at a canter by 33 points. Terry was held scoreless.
The above is both a fitting conclusion and a damning microcosm of the Rockets’ season. They were expected to compete because they had just done so, making the Western Conference Finals last season losing only to those same juggernaut Warriors. But from the very off, when James Harden could not hit a jump shot to begin the season and the team waddled listlessly through high profile early season matchups on international television, they never got going.
Indeed, they never got especially close to going. The team finished 41-41, an unimpressive eighth seed without even much of a crescendo or a sign that it would suddenly snap into life. They were the Western Conference version of the east’s Chicago Bulls and nothing like what they so recently were.
Any title-less season requires a postseason post-mortem, especially disappointing seasons. The coach has already taken his share - head coach Kevin McHale was fired back in November after the 4-7 start – and the marginal improvements under interim head coach J.B. Bickerstaff will not stop him from having to interview for his own place again. The players have been scrutinised, Harden especially, and will continue to be. But if players do not fit together, it must be explored why they were put there, and who by.
Two weeks ago, I looked back on the body of work of former Philadelphia 76ers general manager and vice president of basketball operations Sam Hinkie, in light of his unexpected resignation and his extremely unexpected letter explaining his hitherto closely guarded inner narrative.
Hinkie was well known for his analytical, statistical approach to assembling a team, revered and derided in roughly equal measure for ostensibly favouring a business-like, arcane approach over more traditional ways of measuring basketball teams and players’ effectiveness and cohesiveness. I concluded that Hinkie had done an incomparably excellent job at asset accumulation, but had not made much progress or shown much evidence of the importance of this cohesiveness in his attempts to lay a new foundation. There may be some comparisons to be found here with Houston and Daryl Morey.
Morey and Hinkie are, if not cut from the same cloth, cut from the same type of material. There are strong and well-established similarities between the two in terms of their backgrounds and approaches, and it is both well known and not coincidental that Hinkie was Morey’s former second-in-command. Parallels, then, are obvious. Particularly given the way the Rockets have limped to the barn.
The earlier critique of Hinkie was essentially focused on how, with a completely blank slate and license to build whatever he wanted, he did not really build anything, only continually dismantle, reload and tinker. Hinkie took a team with few assets but nothing incumbent worth keeping, stocked it replete with assets, and made the future potentially better, but never made it actually better.
Morey, meanwhile, made his franchise and his reputation by treading water in the most productive way possible. The Rockets have, under his guise, never tanked or asset stripped. Instead, they continuously either made or nearly made the playoffs (finishing ninth in the rock hard Western Conference three times in a row, each time slightly above .500), whilst also asset accumulating. He took an aging, declining roster that was not bad (three straight fifth-place finishes) but which was not good enough, without much room for internal growth, and made it younger and better, while concurrently somewhat pioneering a new style of basketball (threes and layups) that has firmly stuck in the coaching realm and the NBA discourse.
The value of the step back from fifth to ninth was apparent and worthwhile, and last year’s strong campaign was the beginning of the paying of the dividends. In building his team, Morey drafted well, traded well, and maintained financial flexibility. Even at the times it never seemed to go very far and felt like over tinkering, he almost always won his trades and usually drafted for great value.
But the parallel to Hinkie is not just in their methodology, but also in their results. Just as Hinkie never cultivated an environment in which the young talents he coveted so much were given the optimum situation in which to develop, Morey has never (it now seems) built a particularly harmonious team of his own.
The glaring problems with the Rockets are easily seen on the court. On the most basic level, for all the emphasis on outside shooting, the Rockets are not that good at it. They were third in made three-pointers (878, only two behind the Cleveland Cavaliers for second), but only 19th in percentage (34.7%). A team supposedly focused on efficiency instead became increasingly focused on isolation-style basketball, the very inefficiency we were told they were built to avoid.
Furthermore, the Rockets’ basketball IQ has not been good. The offence, sans Chandler Parsons and Jeremy Lin, was in too large of a part staffed by players who could only score with a big share of the ball.
Harden and Howard are the biggest culprits here. As he has risen to superstardom, Harden’s style of play has become almost excruciatingly ball dominating, while for all the athleticism and dunking of his youth, Howard has never used those skills in an efficient way. So much of his career arc has been about his abilities or inabilities in the post. He has good post moves, just not much natural touch outside of this. Tyson Chandler in his prime scored about as much as Howard does now without the abilities to catch, dribble, shoot, score with his left hand, score with his right hand, five hundred free throw attempts given to him per night or create on the block.
He could do this because he knew when to run, where to be, how to play pick and roll, and how to be an alley-oop threat at pretty much all times. Most of that can also be said of DeAndre Jordan today. It is true that Howard has never had a Chris Paul (the common denominator in both the above examples) to make him look better at this in the way that Chandler and Jordan have. But for all the focus on his offensive skills, Howard has largely avoided scrutiny of the subpar way he has used all his physical tools. In light of his team’s offensive inefficiencies and inability to create nearly enough easy looks considering all their talent, this is now jarring.
The reason for the apathetic side of things is not so obvious. There have been reports at times of a somewhat fractious locker room, not as toxic as that of the comparable Bulls but not a happy place to be. If this is manifest in their play - not enough ball movement, man movement, energy outside of a select few or generally lackadaisical defensive play - this is probably not a surprise. “Let’s try to only shoot threes and layups” does not mean much or work very well as an offensive philosophy if players are just sort of standing there. It is not the efficient strategy it is said to be if it is not done well, and aside from the unrelenting confidence of Terry (his aforementioned comment, while funny in how inaccurate it proved to be, is the sort of brazen, laudable spirit a locker room needs), Rockets players never seemed particularly happy to be there. You can put the world’s best business people in the same executive committee, and yet nothing of note will get done if they cannot get along.
“Let’s try to only shoot threes and layups” does not mean much or work very well as an offensive philosophy if players are just sort of standing there. It is not the efficient strategy it is said to be if it is not done well, and aside from the unrelenting confidence of Terry (his aforementioned comment, while funny in how inaccurate it proved to be, is the sort of brazen, laudable spirit a locker room needs), Rockets players never seemed particularly happy to be there. You can put the world’s best business people in the same executive committee, and yet nothing of note will get done if they cannot get along.
Seemingly, this is to a point what the Rockets have done. In being so candid and cutthroat in trying to keep open the roster and financial flexibility in order to acquire three star players (losing Chandler Parsons and Goran Dragic in the process), perhaps the team sowed the seeds of doubt. It is impossible to know from the outside, but it does stand to reason that if you feel like you are only a placeholder, you might not fully buy in. Wherever it comes from, though, what is known via the obvious listlessness on the court and the reports echoing it is that discontent comes from somewhere. And if the players neither fit the system nor like each other, it is a valid question as to why they were there.
This is not to say Morey should be, or is, on the hot seat. Making the conference finals last year was a very, very significant achievement, and everyone is allowed at least one blip. Most get at least two, and without having achieved as much as this prior. Also, while the .500 record was a massive disappointment, it was also the worst in Morey’s entire tenure - a decade of being at or above. 500, even if only slightly above it, is almost unrivalled. But there are legitimate concerns about the current prognosis of the Rockets.
Morey has been in charge for ten years now; officially taking over in 2007, but running operations since at least 2006, as evidenced by the Rudy Gay for Shane Battier trade on draft night of that year (that is not a trade Carroll Dawson was ever going to be making). Some rewards should be seen. As it is, there was one Western Conference Finals loss, and then a mini-implosion. It was all building to something – building, building, building – and then it suddenly wasn’t.
Perhaps this year was an aberration, and last year’s Conference Finals team is more reflective of Moreyball’s ability. But the nature of the implosion, the sloppy, lifeless team with seemingly interminable scoring droughts that seemed far short of both talent and effort, does not bode well. For so long, it was all about building a core, yet the Harden/Howard core has not proven to be much more effective than the McGrady/Yao core it was replacing.
The dream has always been three superstars, but the reality is one, and that one is one of the most flawed superstars there can be. It is extremely hard to acquire a superstar, especially via trade, so to even have this is not a small achievement. Nor was the Conference Finals appearance. A lot of good work has been done. But it is now apparent quite how much the foundation is flawed.
There seems to have been in recent times either an absence of due diligence or a deliberate decision to override it. This is said with particular reference to the Ty Lawson trade (a once- tremendous player who was available so cheap not just due to his alcoholism, but because his skills, his confidence, his everything have been whittled away to mere shards of what it was, all of which seemingly went underheeded), or the decision to decline Chandler Parsons’s paltry sub – $1 million team option, (a baffling piece of bad asset management from someone whose clearcut strength was exactly that area). Analysts and fans can and will look at the Rockets’ individual pieces and find plenty to like. Clint Capela on a rookie deal, for example. Yet it has not worked. So barring something outlandish like Kevin Durant coming to town, how does it now start working again?
Morey’s Rockets do not need to begin again. But they need to change quite a bit. Dwight Howard will probably leave in free agency - he would be a fool to opt into his current contract – and he of all people should know that having made that mistake once before. His role has diminished in the new NBA game, his skills have diminished (scoring a career low last year, but also not the overpowering force he was defensively), his health is seemingly now a permanent question, and he does not seem especially comfortable with any of this taking place in Houston. This will mean one of the long coveted ‘stars’ will leave with no incoming assets in return, but so be it. All things considered, it is better to lose him than keep him.
In his stead, the Rockets will have a huge amount of cap room again. But so will almost everyone else, and others offer a more positive recent past and idea of a future than Houston. Coachless, dispirited, based around a superstar who won’t run unless he has the ball in his hands Houston is not the lure now it was expected to be 10 months ago.
There is still a decent foundation here. The Rockets have a tremendous offensive coordinator in Chris Finch, whom British fans will know to be quite the playbook manager. On a Luol Deng-less GB National Team at EuroBasket 2009 armed with a team where only Robert Archibald could score consistently in the half court, Pops Mensah-Bonsu was the only player willing and able to beat an opponent off the dribble (albeit not without dribbling off of either his or the opponent’s foot half the time), and no guard could bring the ball up against pressure
Finch managed to take a ramshackle and wildly overmatched team and be competitive, almost upsetting Spain and their endless NBA talents, all done via devising a million different ways to move the ball around to get it to precisely the spots on the floor where the few capable scorers could operate. Finch is good, and the threes and layups concept is the right one if done correctly.
There is also talent, young and old, frontcourt and backcourt, not least of which is Harden. Even in a down year, Harden was hugely productive - warts and all, he is a superstar in a league that only ever has a few. Capela is a bargain, a breath of fresh air and the efficient, effervescent presence the team has needed, and Harden’s ability to find Donatas Motiejunas in pick and roll situations combined with DMo’s own much-improved post play makes him a good piece going forward, health permitting.
Trevor Ariza remains a decent role player and will for a while, Montrezl Harrell and Sam Dekker are cheap talents with reasons for optimism, Michael Beasley was a very surprisingly useful midseason addition, and Patrick Beverley never lost his fire. There is still plenty to like about the Rockets it could all just be a stumble, a retool, an “OK, that wasn’t quite it, let’s try it this way” of a season. These do happen. There are always bumps in the road. Unless you are Golden State.
