Cavs, Raptors Eye Will Cherry
Will Cherry‘s strong summer league showing for the Cavs this month has Cleveland strongly considering a more substantial arrangement with the free agent guard, and the Raptors also have serious interest in him, reports Marc J. Spears of Yahoo! Sports (Twitter link). It appears as though the teams are envisioning him as a training camp invitee, though it’s conceivable he could wind up with at least a partial guarantee, given the competition for his services.
The 6’1″ 23-year-old averaged 12.8 points and 4.0 rebounds in 25.3 minutes per game in five appearances for the summer Cavs in Las Vegas. Cleveland is also familiar with Cherry from his work for its D-League affiliate last season, when he notched 11.6 PPG and 3.7 RPG in 30.4 MPG. He also dished out 4.5 assists per contests in his time with the Cavs affiliate.
Cherry went undrafted out of Montana in 2013, and he wasn’t in an NBA camp last fall. The Raptors have 13 guaranteed contracts and the Cavs have only 12, but Cleveland’s roster is in flux as a potential Kevin Love trade looms, leaving it uncertain whether Cherry would have a better shot in Cleveland or Toronto.
Grizzlies Sign Patrick Christopher For Camp
SEPTEMBER 25TH: The deal is official, the team announced.
JULY 25TH: Free agent shooting guard Patrick Christopher has agreed to a non-guaranteed deal with the Grizzlies, reports Marc Stein of ESPN.com (Twitter link). It appears it’ll be a summer contract that will allow the former University of California standout to go to training camp in October with a chance of making the opening night roster.
Christopher had a similar arrangement with the Bulls last year, but he was one of the team’s first cuts, in early October, and he didn’t appear in a preseason game. He wound up joining the D-League’s Iowa Energy, averaging 13.6 points in 33.4 minutes per contest and swishing 44.6% of his three-point attempts.
The 26-year-old will join a fairly crowded roster in Memphis, which has 14 players on guaranteed contracts. That doesn’t include Jarnell Stokes, this year’s 35th overall pick, who remains unsigned. Memphis can carry up to 20 players into camp, but it appears there’s just one spot up for grabs on the team’s regular season roster, which can have no more than 15 players.
Teams Limited To Paying The Minimum Salary
Money dries up quickly in NBA free agency. Teams come to dozens of agreements within in the first two weeks of July, leaving little remaining cash for stragglers. That’s often why top restricted free agents remain on the table until late in the process, as teams hesitate to tie up cap room on an offer sheet that could end up being matched. Mid-tier veteran unrestricted free agents also feel the squeeze, as patience is often rewarded only with a shrinking pool of options.
Eleven of the NBA’s 30 teams are already limited to offering no more than the minimum salary to free agents from other teams. They’ve used up all of their available cap room and exceptions, aside from the minimum-salary exception. Teams below the tax apron can take sign-and-trades, as the Wizards did with Kris Humphries and DeJuan Blair, and some clubs, like the Cavs, can waive non-guaranteed salary to open up more cap space. Still, these 11 teams can’t sign players for more than the minimum, at least without a corresponding move, and in most cases, such a move would require the cooperation of another team:
Updated 3/25/15
- Nets: Tax team. Used taxpayer’s mid-level exception on Bojan Bogdanovic.
- Bulls: Cap room exhausted. Used room exception on Kirk Hinrich.
- Cavs: Cap room exhausted. Used room exception on Mike Miller. Used disabled player exception on Iman Shumpert.
- Clippers: Over the cap. Used non-taxpayer’s mid-level exception on Spencer Hawes and biannual exception on Jordan Farmar.
- Heat: Cap room exhausted. Used room exception on Udonis Haslem. Disabled player exception expired.
- Kings: Over the cap. Used non-taxpayer’s mid-level exception on Darren Collison and Eric Moreland. Used biannual exception on Ramon Sessions.
- Knicks: Tax team. Used taxpayer’s mid-level exception on Jason Smith.
- Lakers: Cap room exhausted. Used room exception on Ryan Kelly and Xavier Henry. Disabled player exceptions expired.
- Mavericks: Cap room exhausted. Used room exception on Jameer Nelson.
- Nets: Tax team. Used taxpayer’s mid-level exception on Bojan Bogdanovic.
- Pacers: Over the cap. Used non-taxpayer’s mid-level exception on C.J. Miles and Damjan Rudez. Biannual exception unavailable this year (used on C.J. Watson in 2013).
- Rockets: Over the cap. Used non-taxpayer’s mid-level exception on Kostas Papanikolaou and Nick Johnson. Used biannual exception on Josh Smith.
- Warriors: Over the cap. Used non-taxpayer’s mid-level exception on Shaun Livingston. Biannual exception unavailable this year (used on Jermaine O’Neal in 2013).
- Wizards: Over the cap. Used non-taxpayer’s mid-level exception on Paul Pierce. Biannual exception unavailable this year (used on Eric Maynor in 2013).
