Zydrunas Ilgauskas Mulls Comeback With Cavs?
11:23am: Herb Rudoy, the agent for Ilgauskas, denies the rumor, telling Shams Charania of RealGM that his client is not considering a comeback (Twitter link).
9:13am: Zydrunas Ilgauskas is considering a comeback, according to Tony Rizzo of ESPN Cleveland, and Brian Windhorst of ESPN.com suggests that the Cavs would consider signing the 39-year-old at midseason. Rizzo and Windhorst made their comments Monday on Rizzo’s “The Really Big Show” on ESPN Cleveland radio (audio link; move forward to the 0:48 mark).
Rizzo hears that Ilgauskas is contemplating a return as soon as training camp, but Windhorst doesn’t think the 15-year veteran plans on coming back until after the season has begun. The defensive shortcomings that stemmed from his lack of mobility in 2010/11, his final season in the NBA, would be difficult to overcome, though he’s otherwise fit enough to play in the NBA, Windhorst suggests.
In any case, the Cavs are likely to consider an array of veterans, including free agents who didn’t sign this past summer, those bought out during the season, and players who retired, like Ilgauskas, during the season, according to Windhorst. There’s a decent chance that Ray Allen, a Cavs target for much of the summer, will be among them, Windhorst says, pointing to the possibility that Allen envisions sitting out the start of the season and signing later.
It’s likely that the 15th player the Cavs carry at the beginning of the season will be on a non-guaranteed contract “or at least be very movable,” Windhorst says, adding that there’s a distinct possibility that the Cavs will maintain flexibility with another roster spot, too. Cleveland has 10 deals known to be fully guaranteed, and presumably Shawn Marion and second-round pick Dwight Powell will have fully guaranteed salaries, too. One of their partially guaranteed contracts belongs to Anderson Varejao, but Erik Murphy, Alex Kirk, John Lucas III, Malcolm Thomas are the players seemingly in contention for the final two places on the regular season roster.
Ilgauskas spent his final season with the Heat, but he otherwise spent his entire playing career with Cleveland. He rejoined the organization after he retired, when former GM Chris Grant hired him as a special assistant within the front office. Ilgauskas was a teammate of LeBron James for eight seasons, the longest anyone ever played with the four-time MVP.
Windhorst’s Latest: Love, Mozgov, Thompson
The Cavs were only willing to give up two of three assets they relinquished in the Kevin Love trade until owner Dan Gilbert met with Love earlier this summer in Las Vegas, as Brian Windhorst of ESPN said in his appearance Monday with Tom Rizzo on ESPN Cleveland radio (audio link). Cleveland switched gears after that meeting and decided to give up its entire package of Andrew Wiggins, Anthony Bennett and the 2015 first-round pick it had previously acquired from Miami, as Windhorst details. The ESPN scribe speculates that Gilbert probably emerged from having spoken with Love more confident that the superstar power forward would remain in Cleveland long-term, which led him to up the Cavs’ offer. Windhorst had plenty more to say on Rizzo’s “The Really Big Show,” and we already touched on the Zydrunas Ilgauskas news earlier today. We’ll share the rest of the highlights here:
- Cleveland’s acquisition of John Lucas III, Erik Murphy and Malcolm Thomas in last month’s trade with the Jazz was made with Timofey Mozgov in mind, according to Windhorst, who says the Cavs continue to try to pry the center from the Nuggets. The Cavs envisioned flipping some combination of those three for Mozgov, as Windhorst indicates. Still, the Nuggets are reluctant to give him up, Windhorst adds, even though the Cavs offered a first-round pick as part of a deal for him, as Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo! Sports reported a few weeks ago.
- The Cavs tried to acquire Alexey Shved in the Love trade, in part because of his connection to coach David Blatt from their time together on the Russian national team, Windhorst says. Shved went to the Sixers instead.
- Windhorst asserts that the Cavs will sign Tristan Thompson to a rookie scale extension, suggesting that it would make the power forward a trade asset. An extension would complicate any trade involving Thompson because of the Poison Pill Provision, however.