But the problems are real. Primarily, the defense has completely disappeared. Whereas in years past the Rockets have had decent and improving defensive units (16th, 13th and eight the last three seasons in defensive rating), this season it fell away to a lowly 22nd. There was shockingly bad transition defence always on show - arguably the most obvious way a lack of effort and hustle can be manifest - and a team that often seemed overmatched against athletic opposition. If a team does not want to compete, it won’t, and Houston seemingly didn’t. The team that was supposedly built for threes, layups and defence was not good at any of those three things.
Moreover, the Rockets need to create some harmony, and that permeates everything. They need to stop watching Howard post up. They need to stop dribbling so much. They need, in the worst way, to run back. They need a simpatico coach who can work with Harden, not near him, to get him to optimise his talents in a way he simply is not doing right now. There is a lot of work to do and a lot of decisions to make from the coach, and the man sitting astride it all needs to have a rethink. The acquisition of talent, the evaluation of players, the cap manipulation, that is not in doubt. But the acquisitions no longer fit.
The Mid-Level Exception rule is essentially redundant, and that could just be the start
April 27th, 2016
The Mid-Level Exception was introduced in the 1999 Collective Bargaining Agreement, and quickly became a vital tool in the interminable team building struggle, if not for many, the most vital.
For teams over the salary cap, the Mid-Level Exception (also known in its infancy as the Middle-Class Exception, and never since then) was a way to continue to sign players for significantly more than the minimum salary, thereby enabling themselves to add players of decent to good quality despite having already spent the theoretical maximum any team could spend on players. In practice, then, the MLE was, to an extent, the most powerful weapon most teams could have – with it, there was less incentive to stay under the cap.
However, the 2011 CBA shifted the balance back and provided a far greater incentive to stay under the cap. By introducing the post-cap room MLE and other mechanisms (such as the ability for teams under the salary cap to make amnesty waiver claims, which does not matter anymore but which certainly did to begin with), there was more reason to stay under the cap; concurrent as it was with the rules shortening contract length, and a much-heightened awareness in the internet era of the importance of salary cap management, it was not only preferable to stay under the cap but much more important to do so.
Far fewer teams had cap room in years past compared with today – compare the three that had cap room in the summer of 2009 (under the 2005 CBA, where the MLE ruled the day) with the 15 in the summer of 2013 (when the benefits of the new 2011 CBA were ripe for the taking).
Simultaneous to that shift in the balance came big revenue spikes in the league, which drove the salary cap up. Way, way, way up. Now, with the new projected salary cap and luxury tax figures announced by the NBA last week including a salary cap projection of $92 million (compared to the actual 2015/16 figure of an even $70 million), concurrent with the earlier decision to forgo any “phasing in” of the huge salary cap spikes caused by last year’s new TV deal, teams will pretty much have no choice but to be under the salary cap. With this in mind, the MLE’s value has been hugely diminished.
The MLE used to be the main, if not the only way that teams over the salary cap could be seen to be “adding” pieces. In practice, this usually meant giving far too large four or five-year contracts to players the calibre of Jason Kapono or DeSagana Diop, but it was nevertheless the main way for many.
The MLE was roughly equal to the league average salary, and by a simple extension of that logic, it should have been used to yield, at worse, average players. But the number of years given out rarely was average, and only the salary in the first year was ever average.
The salary would almost always grow throughout the life of the contract, yet the player’s ability would rarely follow suit. Only when average-to-good players sustained or improved their play – for example, Beno Udrih – did full value MLE contracts ever work out. And even Udrih was salary filler in a trade towards the end.
In the 2011 CBA – the one we are still under for at least one more year – the value of the MLE changed in multiple ways. Firstly, there were now three MLEs – a full one for teams over the cap but below the tax, a smaller and shorter one for taxpayers or would-be taxpayers, and the aforementioned third one for teams with cap room to use after using their cap room (that has not proven to be that much different in size or function to the tax paying version).
Additionally, however, the starting salary value of the MLE was detached in 2011 from the average salary calculation. Whereas previously the MLE value would be one of the myriad financial instruments dependent on the league’s financial audit and calculated only during the July moratorium at the start of each season (new seasons technically start on July 1st, as does the moratorium), the amount was instead pre-determined as a part of the CBA negotiations. For this reason, the MLE’s value has not grown as the salary cap has.
In 2006/07, the starting value of the MLE was $5.215 million, against a salary cap of $53.135 million. It was roughly a tenth of the size of the cap. In 2008/09, it was $5.585 million against a salary cap of $58.68 million. But in 2011/12, the first year of the latest CBA, the new rules not only delineated the MLE amount from the cap but also shrank it down to an even $5 million against a salary cap of $58.044 million.
Next year, with the aforementioned prediction of a $92 million salary cap, the MLE will only be a comparatively paltry $5.628 million, only $43,000 bigger than it was eight years ago even though the cap will have grown by more than $33 million, and now only roughly a sixteenth of the size of the cap.
In practical terms, it follows logically that the MLE will not be able to yield as much. Even players such as Al-Farouq Aminu (an average role player, and, again, average is not a pejorative here) earned more than that last year before the huge salary cap spike now facing us.
This will happen again. Until such time as the MLE’s value can again be more reflective of an average player salary – which will not happen until at least the next CBA, which will not happen until the current one ends, which cannot happen until at least next summer – the MLE no longer yields the value it once did.
It used to be a way for over the cap teams to add a quality rotation piece without having to take anything apart that they did not want to. But this is now going to be much harder.
In theory, a well-used MLE could still yield the leftovers from the great cap room grab. But all the above ties in with a wider shift in the paradigm. In this era of heightened awareness of salary cap management, as well as a CBA with far more restrictions on how front offices can spend on players (which in practice has been the result of putting in many rules to protect general managers from themselves), there is now much more money to spend than players to spend it on.
Whereas before three teams had cap room and everyone else had an MLE to fight for the same prize pool (admittedly with sign-and-trades easier and thus more prevalent), the majority of teams will now have cap room in the foreseeable future, and although there are going to be far more free agents than there used to be, only a few of them will be hot property that will generate significant bidding. Basically, then, there might not be many leftovers.
We are finding more and more that there is quite the swathe of residual cap room left over after the peak free agency period, often running into the season, often running up to the trade deadline, and sometimes even after it. There has long, long been an NBA minimum salary, for instance, but no one had ever threatened it until recently.
Indeed, it had not ever been missed. But it has now, by multiple teams, and by multiple teams in the same year. Because there is more money to spend and only shorter deals to give out, there are few albatross contracts, far fewer salary dumps, and still only roughly the same number of quality players to spend it on.
Gone were the days of Kapono, Diop, and Mickael Pietrus for $5.3 million per for four years. In came the days of Marreese Speights for less than $4 million annually.
But those days might be largely gone now too. Those deals may still be found on occasion. But the MLE, while not dead, does not matter that much anymore. As the NBA’s spending middle class has grown, the Middle-Class Exception has shrunk.
Given ultimate freedom, Sam Hinkie did half the job
April 15th, 2016
Last week, Philadelphia 76ers general manager and president of basketball operations Sam Hinkie announced his resignation from the team. The move came a few months after the Sixers’ ownership hired long-time NBA executive Jerry Colangelo as chairman, a move that precipitated a reduction in Hinkie’s role and influence and which ultimately led to his departure.
Hinkie announced his resignation to the franchise’s owners via a 13-page internal letter, one almost immediately released publicly by ESPN’s Marc Stein. It is a letter well worth reading in full, providing as it does a first-hand insight into the mind of arguably the NBA’s most unique, enigmatic, reclusive and polarising executives.
Hinkie’s resignation was a surprise, and the public release of his resignation letter even more so. But the contents of it should not be. That letter is in style, tone and content, a final report from a hedge fund manager to his investors, a management consultant restricting a struggling business, an interim CEO brought in to get the college ready for Ofsted inspectors.
Only briefly touching on the basketball side of the operation, the end product is described in terms of asset management and ‘repositioning’ because that is the task with which Hinkie was charged (or at least, the one he chose to take on).
The largely triumphant tone of Hinkie’s letter speaks to a job description, real or perceived, that was primarily if not exclusively concerned with taking apart what went before and accumulating as many assets as possible. To that end, Hinkie primarily chooses to evaluate himself on how he did that half of the job.
However, that job description is at best only half of the job required of a successful basketball front office. And while Hinkie may not have been brought in to do only half the job, it became apparent over the course of this past season that that was all the ownership group were going to empower him to do.
In basketball operations as in most facets of life, taking something apart is much easier than putting it back together. Ultimately, Hinkie was squeezed out of the picture simply because he did not put it back together especially well, and nor did he seem to try to.
Sam Hinkie did not invent any of that which he practiced. He was not the first executive to place an increased value on the draft, to use cap space for financial flexibility instead of free agent signings, nor to employ any of his basketball asset gathering techniques. His namesake Sam Presti had done all this in his first few years in Seattle/Oklahoma City, and, notwithstanding better luck (the right picks have to fall in the right years in a way no one really controls), did it much better.
Additionally, the man Hinkie himself praises in the letter, Boston Celtics President Danny Ainge, has also enabled a quick and potent rebuild through much the same techniques.
What Hinkie did do was take it to an unquestioned extreme. The 76ers as he leaves them are as close as feasibly possible to having no committed future salary, and have more future draft picks from other teams than it is possible to have on a roster. ‘The Process’, as it came to be known, could not have been conducted much more emphatically.
Hinkie cites in his letter one example of where it could have been when he talks about the missed opportunity to trade for Joel Anthony and a couple of second round picks – it should hereby be noted that for all the emphasis placed on second round picks by Hinkie’s 76ers, they drafted and got nothing for J.P. Tokoto, Cory Jefferson, Jordan McRae and Russ Smith, an important bit of context for any analysis of those second round picks’ worth – yet ‘The Process’ was essentially as emphatic as it could have been, and far more so than anyone ever before has done it.
Regardless of how much his employers were initially on board with his ideas, it took conviction to do what Hinkie did, to stay straight and on message despite the scorn and criticisms that came with it. Only having the conviction that he did, and being able to detach the asset management from the basketball side, allowed him to reposition the Sixers to the extent that he has. And there were some very good moves made within it, not least of which is the trade for Dario Saric, the value of which is yet to be fully realised but which will pay dividends.
However, in dismantling a basketball team, the rebuilding has to begin concurrently and immediately. They sound like nebulous concepts from the outside, but matters such as ‘culture’ and ‘environment’ matter when on the inside. Human beings make basketball teams, and Hinkie had so many young players on the team, on the fringes of the team and in the future plans for the team that he had little to no roster space for veteran guidance, an impossible-to-quantify metric that is nevertheless fundamentally important and only really measured by its absence.
Carl Landry was the sole relative veteran on this year’s team before Jerry Colangelo’s intervention, and Landry likely only survived because he was suitably good of a player to be a tradeable asset in the future. Human beings also pay to watch basketball games, and for all the value this ruthless asset gathering ‘process’ brought to the franchise going forward, basketball is the sport fans pay to watch, not GMing.
It is in these basketball terms that the Sixers ownership felt Hinkie was lacking. The narrative coming from inside to outside (admittedly not without some form of agenda inevitably tacked onto it) was that Hinkie, precisely because of his ruthlessness, was unable to cultivate the relationships and trusts with agents, business managers and whoever else that would attract players to the team when they decided they were ready to start doing that.