Basketball Insiders and ShamSports were used in the creation of this post.
Pelicans Re-Sign Darius Miller
JULY 25TH: The deal is official, the team announced.
JULY 18TH: Shortly after adding free agent Jimmer Fredette to their backcourt, the Pelicans have struck a deal with small forward Darius Miller, reports John Reid of the New Orleans Times-Picayune (via Twitter). After being selected by the Pelicans in the second round of the 2012 NBA Draft, Miller averaged 3.3 points in 14.6 minutes per contest over two seasons in New Orleans. However, in June the team opted not to extend the Kentucky product a qualifying offer that would have been worth $1.15MM for next season. The terms of this deal are not yet known.
The 6-foot-8 Doug Neustadt client was the sixth Wildcat taken in the 2012 draft, including Miller’s current and former teammate Anthony Davis, who the Pelicans took No. 1 overall. In his senior year, Miller helped lead the Wildcats to a national title, averaging 9.9 PPG on .474/.376/.797 shooting.
Miller figures to provide depth on the wing for the Pelicans, who possess a talented roster but don’t really have any small forwards with Miller’s height or length. A year after adding Jrue Holiday and Tyreke Evans to a roster that already contained a budding superstar in Davis, the Pelicans added Omer Asik, Jimmer Fredette and have now brought back Miller this offseason.
Buycks Spurns NBA Offers To Play In Spain
Former Raptors point guard Dwight Buycks has signed with Valencia of Spain, the Spanish ACB league’s website announced (translation via Sportando’s Emiliano Carchia). It’s a one-year deal, as Euroleague.net reveals. The Lakers and Clippers extended non-guaranteed invitations to Buycks for preseason camp, according to David Pick of Eurobasket.com (Twitter link), and he was close to signing with the Nuggets before they instead came to terms with Erick Green, as Pick tells Hoops Rumors. The Suns were also reportedly interested in him.
The Relativity Sports client drew offers from multiple teams overseas, but Valencia bid highest among those clubs, Pick reports (All Twitter links). It’s likely he’s receiving guaranteed salary to play in Spain, which would explain why he’s passing up a shot at continuing his NBA career. Toronto waived him this past weekend rather than guarantee his NBA minimum salary for the coming season.
Buycks saw action in just 14 games this past season, his first official NBA experience. He averaged 3.1 points and 0.7 assists in 10.4 minutes per contest for Toronto.
Chris Paul Mulling Boycott If Sterling Stays
Chris Paul called the notion of Donald Sterling staying on as owner “unacceptable” and told Jeff Goodman of ESPN.com that he would seriously consider sitting out the 2014/15 season if Sterling remained at the head of the Clippers franchise.
“That’s something me and [coach Doc Rivers] are both talking about,” said Paul on Thursday, in reference to a potential boycott. “Something has to happen, and something needs to happen soon — sooner rather than later.”
News broke Tuesday that Rivers indicated to interim CEO Dick Parsons that he’d potentially relinquish his role as coach and president of basketball operations if Sterling wasn’t ousted from his the front office. Now, Paul is publicly echoing Rivers’ thoughts and also suggested that a group of other players from the team are on the same wavelength as well.
“We’re all going to talk about it,” Paul explained to Goodman. “We’re all definitely going to talk about it. Doc, [Blake Griffin], [DeAndre Jordan]. It’s unacceptable.“
Closing arguments for the Sterling trial are set for Monday, at which point the judge will determine whether or not Shelly Sterling’s sale of the team without her husband’s consent was within the realm of legality. Should Donald Sterling keep his position as owner, and if Rivers, Paul, and company follow through on their threat to boycott, it would be an unprecedented move by the group that throws the state of the Clippers’ 2014/15 season seriously into question.
And-Ones: Love, Harris, Marble, Monroe
The market for Kevin Love is likely less active than reports have been indicating, observes Sam Amico of Fox Sports Ohio, who suggests that Flip Saunders probably isn’t deciding between a multitude of remarkable offers, but is instead patiently waiting, hoping for an exciting proposal to come in soon. Here’s tonight’s look around the NBA..
- One league source told Amico that the flux of rumors based around a potential Love/Wiggins swap is “textbook Flip,” implying that Saunders is leaking information that he thinks could benefit the Wolves’ return on a Love deal. Amico wouldn’t confirm or deny the source’s speculation, however.
- Joe Harris‘ deal with the Cavs and Devyn Marble‘s with the Magic are structured almost exactly the same way, reveals Mark Deeks of ShamSports (on Twitter). Each rookie will make $884,879 in the first season, $845,059 in the following campaign, and $980,431 during the third and final year of the deal. However, unlike Harris’ agreement, Marble’s contract becomes non-guaranteed past the first season, according to Deeks.
