Kings Plan To Submit Claim For Omri Casspi
The Kings plan on making a waiver claim on Omri Casspi, whom the Pelicans released today, reports Marc Stein of ESPN.com (Twitter link). Casspi would go to the team with the worst record from last season if multiple teams submit claims, so the Bucks, Sixers, Magic, Celtics, Jazz and Lakers could all prevent him from ending up in Sacramento. Casspi’s contract is for only the minimum salary, so teams could use the minimum-salary exception to accommodate their claims.
Casspi has expressed interest in a return to Sacramento, where he spent his first two, and most productive two, years of his NBA career. Stein reported that the Pelicans were likely to waive the 26-year-old even before the trade that brought him from Houston became official, and agent Dan Fegan had already begun reaching out to other teams, as Casspi told Ailene Voisin of The Sacramento Bee.
Any team that claims Casspi would have until the end of August 5th to turn around and waive him again before his non-guaranteed salary became fully guaranteed. It’s unlikely any team would make such a move, but the option of doing so would nonetheless provide a degree of flexibility. That might be enough to persuade another team to submit a claim and keep him from Sacramento.
Pelicans Waive Omri Casspi
4:32pm: The team has officially announced the move on its website.
4:16pm: The Pelicans have waived Omri Casspi, reports Marc Stein of ESPN.com (Twitter link), a move that Stein reported the team was likely to make in the wake of its three-way trade to acquire him from the Rockets. The team has yet to make an official announcement.
Casspi’s minimum salary was to have become fully guaranteed if the Pelicans hadn’t waived him by the end of the day on August 5th. However, that guarantee date will still apply if a team claims him off waivers. It seems he’d be a decent candidate for a waiver claim, since he was a part of Houston’s rotation this past season and would come cheaply. The 26-year-old averaged 6.9 points in 18.1 minutes with 34.7% three-point shooting for the Rockets, reversing a steady decline in production that had taken place since his rookie year.
Casspi told Ailene Voisin of The Sacramento Bee that agent Dan Fegan has spoken with several teams about a deal should he hit free agency, as we noted earlier. The Kings are among those clubs, Casspi said, expressing a desire to return to Sacramento, where he played his first two seasons in the league.
Rockets To Sign Clint Capela
JULY 23RD: Capela has signed his contract, a source tells Marc J. Spears of Yahoo! Sports (Twitter link). Houston will have to receive the signed contract before it becomes official.
JULY 14TH: The Rockets have been working with No. 25 pick Clint Capela to secure his buyout from Chalon-Sur-Saone of France and a FIBA letter of clearance, and they intend to sign him to a rookie scale contract this summer, reports Jonathan Feigen of the Houston Chronicle. The outcome is the result that Capela’s camp had been pushing for after the Rockets apparently asked him to remain overseas for next season. Feigen’s piece doesn’t refer to the request, which Chris Haynes of CSNNW.com had reported over the weekend, but he does cast the Rockets as having been ambivalent about the notion of Capela playing for the team this season. Now, it appears the team and Capela are in lockstep toward a contract.
“We are planning out roster for next season. We expect him to be a part of it,” Rockets executive vice president of basketball operations Gersson Rosas said. “We’re in the process of working toward that.”
Capela is likely to receive a salary worth more than $1.189MM for next season, as our table of salaries for 2014 first-rounders shows. The Rockets had been attempting to preserve cap flexibility as they chased LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony and Chris Bosh, and Houston shopped the pick before the draft. There was also reportedly interest from other teams in trading for Capela’s rights once the Rockets made the selection, but Houston never showed mutual interest in such a swap. Now that the team’s marquee free agent targets are headed elsewhere and Chandler Parsons is off to Dallas, there’s room for Capela, a raw talent who averaged 9.8 points and 6.9 rebounds in 21.4 minutes per game for his French team this past season.
Thunder, Huestis Cut D-League Deal Before Draft
The Thunder and representatives for Josh Huestis made an arrangement prior to the draft in which Huestis agreed to sign with Oklahoma City’s D-League affiliate for this season in exchange for the Thunder taking him 29th overall, agent Mitchell Butler tells Grantland’s Zach Lowe (Twitter link). Darnell Mayberry of The Oklahoman originally reported this weekend that Huestis was likely to sign with the Thunder’s D-League team.