In a business where every market has some sort of lure, and in a market where the vast majority of the teams now have significant cap room every years, the Sixers were going to need these factors to compete for the same few players everyone else was competing for. Moreover, there needed to be the culture and environment whereby players and their people could trust that the team meant it when they said they saw them as a part of the plan going forward. And the fans had to have some basketball to watch.
This sounds like the kind of thing that is easy to say in retrospect, and maybe it is. But it is not a narrative that comes only in retrospect. Hinkie’s letter opens with an acknowledgement that everyone makes mistakes, yet when it came to acknowledging his mistakes, Hinkie’s chosen example is telling.
He openly laments not trading for Joel Anthony and a couple of extra second round picks, and yet makes no mention of what it is that saw him squeezed out. (It certainly was not because he did not trade for Anthony and more picks.) In trying in his opening to affirm that he did not come from a purely business perspective and considered basketball factors just as much as anyone, he instead essentially portrayed the opposite.
If Hinkie is to be evaluated purely for ‘The Process’, then he is mostly a success. It is not in dispute that the Sixers as he leaves them are most replete with team-building assets, more so than any competitor, and infinitely, almost immeasurably better off than the franchise was at the time he took the keys nearly three years ago.
But as a team, the 76ers are currently worse, and could well have been the worst of all time had two of those coveted second round picks not been dealt mid-season for Ish Smith, an extremely average NBA point guard (a term which is meant to his credit) whose averageness was sufficient enough of an upgrade to turn some losses into wins.
In three years, Hinkie managed to acquire at best two NBA rotation-calibre guards with little upside, a couple of highly talented big men whose talents do not co-exist well and who have struggled off the court with either injury, temperament or both, and a couple of decent defensive role players. The best future piece is Nerlens Noel, and that was a move made nearly three years ago. That is not an identity, culture or foundation to envy. The most enviable part is the sheer volume of future assets and flexibility, but ultimately, the players matter the most.
This is a player’s league. It always has been and it always will be. In his preamble, Hinkie acknowledges that emotion and the failings of the human conditions affects managerial decision making, but in evaluating players almost exclusively as assets detached from this human condition, he disconnects them from this same acceptance. The very approach, cut-throat and analytical, that made him a success at the part of the plan he tackled is the very reason he was not a success at the other part.
While acknowledging that the ultimate currency of the NBA is wins, he overlooks the fact that after three years, his team as it stands just went 10-72, only one win better than the all-time worst record in NBA history, an ignominious record his franchise probably would have secured had it not been for the mid-season trade for Smith that Hinkie, second round pick collector, likely did not want to make.
It matters not much empirically if a team wins 10 games or 20, and the notion of the tank is long since tested and begrudgingly accepted as a sound strategy for long-term success. But the perception matters, as does the laying of the foundation for said long-term success. Teams sometimes have to go backwards to go forwards, but in three years, Hinkie’s teams only went backwards.
Players have to have something to want to join, and fans have to have something to root for. Accepting as anyone may be of the need for ‘The Process’ and the ruthless asset-accumulation in that time frame, there still existed a need to put the new foundations in place in that time. It is in this regard that Hinkie did not succeed, and what got him pushed aside.
In his letter, Hinkie lauds Danny Ainge for his planning and his foresight in building the championship Boston Celtics team. But he should also be lauded for how he rebuilt. Ainge took advantage of a foolish and desperate Brooklyn Nets franchise – the best thing any GM can do is take advantage of the self-imposed desperation of others – and dismantled his team while bringing in strong assets in the process. But he never stopped acquiring good players for good prices when he could, always building while also taking down.
While Hinkie was trading away his most significant attempt yet at acquiring a future guard foundation (Michael Carter-Williams), Ainge was trading for Isaiah Thomas, despite having spent a top five pick on a player at that position only months before and despite ostensibly being mired in his own rebuild. That move paid off hugely – Thomas has been a big catalyst for Boston’s hard and fast rebuild, and his team is now a contender for the Conference title while still having all those acquired assets coming up in the future.
Ainge did not completely pull the plug in the way Hinkie did, and as a result, he has a better team. The prognosis for the Celtics, with their young elite coach, talent at all positions and mixture of youth and experience, compares favourably to that of the Sixers in every way unless looked at purely from a ridiculously simplistic who-has-the-most-money-and-picks-in-the-future approach. This is an approach no one should adopt.
In drafting Jahlil Okafor and Joel Embiid, players who have struggled off the court in their short time in the NBA, Hinkie neither flanked them with the right culture in which to thrive, nor acquired young players who bring any of it with them. Hinkie’s overarching message in his resignation letter was that he had done his job by giving the franchise every chance to succeed in the near and distant futures.
But he only did so on one level. The jury is still out on how successful all of ‘The Process’ will ultimately be, but the verdict was in that Hinkie was not the man to do the rest of it. For that, he must take a further look at himself. By virtue of the mandate he was given and his conviction in following it, Hinkie found himself in the unique position of having an absolutely blank page. He could build the team however he wanted to – he did not have to fit any pieces with any other, as he had the freedom to choose every piece himself. Yet he leaves without having done so.
True sacrifice marks this fan’s long-distance love of the game
August 17th, 2015
[the fan being, me; this originally ran on NBA.com]
Mark Deeks is a 30-year-old Englishman who didn’t play basketball growing up, didn’t coach, didn’t scout and didn’t really follow the game at all. Yet over the last decade, Deeks has become among the most knowledgeable people on earth about the game and the league, through his expertise in understanding one of the NBA’s least understandable topics: the salary cap and Collective Bargaining Agreements.
His website, ShamSports.com, has become among the go-to sites for anyone seeking down to the penny info on player contracts and the arcane yet necessary knowledge about the CBA (the site is currently being renovated). It was Deeks who discovered in 2012 that Zach Randolph’s contract extension with the Memphis Grizzlies and Tim Duncan’s with the San Antonio Spurs technically violated existing CBA rules, and needed to be changed to be legal. They were. Deeks also blogs about how teams put together rosters — the why as opposed to the how — and has strong opinions on team and player decisions. Mark has been kind enough to lead us off this week with his story.
*******
The NBA is an increasingly global brand. With NBA games now played every season in Europe and Asia, plus ones last year in Brazil and last month in South Africa, the NBA has delivered its distinctly American product around the world. And of course, the league has used the greatest facilitator ever, the Internet, to cover games live and on-demand to pretty much anyone who wants it.
As a result, there are hundreds of millions of basketball fans around the world, many of whom are quite new to it. To be a fan of basketball outside of the USA is to be a fan of the NBA — no matter how good your domestic league is, or how much like a religion basketball is in nations such as the Philippines, it is extremely rare to delineate one from the other. As more and more people take to basketball, they take to the sport at its pinnacle, and there is no lack of supply to meet that demand.
This was not always the case.
In October, 2013, I travelled to Norman, Oklahoma, to visit a friend. On my first evening there, we went to a comedy night in a local bar, where a nationally televised NBA game was also being shown. I remarked upon how unusual it was to see a weekday game start so early. It was quickly brought to my attention how stupid of a thing that was to say. But it wasn’t stupid to me.
I am an Englishman, born and raised in a country that basically does not have basketball in any substantive form. Basketball here is a widely played game amongst inner city youth, but a jarring lack of facilities, a semi-professional domestic league, a lack of history and inexplicably little media coverage make it an afterthought sport roughly equal in stature to lamenting the fall of the empire. Rolling cheese down a hill gets more media coverage in my country than basketball does.
It is not an exaggeration to say that I didn’t even know what basketball was until I was about 13, that I had never seen it until I was 14, and that I still have never truly played it.
In 1998, a half-hour long magazine show featuring highlights and news from that week in the NBA started being broadcast on a mainstream TV channel on a Saturday afternoon, presented by Beverley Turner and former Olympic runner Derek Redmond. On one such Saturday afternoon, this bored 14-year-old was channel hopping, found this channel, and stuck with it for a bit (at least in part due to Turner). For whatever reason, I immediately took to the game, and watched those half-hour snippets over and over again. There wasn’t much other choice.
Half an hour a week had to suffice, at least until the internet began to take over. In 2003, I made a friend in Wisconsin who had League Pass on his cable subscription, who recorded all Chicago Bulls games for me on VHS and posted them over every few weeks — this was the exact moment an addiction took hold, never to be shaken. As the technology of the internet improved, I was able to watch a lot more. And then in 2006, basketball, in both NBA and NCAA form, really arrived on British TV. They were bought in bulk by the same companies selling extremely expensive Premier League football packages as a cheap means of padding out the schedule between footballing Saturdays.
To be awash in so much NBA content today, then, is a beautiful and once unimaginable thing. Every game is available to watch, via television, the Internet, or both. Further to that is all the other coverage, the analysis, the entertainment, the discussion, the Draft, and everything in between. And no longer must one be a U.S. resident to enjoy it. Where once there was so little, there is now so much.
However, that does not make it easy to be an international NBA fan. Particularly in England. Those 7 p.m. ET tip-off times that seemed so normal to amateur Oklahoman stand-up comics are games that tip at midnight in my country. And, the further east you go around the globe, the later it gets. Los Angeles Clippers home games routinely start at 3.30 a.m. and finish after everyone else has risen for work.
If you want to watch those games, but you also need to work a 9-to-5 job given that you cannot work in your industry of choice due to your nation’s greater focus on the beautiful marriage of gravity and dairy, what do you do?
You could settle for a casual relationship with the sport, watching NBA games when it is convenient and maybe a few on catch-up. Yet it is not within mine or many sports fan’s nature to be anything but fanatical. Watching reruns just doesn’t work — you miss the discourse and the pertinence of it all. So instead, you have to cater for the time difference.
And that means sacrifice. That means having next to no money, as you sacrifice employment for love. That means going to bed at 7 a.m. every day, and not seeing the sun during the winter months. That means permanently having bright pink eyes and a slight headache.
Inevitably, it also impacts upon relationships, familial and otherwise, as well as the obvious financial and social repercussions. And it also makes you something of an outcast — you can be the most gifted person socially, but if no one understands your lifestyle, what you do with your time and why you have to do it in the way that you do, you’ll always be slightly on the outside.
At times, these things bite. I cannot with certainty speak for NBA fans outside of England, but this surely is at least partly true of any NBA fan east of the Greenwich Meridian. It’s something you have to do if you want to fully immerse yourself into the game, and if you love it enough, being fully immersed is the sole aim.
I can’t really explain to anyone who hasn’t lived anything comparable to it how weird and difficult it is to essentially devote a decade of your life to an activity that not a single one of your friends and peers even remotely understands. It felt almost like a double life. My family haven’t really got a clue why I live like this. My nan occasionally asks how “the netball” is going, which is nice of her.
Friends have a better idea, although I have not one real-life friend who likes basketball. And how can people like it like I do when they see the cost I pay doing so?
It is considerably easier now to justify it all given the relatively vast amounts on offer, and the ease of access. But it still isn’t easy. Staying up until silly o’clock to watch men play a sport I myself have never really played purely so I am more informed for the opinion-giving I do after the fact is a tough sell to those in my life, as is attempting to work in an industry that simply does not exist in my country.