- Lang Greene of Basketball Insiders looks at the options on the table for restricted free agent Greg Monroe. Greene thinks that like all of the game’s best big men, Monroe will get a hefty pay day eventually; it’s just a question of when it’ll be. Should Monroe decide to sign his qualifying offer this summer, he’ll be forfeiting potential earnings for the upcoming season but opening up the door to become an unrestricted free agent next offseason.
Contract Details: Nelson, Tucker, Roberts
Wednesday was the last day that teams with outstanding qualifying offers out to restricted free agents could unilaterally withdraw them. Clubs can still withdraw qualifying offers, but doing so would require the player’s consent, and it would require the team to renounce any form of Bird rights on the player. No team withdrew a qualifying offer before the deadline, though that’s not entirely surprising, since there are only five unsigned restricted free agents left. We ran down the latest news on each of them earlier this week, and not much has changed since then.
As we wait for the last of the restricted free agents to make their decisions on where to sign, let’s have a look at the latest contract details that have leaked out from around the NBA..
- As expected, Jameer Nelson is slated to make $2,732,000 for the Mavs next season, tweets Marc Stein of ESPN.com. Nelson’s deal features a $2,854,940 player option for the 2015/16 campaign, adds Stein.
- The three-year contract P.J. Tucker signed with the Suns will pay him $5.7MM in 2014/15, passes along Eric Pincus of the Los Angeles Times, who goes on to reveal that the deal is worth $5.5MM and $5.3MM during the following two seasons, with only $1.5MM guaranteed in year three (Twitter link).
- Brian Roberts‘ two-year, $5.6MM contract with the Hornets will be fully guaranteed without any player or team option, reports Pincus (via Twitter).
- James Ennis signed a three-year deal with the Heat that’s mostly non-guaranteed, save for a $200K partial guarantee for this season, according to Mark Deeks of Sham Sports. The first year will become fully guaranteed if he sticks through opening night.
- The Knicks gave Cole Aldrich one year at the minimum salary when they signed him earlier this month, Deeks reveals.
- Grant Jerrett‘s contract with the Thunder runs four years at the minimum salary, with full guarantees on the first two seasons and no guarantees for the last two, Deeks notes.
Chuck Myron contributed to this post.
Pacific Notes: Lin, Kings, Sterlings
The Lakers have finally acquired Jeremy Lin after two failed attempts to land the point guard in recent years, writes Dave McMenamin of ESPNLosAngeles.com. At the veteran’s introductory press conference, Los Angeles GM Mitch Kupchak told reporters including McMenamin, “The first thing I said to [Lin] when he sat down was, ‘You know, three times is a charm.'” Here’s more from the Pacific Division:
- Quincy Acy‘s contract was set to become fully guaranteed tomorrow, but the Kings have been granted an extension to make their decision on the small forward’s fate until August 15, reports Jason Jones of The Sacramento Bee (on Twitter). The deadline extension, presumably granted by Acy and his management, will give Sacramento more time to explore their options to keep the 23-year-old while avoiding the luxury tax.
- A Sacramento judge is set to make a final ruling against a citizen-led attempt to block construction of the new Kings arena, reports Dale Kasler and Ryan Lillis of The Sacramento Bee. The judge issued a temporary rejection of the lawsuit today, which is the last remaining legal barrier to the arena, which was initially approved in May.
- Donald Sterling attorney Max Blecher accused commissioner Adam Silver of having given Shelly Sterling the idea that she should take full control of the family trust to facilitate the sale of the Clippers, as Ramona Shelburne of ESPNLosAngeles.com details.
Chuck Myron contributed to this post.
Eastern Rumors: Harrington, Wiggins, Love
The Wizards would like to have Al Harrington back, and the matter of whether he plays for the team next year is essentially up to him, according to J. Michael of CSNWashington.com. The 34-year-old has decided to play in the NBA next season after contemplating retirement. More from the Eastern Conference:
- Andrew Wiggins‘ name has come up in trade talks with the Wolves, but the Cavs haven’t offered him as part of any proposal for a Kevin Love trade, tweets Sam Amico of FOX Sports Ohio. That nuanced accounting of the discussions might illuminate some of the conflicting reports about Cleveland’s true willingness to part with the No. 1 pick.
- Terry Pluto of The Plain Dealer thinks the Cavs shouldn’t trade for Love unless they receive full assurance that he will commit for at least two years to the team, considering how difficult it would be to transition from a young, sub-.500 club to a championship contender in just one season. Love is reportedly agreeable to remaining with Cleveland alongside LeBron James, but hasn’t indicated a willingness to opt in for next season’s player option in order to delay his free agency for another year.
- The Celtics haven’t completely given up hope of landing Love, but they’re prepared to move on, a source tells A. Sherrod Blakely of CSNNE.com. That’s why Boston is among the teams trying to function as the third team in a swap that sends Love elsewhere.
Chuck Myron contributed to this post.