Huestis was projected as a second-round pick at best, coming in 44th in Jonathan Givony’s DraftExpress rankings, and Chad Ford of ESPN.com had him as only the 90th best draft prospect. Butler told Lowe that he wasn’t sure that his client would be drafted at all and saw the deal with Oklahoma City as the best way to make sure that a team would pick him (Twitter link). Huestis didn’t want to play for a European team and was on board with the D-League idea, Butler added, noting that Huestis wouldn’t have gone for the plan if any other NBA team had asked him to do so, with the exception of the Spurs (Twitter link). Butler also contends that the arrangement doesn’t violate the NBA’s rules against discussing potential compensation with a prospect prior to the draft, as Lowe also tweets.
The small forward from Stanford is in line for a fraction of the more than $1.1MM that he would have received this season if he were signing an NBA rookie scale contract for the standard 120% of the rookie scale amount, as our table of likely first-round salaries shows. D-League salaries top out around $25K. It’s not clear whether the Thunder have promised to sign Huestis next summer as part of the deal or if it’ll be up to him to prove his worth in the D-League this year. Huestis expressed confidence in his abilities when he spoke with Zach Links of Hoops Rumors prior to the draft.
The Thunder also moved to cut costs last year with their first-round pick, doling out only 80% of the scale amount to 2013 26th overall pick Andre Roberson. A change in D-League rules for this year allows NBA draft picks to sign directly with the affiliate of the team that holds their NBA rights, helping pave the way for Oklahoma City’s Huestis plan. The Thunder had to work trades last year to acquire the first pick in the 2013 D-League draft to grab the D-League rights to No. 40 overall pick Grant Jerrett, moves they won’t have to undertake this time around.
Knicks Waive Shannon Brown
The Knicks have waived Shannon Brown, the team announced (via Twitter). His non-guaranteed contract for the minimum salary was to have become fully guaranteed if the Knicks hadn’t waived him by the end of August 1st.
The move is somewhat surprising, given Brown’s ties to Knicks team president Phil Jackson, who was Brown’s coach when they were together with the Lakers. New York gave Brown his deal this past March soon after hiring Jackson, though Brown initially joined the club on a pair of 10-day contracts that predated Jackson’s arrival.
Brown, 28, averaged just 2.1 points and 7.8 minutes per game in 19 appearances for the Knicks this year, having seen only slightly more playing time in a 10-game stint with the Spurs earlier in the season. He had a much larger role the previous two seasons with the Suns, including a career-high 11.0 points per game in 2011/12, but Phoenix sent him to Washington in the Marcin Gortat trade, and the Wizards promptly waived him to get down to 15 players before opening night. The eight-year veteran spent the first three months of the season without an NBA deal.
Wolves Re-Sign Robbie Hummel
WEDNESDAY, 3:23pm: The deal is official, the team announced.
MONDAY, 8:28pm: Robbie Hummel has re-signed with the Wolves, according to his reps at Priority Sports (on Twitter). It’s a fully-guaranteed one-year, $900K pact, according to Darren Wolfson of 1500 ESPN (on Twitter).
The Wolves declined to extend Hummel a qualifying offer of $1.016MM at the end of June, but less than a month later they’ve agreed to a deal that pays just ~$100K less. Last season, the 25-year-old averaged 3.4 PPG and 2.5 RPG in 12.4 minutes per contest across 53 games (five starts).
The swingman was taken with the No. 58 pick in the 2012 draft, signed with a Spanish team later that summer, and circled back to the T’Wolves prior to the 2013/14 season.
Cavs, Andrew Wiggins Near Deal
WEDNESDAY, 2:59pm: The Cavs expect that they’ll receive a signed contract from Wiggins on Thursday, tweets Jason Lloyd of the Akron Beacon Journal.
SUNDAY, 6:25pm: The Cavs are planning to sign No. 1 overall pick Andrew Wiggins to a contract in the coming week, a source close to the process tells Brian Windhorst of ESPN.com. Wiggins, of course, has been linked to the Kevin Love talks, but the hold up in the deal reportedly wasn’t related to those discussions.