But is it all worth it? Of course it is. We love this game.
This website and its sole proprietor keep a spreadsheet containing to-the-dollar information on all luxury tax paid to date, updated annually. Here is the latest update.
In the 14 seasons since the luxury tax was created, it has been applicable in twelve seasons; in twelve eleven seasons, 26 NBA franchises have paid over $1.1 billion in payroll excess. The exact details can be found here.
NBA All-Time Luxury Tax Payers – sorted alphabetically(click to expand)
NBA All-Time Luxury Tax Payers – sorted by expenditure(click to expand)
(Orange cells denote the team that won the championship that year.)
Please use the spreadsheet freely for resource purposes, and feel equally free to suggest any improvements. However, please do not just take it, and if you do cite its data somewhere, please acknowledge its source. While the content is not my IP, I did spend a long time sourcing the relevant information, and in return, I seek only credit and a few page hits for that. Thank you.
A 6’2 scoring guard, Adams is trying to emulate David Logan and go from Division II Indianapolis right to the highest levels of professional basketball. And he’s doing a bloody good job of it. In fact, he’s already done it. A scoring machine, Adams has worked his way to the Spanish ACB in three short years after graduating. He led Division II in scoring as a senior with 23.2 points per game, followed it up with 18.9 points per game with Guaiqueries in Venezuela, followed that up with 19.3 points per game in the Ukraine with Kryvbasket, followed that with 18.0 points per game with Bremerhaven in Germany, and followed that up with 18.3 points per game with Nancy in France. There aren’t many more levels to go up after that – Nancy were a EuroLeague team this year – and after a mid-season move to the ACB and Laboral, Adams is now knocking on the NBA’s door. Adams is not just a scorer – he’s also a high assist guy, a very good rebounder for his size, and a decent defender with great hands. He’s streaky as a shooter and takes some bad ones, but such hot streaks can be extremely hot, and although he is small and does little at the basket, his energy and dynamicism make him a pest on both ends. Adams is fast, athletic, energetic and relentlessly aggressive, and he is becoming one of the better American point guards not in the NBA. Be prepared for a LOT of turnovers, however.
An out and out post player, Alexander was something of a disappointment as a freshman, which is a little unfair given that no one ultimately can control the expectation of others but which nonetheless speaks to his underwhelming season, in which he showed distinct limitations.
Alexander has a strong frame with a good amount of muscle on it for one so young, and although he is not much of a run and jump athlete, he is not a stiff. His very long arms make up for being a couple of inches short of ideal in height, and he can outmuscle pretty much all the competition, particularly on the glass. The physical profile is quite established.
The skill set isn’t. Alexander looks a bit bewildered in the post, has no handle and very little jump shot away from it, misses a lot of shots (his only consistent offensive tool is the dunk), shows little skill with his off-hand, and has little offensive poise or awareness. He also shows little defensive poise or awareness, being little help on the perimeter and either getting lost or jumping needlessly on the perimeter. At this point he’s a rebounder and opportunity scorer, and given that he is not especially explosive (Alexander dunks a lot, but has to gather himself to do it), the skills are going to have to develop quite a lot to overcome the current problems.
As a general rule, early declarations should not be frowned upon, given the backwardness of the NCAA model. In Alexander’s case, however, it might have been in his best interests. Some continuity and intense skill development is needed. Alexander will make money anyway, but the big money will elude unless things change.
Birch is an exceptional rebounder, one of the best there is and that there can be. He also averaged an enormous 3.8 blocks per game, again about as good as there can be. He hustles and scraps, tracks the ball off the rim, rebounds outside of his area, rebounds over people, and has the length and athleticism to compete with anybody. Birch’s thin frame lacks for strength and he can be boxed out, but he can grab the rebound anyway, and will certainly try to. Around the basket, he will swat whatever he can around the rim, has good timing and anticipation, and of course gets up very quickly. In two of the most big man-ny big man areas, Birch is extremely productive.
Everything else is less of a sure thing. On offence in particular, Birch is markedly underskilled, creating almost nothing in the post, not shooting a jump shot with any consistency, not making his foul shots with any consistency, and indeed not even making layups with any consistency. He runs the court, hustles and dunks, but it’s opportunistic only and he’s plenty subdueable. With his physical profile, Birch should forgo trying to be a post-up player and become a dominant pick-and-roll presence, but he is a long way short of this, and the guards he plays with can only partially be at fault. Birch’s offence is underdeveloped to the point that spacing and screen, real fundamental skills, aren’t even comfortable for him. The same can be true of his defence; Birch’s physical tools allow him to mask many mistakes, but there are many mistakes of the positional and staying-in-front sense. There is an awful lot to do, and Birch is very much a project still.
That said, look at those rebounds. Look at those blocks. Look at that athleticism. Don’t look at the bits he can’t do; look at the bits he can do that can’t be taught. Look at the lack of character concerns that go with it. Is that not worthy of a second-round pick and a slow developmental process?
Turns out it wasn’t; Birch went undrafted and, although he signed a camp contract with the Miami Heat that even included a little bit of guaranteed money, he never made an NBA roster. Birch instead spent the year with the Heat’s affiliate, the Sioux Falls Skyforce, and took full advantage of the D-League’s high pace with averages of 11.1 points, 9.5 rebounds and 1.8 blocks in only 24.5 minutes per game. My views from before still apply – Birch is not skilled, but he doesn’t especially need to be. As rebounders and opportunist scorers go, I’d take him over Alexander.
Boatright is dynamic, but not with any great control. He is fast, with a very tight handle, aggressive and fearless, and relentlessly attacking the rim. But he struggles to finish when he’s there, and he takes some poor shots along the way. Boatright is quite a good shooter, especially good with a step-back, but he overfancies himself and can stop the ball at times. And while he can play close, tight, pressing defence, he can also overhelp and gamble recklessly.
Shooting a very good pull-up shot, Boatright is a half court scoring option on every trip and a dynamo in transition, but his unreliability and excessive shot taking negates some of that. Boatright’s blazing speed and great leap make him one of the better athletes on this or any list, but his tiny frame and short arms make him one of the smallest players on this or any list. Boatright can get to the rim without a screen going right, but struggles to get there even with one when asked to go left. Boatright can pass on the move, drive and kick, and drive and dump off, but he rarely finds a role man and is often driving to shoot. He has great agility and body control, but is really, really small. Some of that stuff can be fixed. Some can’t.
Brown’s athleticism is as good as anybody’s. He is a cannon in transition, a seriously dynamic player who absolutely flies down the court and who isn’t afraid of contact. Brown runs the court at every opportunity and has learnt how to use this athleticism – by leaking out, cutting off the ball and playing defence, rather than by trying to do everything with the ball.
This is important, because in terms of ball skills, Brown is lacking. Despite all the athleticism, he doesn’t have the greatest first step when driving with the ball, in large part because his handle is not good enough to keep up with his feet. He lacks advanced ball handling skills in terms of hesitation dribbles, changes of direction and the like, and although he is developing in this area, Brown lacks the handle that a 6’3 guard would ideally have. At that size, one would expect a guard to be able to play some point, but Brown rarely does – forced into doing so in the absence of Marcus Smart, Brown was not especially reliable at getting the ball over half court, and showed little in the way of playmaking ability other than to start the endless series of perimeter passes.
Brown’s abilities and upside lie elsewhere. As a defensive player, he has every physical tool required; recovery speed, strength, long wingspan and, pleasingly, a penchant for blocks. These tools also allow him at times to be able to get to the basket without using a pick, and he has developed over the years an understanding of the timing and angles involved in when to make such attacks. He also has some projectable ability as a shooter. Utilising a good shot fake and with an incredibly high leap on his shot, Brown has improved his catch-and-shoot jumper to being perfectly adequate, and is already a good mid-range shooter. He rarely shoots off of curls or screens (despite often using both for getting to the basket), which if developed would be a new string to his bow.
At times, Brown drifts and gets lazy on defence, undermining his physical prowess. And at times, despite his increased offensive IQ and skills, he forgets the fact that he’s the kind of player who can split double teams, dive off the ball, attack the basket and finish through contact, and instead tries to shoot through everything. But on his game, Brown is an NBA player. And if he can develop the defence to an elite level, whilst also developing enough of a handle to fill in at point or enough of a shot to be a capable higher volume shooter – or both – he might stick around for a while. He hasn’t the ideal size for Tony Allen’s job, but then many of these same things were once said about Tony Allen, too. Allen learnt his role and embraced it. So must Brown.
He was certainly given the opportunity to be that Tony Allen clone by the Nets last year, recording 781 minutes and 29 starts in the regular season, although barely featuring in the playoffs. Brown gave some youth, athleticism and dynamicism to a team that sorely lacked for those qualities, and has plenty of moments defensively. He was extremely tough to place offensively, however, passing up jump shots, missing many others, driving to nowhere and losing the handle too regularly. Brown’s athleticism is elite and his defence pretty good, but pretty good will have to become elite for him to break out. The Nets really need the exact type of player Brown could be, and a pairing of him and Rondae Hollis-Jefferson could be a spectacular wing defensive pairing. But it will also be a terribly spaced unit unless Brown can improve his catch-and-shoot game.
Clark is now 27. This should be his prime. And yet here he is, back in summer league, once again trying to get back in the NBA after a season on its very fringes. The man whose calling card was the fact that he “does so many things” continues to struggle to find a place in the bigs on account of not doing any one particular thing. Occasional shooting and good passing vision for his size are not proving enough, and now in his late twenties, it’s getting tougher. There are better shooters to use as stretch bigs, and there are younger unpolished 6’10 athletes.
Delaney is a very athletic wing with good size and length, who was given the opportunity to score at New Mexico last year due to a severe dearth of options, but who didn’t really take it. He did score some – 11.7 points per game in 29 minutes, on 49.5% shooting with a 37.2% three point stroke – but he didn’t assume the role of go-to guy, despite one being sorely needed, as he just hasn’t that mindset or skill set. Delaney’s offence suffered from unaggressive periods when his team needed someone to step up, and moments of reckless abandon when going to be the basket. His offensive instincts in the half court are still behind the curve. That said, there are plenty of tools in the shed – the physical profile (athlete, dunker, good length and speed), coupled with a decent three point catch-and-shoot shot and a mid-range pull-up. Although only a decent defender despite his tools, Delaney has the tools of a three-and-D role player at the NBA level with his athletic profile, set shot and ability to disrupt on the perimeter. He does however have to prove he can do the latter two to a higher standard and higher frequency, as others have proven themselves ahead of him.
Gasser was the token gritty glue gumption guy for Wisconsin for four years, whereby his intangibles and hustle and effort and face and whatnot embodied the Wisconsin way and totally justified the fact that he had almost no production. Tat statement is simultaneously facetious yet indisputable; Gasser never seemed to do anything, but things rarely went as well when he wasn’t in.
Gasser averaged as-near-as-is 6.6 points, 3.5 rebounds and 1.8 assist in 33 minutes per game as a senior. In 4,774 career minutes for the Badgers, he totalled 1,025 points, 575 rebounds and 284 assists. As is evident, he didn’t receive 4,774 minutes because he was productive. Rather, a large part of the reason was what he didn’t do. With a better than a 2:1 career assist/turnover ratio, Gasser never did anything he couldn’t do, shooting efficiently from downtown (40.2%) on low attempts, being judicious with every shot and dribble. He moved the ball on, fed the post and endlessly if completely unincisively swung the ball around the perimeter, which is exactly what he meant to do. Similarly, Gasser’s main virtues came defensively where, despite being not fast, big or athletic, Gasser played tough as old boots and made himself a very good on-ball perimeter defender. A high IQ system player on both ends with great effort and anticipation, Gasser is leaving the place that was absolutely perfect for him.
The only players to have made the NBA with a comparable resume were Chris Kramer and Mario West, and while West stuck around for a few years in a ridiculously specialist role, Kramer never got out of camp. Gasser might not even get that far, as it will be tough if not impossible to look beyond the fact he really did only average 6/3 in 33 minutes. Kramer at least had athleticism. Nevertheless, Gasser can make some money in Europe, and having the NBA on your resume is quite the boost for that.
Gray made a name for himself right at the end of his senior season with a 33 point, 30 rebound game against Coppin State in one of his final collegiate games. It was the culmination of consistent improvement in this area of the game, as Gray’s rebounding rate developed significantly throughout his career. As a freshman, he tried to block everything, recording 3.2 blocks in 25.3 minutes per game but rebounding only 4.8 times in that time. But as a senior, while still blocking 2.8 times per game, Gray grabbed 11.8 rebounds per game, second in the nation behind only UCSB’s Alan Williams. Decently sized for the paint and decently mobile so as to be able to rebound outside of his area, Gray boxes out on everything, and uses great timing rather than explosiveness to swat shots at the rim and track the ball coming off of it.
The Coppin State game, however, was also a bit of an outlier. Gray struggled with fouls and fatigue quite a bit down the stretch of the season, and didn’t record a double double over his final four games (the Coppin State outing was therefore his last one). Despite the appearance of being an automatic double double, Gray wasn’t that, struggling with consistency and seeing his production taper off quite significantly. The Gray who likes to run the court and pursue the ball was a step slower, and without that motor, Gray does not stand out.
There is some offensive skill to his game, however. The staple of Gray’s scoring game is a mid-range jump shot, added to which he has the ability to put the ball on the floor and drive on close-outs from that area. Gray’s offensive game is almost entirely from the mid-range area facing up; he creates little in the post, shows little in the way of moves, and hasn’t the core length or strength to ever be particularly strong in this area. He also shows little inclination towards trying to seal position for a pass over the top or dump-off down around the basket, is prone to standing around on offence, and without any great strength or explosiveness is not the best finisher around the rim. Yet in addition to shooting from the mid-range area, Gray is also a capable and willing passer from there, hitting cutters and throwing good high-low passes when the opportunity presents itself. He is a defence-first player, but he is not an offensive liability.
Gray is quite mobile, but certainly not explosive, and quite big, but not powerful. He runs without moving his arms (which is weird) and does not use any tools especially to succeed. Much of what he does is through instincts and timing rather than explosiveness, and through having size and athletic advantages at the Delaware State level he won’t have any longer. There are holes in the skill set and there’s doubts as to how well the good bits will even translates. That said, Dwayne Jones played many years in and on the fringes of the NBA with a similar skill set and body of work; slightly bigger and more athletic, maybe, but less offensively skilled. Rebounding generally translates, and a stint in the D-League (where, in the right spot, he could readily average double digit boards again) will put him in the conversation.
This will be the fifth summer that Gonzaga guard Gray has tried to make the NBA, and although he was able to get one training camp contract from the Washington Wizards in 2012, he has yet to make a regular season roster. Gray has spent the last three years of his career in France, and last season averaged 16.8 points and 3.1 rebounds in French league games with Dijon. Included in that was 42% three point shooting on more than seven attempts per game, as well as a 40% three point shooting stroke in 16 EuroCup contests. This is not an outlier; Gray is always a good jump shooter, from mid-range and out, off the catch and off the bounce. Gray also makes good reads on defence, anticipates well and shows a decent effort level on this end. He would be a very projectable three-and-D wing role player were it not for a lack of physical tools. With below average size for the NBA shooting guard position and without the great length or athleticism to make up for it, Gray has entirely the right skill set for the job, but not quite the optimum size. If he can shoot it well enough, this may not matter.
Lionel’s son is here after spending the first season of his professional career in the French second division with Denain. For Denain, Hollins averaged 8.5 points in 17.9 minutes, shooting 40.3% from three point range, whilst also making three pointers be the vast majority of his offence. From last year’s seniors list;
Playing alongside his nakesake Andre at Minnesota, Lionel’s son had to shoulder more of an offensive burden as a senior than perhaps best suited him. The Golden Gophers were suitably short of offence that Hollins’s 12.4 points per game actually led the team, yet being a leading scorer is not what Hollins is good at. Hollins does not create like a primary offensive creator, nor does he have the tools for being so. He has neither the explosive foot speed, nor the intricate handle, nor the jump shot to be so. What he is is a solid combo guard and role player.
Hollins is a good athlete with a long wingspan who is fairly consistent in his production and effort, but who lacks stand-out offensive skill. He can hit a few three pointers, but without the greatest natural rhythm or a high volume of looks, Hollins’s jump shot is only an occasional weapon, one shot better off the catch than off the dribble. Despite decent wingspan and athleticism, Hollins is not much of a slasher, favouring the jump shot and never proving consistently able to get to the rim when defended man to man.
However, the fact that Hollins was never a go-to player should not discredit the value he brought as a role player. With decent tools, timely scoring, good extra passing, unselfishness and enough of a shot to be a threat, Hollins had subtle but key benefits to the Golden Gopher’s offence, and was also a decent and consistent defensive player, despite often having to defend wings much bigger than he. Hollins led the team to an NIT championship, the best all-around player on the team who always took on the challenge, even when he was ill-suited for it.
To make the higher levels of the European game, Hollins will have to improve some facet of his game so that it is a discernable strength, something on which he can hang his hat. That facet will likely be the shot. If he can up his percentages and also add more shooting outside of just catching and raising up, he could be a role player at a high standard of professional basketball.
The uptick to a 40% three point shooting mark sounds like a good start towards that. But going from a bench role in the French second division to the NBA is a huge ask, no matter who you’re related to. Hollins still needs to prove he can be a volume three point shooter.
Hollis-Jefferson is not a shooter. Indeed, he’s almost a non-factor as one. Aside from, if we’re being generous, a fairly consistent 12 footer, Hollis-Jefferson is little other threat on the jump shot, and does not have much potential in this area with his current form. He does at least shoot 70.7% from the foul line, which is not bad, aided by a quite contrived wiggle in his pre-shot routine. But the wiggle can’t be adapted to the jumper, and so a wiggle-less RHJ is able to be entirely left alone from the perimeter.
Every other part of the game, however, has plenty of potential. Strong, long, fast and athletic, Hollis-Jefferson defends multiple positions and plays with great energy on the defensive end. He plays hard on the offensive end, too, but his skill is underdeveloped – lacking a jump shot with range (as mentioned above), demonstrating little in the way of ball-handling ability, not posting up, and not in any way creating much offence other than by running the court. Hollis-Jefferson is also not the best finisher when he does get looks at the basket that aren’t dunks, although he does attack defenders looking for contact, and does at least create these opportunities through cuts and hustle. But in order to be a slasher, he has to develop his handle beyond being the straight line driver that he is now, and improve his awareness so as to not barrel in recklessly.
The defensive end is the calling card and likely always will be. Always with great energy, Hollis-Jefferson stays in front, bodies up, uses his length and reading of passing lanes to recover for blocks, and has a knack for clean stripping drivers. He stays in front of smaller guys and smothers them on the perimeter, closes out quickly and with his hand up, and bodies up the bigs with core strength that it does not look like he has. In theory, RHJ can defend every position – that makes him a 3 by default in the NBA, as do his measurements, but a small forward with defensive versatility to go both bigger and smaller is exactly the type of small forward the NBA wants.
These improvements are required more than desired for Hollis-Jefferson, if he is to stand out from the Julian Wright types that have gone before him, players did not develop these skills and found themselves soon out of the league for the next crop of the same type of player who might. The idea of a multi-positional, defensive-mind, transition-and-cutting athletic presence is nonetheless a nice one. Hopefully RHJ keeps up the intensity and is exactly that.
However, a discussion of Hondae-Jefferson here is incomplete without a discussion of the trade that sent him to Brooklyn. On draft night, the Nets acquired his rights along with Steve Blake from Portland in exchange for Mason Plumlee and the rights to Pat Connaughton (41st pick). Disregarding Blake, who is irrelevant to the talent part of the trade and was included purely to match salary, the trade is Plumlee and Connaughton for RHJ. And no matter what anyone may think of RHJ, it’s an extremely valid question to ask why Plumlee’s value was deemed so low. Plumlee is athletic, rebounds very well in traffic and has potential (if not yet all that much effectiveness) as a paint protector. It is duly noted that he was somewhat stuck behind Brook Lopez, a man with whom he pairs very badly, and that although the aim would be to have both Plumlee AND Hollis-Jefferson, the Nets hadn’t the assets elsewhere to make that possible. Yet Plumlee has been an effective NBA centre for two years, in an ugly yet sustainable way, and is both cheap and capable. Very capable, in fact. So why is his value considered to be that of a #23 pick? And why on Earth was Connaughton added?
Nonetheless, RHJ is here now. He is, sans the spacing issue, what the Nets need, and a player with a lot of potential. If he lives up to some of it, Connaughton’s bizarre inclusion won’t matter.
Jefferson’s distinctive characteristic is trying to tear the rim off. He is a mostly scrappy offensive player, benefiting more from cuts to the basket, transition and put-back opportunities than shot creation from the post or off the dribble, but when he gets a ahead of steam and a lane to the basket, he dunks as explosively as anybody. Jefferson has an NBA body and NBA athleticism, and he proves it at any opportunity.
There is skill to go with it, especially in the form of a mid-range jumper that is becoming quite consistent. A scrappy high IQ player with good shot selection, Jefferson can utilise this jump shot in pick-and-pop plays or when turning around from the post, and he is also starting to add occasional three point range to that. Thriving in pick-and-roll play, Jefferson struggles to make more than about two dribbles or driving anywhere other than in a straight line with the ball in his hands, but when given a straightish line, he is plenty capable of finishing the play. Although he lacks badly for assists or any playmaking skills for others, this is not something that should be held too much against Jefferson, an unselfish player with limitations but who knows exactly where they are and who is incredibly efficient in what he does do. He attacks the contact, gets to the line, and creates offensive purely through his physicality, effort level and athletic prowess. Defensively, although Jefferson somewhat lacks for much strength or great lateral quickness, he projects to be able to defend perimeter bigs at the professional level if he can improve his footwork, and he has sufficient awareness to take quite a few charges.
Always bouncy, Jefferson is hard to ignore, and hard to subdue. He has NBA talent, and will stick if he can add consistent outside range to what he already has.