The Cavs, sources say, are merely exploring options for using their estimated $1.4MM in remaining cap space before signing Wiggins to a contract that will pay him in the neighborhood of $5.5MM as a rookie. The Cavs and Timberwolves have been discussing a Love trade since the return of LeBron James, with sources saying that Minnesota is insistent on getting Wiggins back in any deal that sends Love to Cleveland. Once Wiggins signs, though, league rules stipulate that the Cavs must wait 30 days before trading him.
One option under consideration for the Cavs, sources say, is using their leftover salary-cap space to create long-term contracts for recent second-round picks Joe Harris and Dwight Powell. Signing Wiggins first would preclude such moves.
Once the Cavs exhaust their cap space and sign Wiggins, they are expected to officially sign free agent Mike Miller to a two-year, $5.6MM deal. The Cavs also remain interested in free agent Ray Allen, but they’ll only be able to offer him a $1.4MM veteran’s minimum contract.
Mavs, Jameer Nelson Nearing Agreement
2:56pm: Nelson’s camp is fielding calls from other teams as they look to intervene before he commits to the Mavs, reports Shams Charania of RealGM (Twitter link). The Bulls had been pursuing him before they came to terms with other point guards, Charania adds.
WEDNESDAY, 1:41pm: The Mavs are “on track” to strike a deal with Nelson for the room exception when he meets the team Thursday, barring an unforeseen snag, Stein reports (Twitter links).
TUESDAY, 8:36pm: Free agent point guard Jameer Nelson is scheduled for a face-to-face visit with the Mavericks on Thursday, sources tell ESPN’s Marc Stein, who adds that Dallas is still equipped with its $2.732MM room exception and hopes to ultimately complete a deal with the former All-Star. On the topic of their search for one more veteran point guard this summer, Stein also reminds that the Mavs met with Mo Williams at some point this month (All Twitter links).
As we recently passed along, Williams hasn’t been the team’s top priority with their room exception, and Tim MacMahon of ESPNDallas.com even suggested that Nelson was possibly a higher target on their list. If the Mavs reach an agreement with Nelson, it would certainly factor into Williams’ interest in joining the team; the addition of Nelson to a current point guard rotation that includes Devin Harris, Raymond Felton, and Gal Mekel would create a logjam. Although Williams can productively contribute as an off-guard, it’s difficult to imagine him taking less money to join the Mavs when there are more lucrative offers reportedly on the table.
Nelson put up 12.1 PPG and 7.0 APG in 32.0 MPG over 68 games and 68 starts last season, although he didn’t shoot particularly well from the field overall (39.4%). Nonetheless, those numbers are mostly better than Harris’ (7.9/4.5/20.5/40/37.8) and Felton’s (9.7/5.6/31.0/65/39.5) last season. Nelson was also the superior three point shooter compared to the other two, hitting from deep on a 34.8% clip; Harris shot 30.7% while Felton connected on 31.8%.
Lakers Sign Ed Davis
JULY 23RD: The deal is official, the team announced on its website, as it introduced Davis to the media today.
“Ed is a versatile, young frontcourt player who, if he continues to work hard, will be a valuable contributor,” Lakers GM Mitch Kupchak said in the team’s statement. “We look forward to him furthering his development with the Lakers and are excited by what we think he can offer our team.”
JULY 16TH: The Lakers and Ed Davis have agreed on a two-year, $2MM deal, according to Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo! Sports. The second year of the contract will feature a player option, Wojnarowski adds (Twitter links).
Davis spent the 2013/14 campaign with the Grizzlies, where he averaged 15.2 minutes per contest over the course of 63 games. While his nightly marks of 5.7 PPG and 4.1 RPG don’t jump off the page as particularly noteworthy, Davis was quietly able to post a respectable 15.9 PER. The big man won’t necessarily fill the void created by Pau Gasol‘s departure to Chicago, but he could definitely prove to be a low-cost, efficient signing for the Lakers.
The official terms of the contract haven’t been released yet, but Davis’ salary for the upcoming season will likely be $981,084, the minimum a player of his experience can make. Otherwise, Los Angeles will need to dip into the room exception if they want to be able to ink the Landmark Sports client.
Davis’ signing will add even more youth to the Lakers’ power forward slot, which had already been set to feature promising rookie Julius Randle. Davis, who mostly played the four last season, will have a good chance to see some serious minutes on the floor for Los Angeles in 2014/15.
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