Jefferson showed he belonged in his first NBA season, averaging 3.7 points and 2.9 rebounds in 10.6 minutes per game and making few mistakes on the way. His athleticism is plenty translatable on defence – it matters not that he hasn’t the strength to defend the post, as not many of the opponents he will play against do either these days – and although he is prone to overhelping, he can recover. Jefferson already demonstrates a pretty good mid-range catch-and-shoot jump shot, and although he was responsible for a spectacular airball last year, the three point range should follow soon.
As a senior, Mitchell completely lost the free throw stroke he had built up to mediocrity as a junior, and his 42.7% shooting from there made him a liability. He rushes the release on the shot and snatches aggressively at it, and has absolutely no rhythm on it nor any jump shot. Given what an offensive liability he became from the line, this also affected his minutes, and as good as Virginia was last season, Mitchell had to watch some of it from the bench, averaging only 25.7 minutes per game.
Mitchell nonetheless played a big role for the Cavaliers, mostly defensively and on the glass. He is a good leaper with a high motor, who returns a very good rebounding rate and embraces his role as a dirty worker. He uses this motor in a similar fashion on the defensive end, where, despite an average amount of lateral quickness that his jumping ability rather masks, and despite a lack of optimum size for post defence, he nevertheless contests on everything. Mitchell hedges hard on pick-and-roll actions and can stay in front of driving big men, but he can be blown past on closeouts given that he does not change direction too quickly, and sometimes those pick-and-roll hedges are a little too hard. He nonetheless moves his feet as best he can, has some shot blocking timing around the rim, and is a nuisance defensively if not a lock-down player at any position.
There is occasionally some offence from Mitchell, who is not Reggie Evans out there. He runs the court hard and can finish around the rim if set up, throwing a little spin to a righty hook if impeded and going straight up if not. He has not the best footwork, has very little handle, has even littler of a jump shot and travels a bit, but his sprightliness and cuts to open spots give him a purpose offensively, and he stays within that role. Players who recognise their limitations and play within them are always fun to be coached, and Mitchell is so capable of and willing to embrace his interior role playing status that he has made it all the way up to this level. But at 6’8 and 230lbs-ish, anything further is a long shot.
Mitchell spent his first professional season with the Rio Grande Valley Vipers of the D-League, averaging 9.8 points and 9.0 rebounds in 26.9 minutes per game. The free throw stroke still hasn’t come back, as he shot 48.9% from the line, and although Mitchell took 41 three pointers on the year after taking only 11 his entire college career, hitting only 9 of them doesn’t make him a stretch threat. Not yet, anyway – another year of working on that, like Eduardo Najera once did, and Mitchell’s in the frame.
Jayvaughn Pinkston improved considerably throughout his collegiate career without it being all that evident in his production. He arrived at Villanova with hype and talent, but not much idea of what to do with it. And after a fraught beginning, he left as a reliable, versatile senior who contributed in many ways.
As a senior, Pinkston dispensed with much of the face-up game that had rather burdened him until that point, Pinkston always played as though he wanted to be a face-up player, a shooter and a driver, but he was never especially good at these things, and his continued insistence on trying was helping neither himself nor his team. He was not nearly as good of a ball handler as he thought he was, and while he took the open threes he was given, hitting them at 26% is precisely why he was given them. But as a senior, Pinkston mostly stopped all this, re-engaged himself with the post, venturing outside only really to run pick-and-roll action.
This is not to say that Pinkston is the greatest option in the post – he lacks athleticism and hasn’t the greatest range of moves, and is not a consistent halfcourt option for every trip inside. But with his strength, Pinkston is very hard to stop from getting position, and he creates the angles for feeds well. Finishing mostly with his right hand, Pinkston has a hook shot and good feet, barrels in and attacks contact. He can isolate down low or get open in the flow, and although his lack of explosion limits him a bit, the ton of fakes he uses down low can create a bit of separation from his defender. He draws doubles from the defence, and notwithstanding some lazy passes, he kicks the ball out of the post fairly well.
Elsewhere, Pinkston’s lack of speed and explosion limit him on the glass, and he struggles to clear the defensive boards or rebound out of his area. This is not helped by a reluctance (or constantly forgetting) to box out. Yet his defensive awareness probably improved even more than his offensive one did. Without great leap or length, Pinkston made an impact defensively by getting position, using his strength on the interior, and taking quite a few charges for a man of his size. Pinkston’s perimeter defence still needs work, as his footwork does not keep him in front of the play enough, but he provides quite a good amount of help defence without fouling, and rotates well. Pinkston’s lack of size and speed is probably not an NBA combination, but the total package of skills will work somewhere.
Reddic was the big man in VCU’s havoc press, and as such can correctly be assumed to have some good perimeter defensive skills for a big man. Be in on switches or traps, Reddic moves well on the perimeter and also makes good reads, recording a good amount of steals for a de facto power forward and able to stick with the opposing guards. Athletic and agile, Reddic overrotates at times, but has good recovery speed, making him very much a pest in this aspect of the game.
The problems come on the interior, where Reddic doesn’t do his work early enough. He has some strength on his frame, but does not do much with it, not being tough enough on the interior nor consistently boxing out on the glass. A power forward in name only, Reddic is not one for the power and physicality of the interior, and never has been a paint or post protector.
Offensively, Reddic’s main skill is the offensive rebound, at which he is much better (and seemingly more interested) than defensive rebounding. He contributes a few different things on offence – some pick-and-roll play, an occasional mid-range jump shot (including a turnaround from the post), occasionally stepping out and being able to take slower defenders with a two-dribble drive from that area. None of it is especially consistent, though, and although Reddic looks fairly smooth in his offensive moves, he simply misses quite a lot of shots. Reddick does little in the post and is only effective from there in opportunistic situations, and although he is very good at the putback, he has little in the way of reliable halfcourt offence.
In total, then, Reddic is a perimeter player on defence and only an interior player on offence, without being particularly effective at the latter. That’s a tough combination to place. If he develops a more consistent shot with better range, then the skills he already have combined with his physical tools make Reddic a potentially very solid stretch four. As it is, he’s somewhat limited.
Reddic’s first professional season was spent with two Italian teams, Pesaro and Bologna, averaging 9/5 in 22 minutes for the former and 7/4 in 15 for the latter. He remained a distinctly poor defensive rebounder, however, and this may be his area of most immediate concern.
Since leaving Houston in 2012 with averages of 14.7 ppg and 5.0 rpg as a senior, Simmons has been in the US minor leagues, firstly the ABA and then the last two years with the Austin Toros/Spurs of the D-League. He enjoyed a decent spike in minutes last year, and averaged 15.1 points, 4.3 rebounds and 3.6 assists in 33.8 minutes per game. Although that isn’t actually that much in the high scoring D-League – as evidenced by a 13.6 PER – it’s plenty solid enough, and came on percentages of 49.4%/39.8%/75.0%. Simmons is prone to mistakes, driving into trouble, losing the ball, throwing it away, and overfavouring his right hand. But at 6’6, athletic and contributing a little in all facets of the game, Simmons has some assets that would make him an NBA role playing wing. It would benefit him greatly to prove he can be a high volume three point shooter, as, although an efficient one, this has yet to happen.
Thames is a high scoring combo guard who is essentially best as a half court driver. Inside the lane, he uses subtle fakes and hesitations to create spacing and looks, and can either get to the basket or shoot a pull-up. Thames gets to the line a lot, welcoming contact and able to draw it through his craft, as well as owning a useful floater for the occasions he is up against true length. He uses both hands to both handle and finish, and although he has little flair, he has good body control and positional awareness to be able to find and expose seams in the defence.
What Thames does not excel at is being able to take that ability to penetrate in the half court and turn it into being able to find looks for team mates. He does not often kick out to shooters when on the drive, nor does he drop off to the big men; he’s driving to score, and seems to lack the vision to do more than that. Thames has some point guard abilities, able to find a roll man in pick-and-roll action and very secure with the ball, smooth and safe, but he does not move a defence much.
Outside of the arc, Thames is less effective, as his three point stroke has never been that good. For all his understanding of time and score, of when to carry the scoring load and when to step up, Thams lacks much in the way of dynamicism, being all craft rather than flair. That said, Thames can carry his team for stretches through this craft. Lacking great speed, Thames makes up for it on offence with reliability and an unflappability in the face of defensive pressure, and copes with it on defence with good anticipation, hands and rotations.
A lead guard at the college level, Thames is harder to peg at the NBA level. A bit like Nolan Smith before him, Thames is either big but slow for a point, or small and a bit slow for a two, with a skill set that resides somewhere between the two. Most aspects of his game are solid, but none are spectacular, which begs the question as to what role Thames fits. “Just a guard” is fine in theory, but what’s his role in a half court offence, and who does he defend? A very good shot creator and defender at the college level, neither projects that well. Thames is good, very good, but might be better suited for Europe.
Europe is where Thames did indeed go, signing with Sevilla in Spain, but he struggled quite a bit. Averaging only 3.4 and 0.8 assists in 15.4 minutes per game of ACB play, Thames returned to American part way through the season and finished up with the Fort Wayne Mad Ants averaging 7.3 points and 2.1 assists in 19.7 minutes per game. Thames isn’t a shooter, a microwave, a half court breaker-downer or an athlete, so not only is he stuck on the fringes of the NBA, but he’s also beholden to a team he really does not fit. The very things the Nets need, the very things Jarrett Jack doesn’t have, nor does Thames.
Despite having very little in the way of picks, the Nets gave up two future second-round picks to Charlotte for the rights to Vaulet, drafted 39th. Had Vaulet fallen two more spots, they might have picked him at #41 instead of Pat Connaughton, kept the two seconds, kept Miles Plumlee and not traded for Rondae Hollis-Jefferson. But regardless, Vaulet’s here now.
Playing last year for Bahia in his native Argentina, the 19 year old Vaulet averaged 16.9 minutes, 7.2 points, 4.1 rebounds, 0.8 assists, 0.5 steals and 0.4 blocks per game, shooting 50.5% from the field, 66.7% from the line and 10% from three point range. Bahia lost to Penarol in the quarter finals of the Argentinian league, and Vaulet had a big role to play in that; after barely playing to start the season, Vaulet was a key contributor by the end, recording 24 minutes and 13 points in the game five loss in the championship series. Aside from the occasional goose egg – everyone has the occasional goose egg – Vaulet routinely contributed every time he was given minutes, and was the bright spot in an uncompetitive season for the team.
Argentina haven’t had much potential come through since the demise of the great era, but the new era is being blooded in as we speak, Vaulet represents one of the more athletic prospects they have had for a while. He is not a shooter, as evidenced by the 10% three point shooting, and seems to release the ball while still on the way up, which isn’t good for his rhythm. He is distinctly raw still on the defensive end, lost at times and overplaying people, but not out-toughed. Indeed, his toughness is a virtue, as is his physical profile. Without being a run and jump athlete necessarily, Vaulet is more spry and nimble, laterally quick and with a tremendous motor. He is fast with and without the ball and is always pushing it, the team entrusting the youngster to make plays in the full court, demonstrating the awareness, handle and step-through to be able to get to the rim. A very willing (if too willing) help defender, Vaulet has great recovery speed, timing and anticipation, and if he is prone to mistakes in man to man and isolation defence, there is no reason to assume this will stay the case. He is raw but not hugely so – the skill set has holes in it, most obviously the jump shot, but the poise and IQ is there, as are the tools. It was odd of Vaulet to declare (and stay declared) so early, but it has worked out, and he is one worth monitoring.
Ben Vozzola
Vozzola is an odd addition here, a much travelled player who played for four colleges in five seasons and seemingly scowled in every one of their team photos. After two years and precisely 10 minutes at San Diego, Vozzola transferred to Cowley County commuunity college for one year (averaging 9.4 points per game), transferred back to Division I with Cal State Northridge for his junior campaign, averaged 2.9 points in 33 games, and then transferred to NAIA school St Catharine as a senior. There, he averaged 15.3 points and 6.0 rebounds per game, but a lot of players average that much at the NAIA level, and roughly none of them get NBA looks. Why has Vozzola (apparently) got an invite to Nets camp? No idea, but fair play to him. Here’s some tape.
Dawson is a power forward in a shooting guard’s body, which of course makes him a small forward by default. He is undersized but explosive, and capable of defending inside and outside. Capable in various matchups, Dawson can match up at the two, three and four positions, and is a physical specimen, combining athleticism with strength and a wide, wide frame.
Normally defending the post, Dawson gets by on defence despite the height disadvantage with this strength and with great discipline. He might be smaller than most opponents, but he is almost always stronger and more athletic than they are, and his long arms help make up for some of the difference. Dawson grabs tough rebounds and is measured in his aggression, and has good anticipatory skills and positional awareness. This does not negate the size disadvantage, but it surely helps a lot.
Offensively, Dawson has developed a little bit of a mid-range shot, but it’s not pleasant looking, and he has absolutely no three point range at the moment. With little handle to speak of either, Dawson is entirely a finisher and not a creator, not even down low in the post. Rarely getting to the line (and shooting dreadfully when he does), Dawson is an opportunistic offensive player who gets by through transition, cuts, offensive rebounds and hustle. Yet when he does get such a look, he tears the rim off. This is pretty much all he does on offence, but it’s both fun and useful.
Dawson, then, is limited to only a couple of areas of the game, but is extremely effective within them. If he can spot up a bit and keep the energy up, he could stick in the league for a while.
Garrett spent last season in the D-League, trying to make it back to the NBA in which he had spent the bulk of the previous two seasons. He started with the Iowa Energy and averaged 14.7 points, 4.8 rebounds and 4.5 assists in 36.5 minutes per game, then was traded to the Grand Rapids Drive in exchange for Willie Reed, and averaged 11.0 points, 3.5 rebounds and 3.0 assists in 23.0 minutes per game there. Garrett shot 40.4% from three point range across those two stints, and has found his niche as a player; a big combo-with-point-tendencies guard with a good wing span and defensive effort, who hits open jump shots and makes relatively few mistakes. Whether he has the athleticism to make it back to the NBA is another matter – not able to get beyond the first line of the defence much, Garrett’s upside at the NBA level is limited, and now aged 26, others may have the advantage.
The extremely athletic Griffin is back once again after a fine summer league performance with the Dallas Mavericks last season that led to a training camp contract with the team. And although he didn’t quite make it out of camp, a fine season with the Mavericks’ affiliate Texas saw him average 19.0 points, 6.6 rebounds and 2.4 blocks per game in 35 minutes a contest. Although Griffin seems to become a less and less interested rebounder with each passing season despite his physical tools, he continues to improve as a shooter, last year knocking down 98 three pointers at a 36.8% mark. That plus 2.4 blocks per game is quite the combination, and Griffin has a legitimate chance of making the NBA next year, including behind his namesake Blake.
After some time in the D-League, Hamilton finished up the season with the Clippers, averaging 2.7 points in 14 games. The book is mostly out on Hamilton now; scoring bursts, OK athlete, sufficient if not stand-out defence, prone to forcing things at times and passing up at times, and a good not great shooter. There’s perhaps some three-and-D potential there, but not the Tobias Harris potential there was once thought to be.
Hobson is back for summer league visit, five years after first being drafted. He spent the first half of last year in Brazil, averaging 17.8 points, 6.0 rebounds and 3.5 assists with Brasilia, then came back to the D-League with the Santa Cruz Warriors and added further averages of 12.7 points, 6.5 rebounds and 5.2 assists in 29.2 minutes per game. Hobson also upped his three point volume, taking four a game and hitting them at 36.7%, and had a very strong final stretch of the season. In the final game of the D-League season, Hobson led the Warriors with 22 points, 11 rebounds and 7 assists over the Fort Wayne Mad Ants; a team that was 15-10 after Hobson’s debut ended up 35-15 and the league champions, and Hobson was a big part of that. Hobson does much the same sort of thing as what Joe Ingles does, and Joe Ingles just played a full season in the NBA. At this point, so could Hobson.
Johnson was [Chris] Crawford’s team mate at Memphis for the last two years, and played off the ball just as much as he did in an entirely different way. The hallmarks of his game are playing hard and playing athletically, and he thrives on all the things those things avail. He runs the court, is always pushing the ball, and can drive to the rim and finish explosively. He really is a dynamic full court player, a tremendous rebounder for a 6’3 guard, and, at times, a quality defensive presence. Johnson’s speed and hands make him a very capable defensive player of both guard positions when the tenacity is there (and it normally is, but there are lulls). Strong with a long wingspan and a great leap, Johnson’s physical profile belies his lack of height for the two guard position, and yet he can also masquerade as a point, bringing the ball up when needed and a good extra passer, if not a defence collapser.
All good so far. Sounds like the upcoming Chris Kramer if Kramer could do something with the ball, if he had longer arms, and if he was even more athletic. Indeed, Johnson shares Kramer’s poor shooting ability, struggling with any form of jump shot and yet not letting that stop him from trying them. The comparison goes further – Johnson struggles to create his jump shots or any offence of his own, cannot shoot off the dribble at all and struggles with poor touch around the rim, but is a good extra passer and has good hands and drives open lanes. Johnson can split a double team and drive baseline in ways Kramer can’t, but there are many similarities nonetheless. Yet what really separates them is Johnson’s knack for turnovers, stemming from forcing the issue, not being able to dribble at the same speed as he can run, throwing the ball away and making too many poor decisions. Johnson makes much happen when he is on the court, but when he’s on the ball, those things are all too often not good things.
This all lends itself terrifically to a workout setting, and Johnson played himself into fringe NBA range in that period. But it may be as close as he gets.
Johnson signed with the Houston Rockets for three days right at the end of training camp so that the Rockets could get him to their D-League affiliate, the Rio Grande Valley Vipers. But although Johnson spent the whole year there, he didn’t play much, averaging only 12.9 minutes in 33 games and averaging 5.2 points and 1.4 assists. The 23% shooting means the jump shot is still not there yet.
Haakim Johnson
Johnson is out of NAIA school Pikeville, and having graduated in 2009 has spent the vast majority of his time in non-English speaking countries. He spent one year in Puerto Rico, two in Japan, a couple in Europe, all interspersed with trips to Saudi Arabia. He has also spent time in Mexico and in the PBL (apparently the Clippers are hitting up the non-D-League minor leagues this summer). A 6’7 face-up four man (not to be confused with a small forward), Johnson fancies himself a shooter, but is inconsistent in his mechanics and shoots a bit flat, and has never been a good shooter at any of these many stops despite his best intentions. He has some post-up play and driving in his arsenal and is decently athletic, but Johnson does not stand out in any facet of the game, and still just wants to be a shooter.
Amath M’Baye
M’Baye played in summer league for the Clippers last year, as well as for the Jazz and Spurs in 2013, at which time I wrote this about him:
M’Baye’s incredibly ambitious declaration for the draft didn’t really work out, in the sense that he wasn’t drafted, although it does mean he can begin earning professional basketball paychecks sooner. And earn paychecks, he will. Last year for Oklahoma, M’Baye averaged 10.1 points, 5.3 rebounds and 0.8 blocks per game, hitting some jumpers, defending some forwards, grabbing boards, whilst hardly handling or playmaking. Yet there was no one determinable calling card. A solid college player whose lure is his physical profile, M’Baye will be in the pro game for several years, but this is likely the closest he’ll get to the bigs.
To be fair, his career trajectory right now rather mirrors that of the aforementioned Jeff Brooks. And yet it has worked out for Jeff. But not in the NBA.
The two years hence have been spent in Japan with the Mitsubishi Dolphins, for whom M’Baye averaged 23.8 points and 8.4 rebounds per game last season. He also shot 33% from three on more than three attempts per game, which is an improvement on pretty much every year prior. M’Baye impressed the Clippers last summer with his willingness to run and his athleticism, and two years as a go-to guy at both forward spots has helped him develop his once raw skills to go with his physical profile. M’Baye has continued to improve year on year and expand his game, and is back here on merit, despite my (not intended) pessimism of yesteryear.
Tennessee Tech graduate McMorrow is also a one time summer league back for a second go, who played for the as-were Hornets in the 2013 edition. He has spent the two years hence in various places, firstly in Taiwan, and then splitting last year between the Halifax Rainmen of NBL Canada and Barako Bull in the Philippines, the latter of which he averaged 27.5 points and 20.2 rebounds per game for. Even in a league where every import’s stats (especially rebounding stats) are huge, McMorrow’s stand out. Turning 28 in a couple of weeks despite his relative newness to the game, McMorrow is a project starting to come good – 7’2, strong and a good leaper, he is a rare physical specimen, who never fails to make himself known on the glass. The offensive game is extremely limited, the mistakes high, and the defensive awareness slow and clumsy (for some reason he never does much in the way of shot-blocking, despite it all), yet in spite of this and his advancing age, McMorrow’s profile is suitably rare as to always merit a look.
Moreira leaves Southern Methodist as a very experienced and much developed player. His awareness and understanding of the pace of the game improved markedly as a senior, and he went from being something of a project to a developed professional player.
Moreira is a fluid and mobile athlete, not a huge leaper or especially explosive but one who moves well and runs the court especially well for a centre. He has also added some muscle to a slightly thin frame, and has skill to go with this profile. Armed with a turnaround jump shot and a quick set-shot from the 15 feet or so area, Moreira also scores with a running righty hook, but can also use a left, and is a good interior passer to boot. He will take a dribble or two from the mid-range area and is always a threat in pick-and-roll situations. Moreira is pretty much entirely a mid-range threat, without the strength to create position in the post and without the range to step any further out, and shoots line-drives free throws poorly that belie his shooting abilities from that area in open play. But he will occasionally flash a spin move in the post and is certainly effective overall offensively, a skilled and smooth big man who presents an option in the half court, and definitely in the full court.
Defensively, the lack of strength again hinders Moreira a bit, and he is a bit soft with his interior defence. He also goal tends quite a lot of shots, and I don’t say this because of his one most famous one. He nevertheless competes defensively and is a good paint protector, lively and active, who gets up quickly from standing – the goal tends are the trade-off from the overall good defensive presence.
Were he slightly stronger and slightly more skilled, Moreira would be a sure-fire NBA player. As it is, he’s not far short anyway.
Newbill is an extremely big time scorer, partly because Penn State have always needed him to be, but always because he is capable of being so.
Best as a slasher, Newbill scores in many ways, if not every way. He has added better three point range year on year, but is certainly no three point bomber; indeed, for a while, he took too many two point jump shots. But he’s put them away, in favour of more three pointers and more barrels to the paint. Newbill can get to the paint using good athleticism and a very good handle that allows him to change direction quickly, particularly in the form of a crossover that is something of a staple. Once at the rim, Newbill’s power and aggressive nature makes him an unafraid finisher (albeit almost entirely with the right hand), which he combines with a runner (supposedly which he learnt from Tim Frazier) for those moments when he can’t or won’t get the whole way there. Newbill also shoots a pull-up two pointer well, and has a stronger mid-range game than most.
Capable of playing point guard, Newbill is best served more off the ball, where his efficiency improves markedly and where he can focus on the thing he does best – scoring. He is much better at getting to the basket off of curls and closeouts than in isolation, and although he shoots few jump shots off these screens, his catch-and-shoot shot is serviceable. Furthermore, Newbill is also a fairly decent defender. His lateral quickness is perhaps better than his straight line speed, and although there are some lapses on that end (which can perhaps be attributed to the huge offensive load he has been carrying), his ability to stay in front when plugged in is quite good.
Ideally, Newbill would be bigger (only 6’4 with a 6’6 wingspan, not great for a two guard). This, of course, he cannot control. He can however control the shot selection, which is not great at times, and he can be accountable for the defensive lapses and underdeveloped jump shot. There is also a hero ball tendency in clutch situations that needs to go (and which the team must be somewhat accountable for), yet that will likely go with newer pastures.
There is no one remarkable facet to Newbill’s game, yet there is a bit of most of them. Newbill can be a tremendous European guard.
Tim Parham
Parham is almost certainly going to be the oldest player in any of the three summer leagues going on this season. Now aged 32, the 6’9 centre graduated from Maryland Eastern Shore way back in 2006, and has very much toured the world in that time. He has played in such far ranging places as Taiwan, Bolivia, Canada, Chile, Mexico, Peru, Poland, Turkey, the D-League, the UAE and Germany, and now he gets to (kind of) add the NBA to that list. It’s a bizarre inclusion, however; Parham has spent most of the last two years with the Halifax Rainmen of the NBL Canada league, but he averaged only 5.2 points and 5.8 rebounds per game for them last year, before averaging 2.2 points and 2.4 rebounds down the stretch of the season for the Windsor Express after being traded for a future draft pick. Ironically, Parham had lost his place on the Rainmen to the aforementioned Liam McMorrow. Old, extremely limited offensively, not a shot blocker and not especially athletic, Parham is a 6’9 strong rebounder and fouler who plays a limited role well, but only at the right level. He’s therefore an odd inclusion on this roster – although he attended summer league with the Chicago Bulls once, that was back in 2006.
White did not play last year, and still has precisely 24 games played in a three-year professional career, 20 of which were in the D-League. It’s hard to know how this ends – notwithstanding the anxiety issues and the burnt bridges, it is not apparent what role White would fill on a team, or that he ever could have done. Not a defender or a shooter, White’s abilities as a playmaker are heavily mitigated by not being of a sufficient talent level to merit the ball in his hands much in the first place. So on what basis would he be called up?
Wilcox barely played as a rookie, recording only 101 minutes, which is not enough time to make a judgement of any substance. We then have to return again to his projection, that of being a three-and-D potential player. With his size, wingspan and good set shot, Wilcox certainly has this, but with the trade for Lance Stephenson, it doesn’t seem as though he will get any minutes with the Clippers again this year either. A change of scenery might be the best thing for him – then again, it hasn’t helped Reggie Bullock.
After starting 31 games as a rookie, Wolters was cut early last season by the Bucks, and although he was soon picked up by the New Orleans Pelicans, he didn’t last but ten games before being waived again and confined to the D-League for the remainder of the year. In 12 games for the Grand Rapids Drive, however, Wolters averaged 15.3 points, 5.3 rebounds and 7.2 assists, with a near 4:1 assist to turnover ratio. Wolters still can’t shoot, and that, in an era of heightened awareness of offensive efficiency, is a bigger problem than ever. But that ratio is extreme efficiency, and even if he can’t shoot to compensate it, Wolters’s playmaking out of the pick-and-roll is not easily found elsewhere.
Way back in the day, I anointed Patric Young with the title of “future SEC Defensive Player of the Year”. And it came off; Young won the award as a senior after making the All-Conference Defense Team as a junior.
Over time, Young made strides in learning how to turn his great physical profile into a defensive presence. Certainly, he looks the part; athletic and quite strong, Young is also laterally quick, plenty big enough to defend the post while also fast enough to defend the perimeter. That said, his defence is far from imperfect – sagging off too far on said perimeter defence, Young’s effort and effectiveness are a bit inconsistent, and his feet on the perimeter need work. Also, for all the athleticism, Young’s offence is limited, mostly just powerfully finishing the work of others or getting the looks only available to one so athletic. He’s always a lob threat, but he’s rarely a post threat, and there is little jump shot to speak of.
Young intrigues with size, strength and athleticism. He runs and he dunks, he explodes and he blocks, and he has decent hands to boot. But he needs to lock down defensively, and either become a much more viable threat in the pick-and-roll, shoot jump shots, or both.
Signed by the New Orleans Pelicans last summer after going undrafted, Young made it only one month through his rookie season before being waived in favour of Dante Cunningham. He then spent the rest of the season with Galatasaray in Turkey, averaging 10.5 points and 7.8 rebounds in Turkish league play. Young has agreed to play for Olympiacos next season and thus likely won’t actually play in summer league, but given that I had written this before that news broke, the blurb stays.
Throughout his playing career, Antoine Walker was always something of an object of ridicule. Rightly or wrongly, this happened.
The fearsome, unrelenting uniqueness of watching him play was precisely why. For all his talent, particularly his prodigious handling and passing skills for a big man, Walker became best known for shooting three pointers.
More specifically, he became best known for not shooting three pointers very well, yet doing it anyway.
Toine was not a Josh Smith-like shooter out there. However, it was closer than it should have been. Walker’s career 32.5% three-point shooting mark ranks him 217th on the list of players with over 500 career three pointers made, nestled in between Stephon Marbury (216th) and Baron Davis (220th).
And considering there are only 232 players who have hit at least that many in their career, this is not a strong placement for Toine. What further separates him from the good shooters on the list was the sheer volume of attempts – of those 232 players, Walker was 16th in total attempts, but only 26th in makes. He was not quietly inefficient. Indeed, he was never quietly anything.
For two seasons in particular, Antoine’s three-point volume was ginormous. Walker hit 221 of 603 three pointers in the 2000-01 season (both leading the league), and 222 out of 645 the following season (second in makes only to Ray Allen, and again leading in attempts). This was the era of the three-point explosion – whereas in 1997-98 the 29 NBA teams shot a total of 30,231 regular season threes, that number had jumped almost 20 percent in the 2001-02 season to 35,071, led by Jim O’Brien‘s Celtics team willingly fuelled by Walker.
That Celtics team and its 1,946 three-point attempts led the second-highest placed team (Orlando with 1,660) by almost 300 attempts. Although that league-wide number pales compared to the 52,974 regular season three pointers shot by the 30 NBA teams last year, it was the highest of all time at the time, and evidential of a trend towards increasing the speed and the scoring of the game.
Antoine was at the forefront of that trend. Pioneer or coincidence?
The sheer volume of Walker’s three-point attempts compared to his peers cannot be understressed. In the 2000-01 season in which he led the league in both makes and misses, only three other players with more than hundred makes could be accepted as being actual ‘big men’ (Tim Thomas, 107; Rashard Lewis, 123; Dirk Nowitzki, 151).
Those 151 makes were the most Dirk ever made in one season of his career before he largely put the three-pointer to bed, and Peja Stojakovic, a poster boy for shooting forwards, only twice made over 174 three-pointers in a season himself. It was not the efficiency, consistency or the beauty of Walker’s three-point shooting that resonated or pioneered – it was the sheer bloody mindedness. As he amusingly, succinctly and yet so accurately put it himself, he shot so many threes because there were no fours.
Antoine is mocked for that comment, but it was absolutely the right idea. We live in an era of the NBA now whereby offensive efficiency is the most important thing, and offensive efficiency is determined by maximizing the number of points per shot. It is a simple piece of logic to conclude that a great way to do this is to take the shots that are worth more, as well as shots that are easier to make. In this respect, Walker was at least half right.
Had Antoine actually been consistently good at that which he consistently attempted, he would have been a sabermetrician’s ideal offensive power forward. It is not merely the threes – it is the point forward role, the second primary playmaker from an unconventional position now so coveted, the latent but steadily growing realization that post offense does not really matter after all.
Walker embodied the occasionally termed ‘European style power forward’ role now increasingly in vogue, in a league where the Kurt Thomas and Tyrone Hill style power forwards are being squeezed out for the Ryan Anderson and Channing Frye types. Talents who defy convention, who bring efficiency and production, and whose ‘softness’ (perceived or otherwise) is offset by talent and results.
And yet, Antoine is often not thought of in these complimentary ways. He was a gimmick, a novelty of a player considered a frustrating and enigmatic waste of talent. It did not help this perception that, in retirement, Walker has become synonymous with financial mismanagement. This does not help a man’s standing when evaluating his legacy and his reputation. Nor did all the wiggling.
Nevertheless, Antoine was in a sense ahead of his time.
Antoine certainly was not the first stretch big in NBA history. He was not even the only or best stretch big on the very Celtics teams in question, a top honor belonging to the permanently tremendous Walter McCarty. Walker also could have done far more to maximize his impact on the game on the defensive end, rather than always resort to his time-honoured technique of keeping one hand on the opponent, lowering the opposite hand below the waist, let him get past and then swiping at the ball fast with the lowered hand. But what Antoine did do was simultaneously raise and lower the bar for the concept. He made the stretch big not just a spot-up player, but a creator of offense, and, with Jim O’Brien‘s consent, a focal point. Logically, if not aesthetically, it makes sense.
Of course, not all three pointers are created equal. There is a big difference between a corner three point shot by a quality shooter off of a defense-collapsing drive-and-kick play (good!) and a contested 30-footer off the dribble from the wing or attempted banked leaning 25-footer between two defenders (‘Toine). Although Walker’s knack for arching his body into a C shape helped him with the extra long long range shots – seemingly the reason he found them so effortless while never really jumping – he never had much natural shooting rhythm, as his ugly tank in the three-point contest serves as testament to.
Antoine’s streakiness and predictability in his entirely undemocratic shot selection further hindered his effectiveness in the role, and all in all, for all the makes, teams wanted Antoine to shoot. And they knew he would.
Therein lies the Antoine Walker dichotomy. It was all the wrong player doing the right stuff in the wrong way. There were no fours, and there still are no fours, but there is also now no Antoine Walker. There are merely a lot of players you hope will get close. There is, however, a new understanding of offensive efficiency, and perhaps ironically, the strikingly inefficient Walker embodies the shift in the paradigm.
Polarizing, perplexing, aggravating and captivating, Walker perhaps never maximized his talents. But maybe, just maybe, he helped progress the NBA.
Memphis Hustle
Wisconsin Herd
Agua Caliente Clippers
Erie BayHawks