Edy Tavares To Play In Spain
AUGUST 26TH: Tavares will indeed remain with Gran Canaria of Spain, Vivlamore confirms after the No. 43 pick from this year’s draft spoke at a press conference he held today with his Spanish team.
JULY 28TH: It’s “very likely” that Hawks second-round draftee Edy Tavares, also known as Walter Tavares, will continue to play overseas next season, reports Chris Vivlamore of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It appears as though he’ll remain with Spain’s Gran Canaria, the club with which he spent 2013/14.
Atlanta drafted the 7’3″ center 43rd overall last month, and he spent time with the Hawks during summer league, averaging 6.3 points, 4.3 rebounds and 1.3 blocks in 16.8 minutes per game across six appearances. The 22-year-old expressed an openness to the idea of remaining overseas, where he would stand to see more playing time than he would with the Hawks this season, as he told Vivlamore earlier this month.
The Cape Verde native nonetheless started just 17 of 35 games for his Spanish club this past season, notching 6.4 PPG, 7.0 RPG and 1.6 BPG in 21.5 MPG. Tavares remains raw, having only played the game for four years, as Vivlamore notes.
And-Ones: Barea, Bledsoe, Bonner, Beasley
The Cavs are probably better off for having lost LeBron James in 2010 than they would be if he had never gone to Miami since it gave them the chance to accumulate assets through rebuilding, SB Nation’s Tom Ziller argues. That helps explain why the Sixers, one of the other teams in the Kevin Love deal, are so aggressively stripping their roster, Ziller suggests. Still, Cleveland was remarkably lucky in the lottery, nabbing three No. 1 overall picks in four years, so it’s tough to say that another team can easily mimic the path of the Cavs. Here’s more from around the league:
- The only players on the Wolves who are off-limits for a trade are the ones who just came aboard in the Love deal, as Jerry Zgoda of the Star Tribune writes within a chat with readers. J.J. Barea remains on the block after the Wolves failed to convince the Sixers to take him on in the Love trade, Zgoda also writes.
- The Wolves like Eric Bledsoe quite a bit, but it’s tough to see a scenario in which they’d sign-and-trade for the Suns restricted free agent, tweets Darren Wolfson of 1500 ESPN Twin Cities. Phoenix reportedly made a last-ditch effort at a Bledsoe-for-Love swap, but Minnesota rejected that idea.
- Backcourt mate Goran Dragic is hopeful that Bledsoe will be back with the Suns next season, as he tells Erildas Budraitis of RealGM.
- Matt Bonner says there were several teams that inquired about him during his free agency this summer, but he let all of them know that he was waiting to see about a deal with the Spurs first, as he tells Dan McCarney of the San Antonio Express-News. Bonner re-signed with the Spurs last month to a one-year deal for the minimum.
- The Heat let Michael Beasley know they wouldn’t rule out re-signing him, but that’s standard practice for the team, which hasn’t made any offer to the forward, according to Barry Jackson of the Miami Herald. The Heat isn’t high on bringing him back for several reasons, Jackson hears.
Western Notes: Bennett, Jazz, Bost, Kobe
No one is ever going to mistake the Twin Cities for Los Angeles or Miami, but Wolves executive/coach Flip Saunders believes geography is overrated when it comes to attracting free agents, as Michael Rand of the Star Tribune notes.
“Our NBA has become, instead of destination city, it’s become destination players,” Saunders said. “Around our league it seems players gravitate toward other players to play with. We feel with some of the players that we have that we’re going to have the ability to get players to gravitate towards our organization because of that.”
It remains to be seen whether Andrew Wiggins and fellow No. 1 overall pick Anthony Bennett will develop into the sorts of players that others will want to team with, but whether one or both of them does could tell the tale of the Kevin Love trade for the Wolves, Rand argues. There’s more on the Wolves amid the latest from the Western Conference:
- Minnesota’s 2015/16 team option on Bennett’s contract is a “lock” to be exercised, as Darren Wolfson of 1500 ESPN Twin Cities writes (Twitter links), though the Wolves have yet to make their final decision, one that’s due at the end of October.
- Jazz GM Dennis Lindsey says he plans to keep one or two roster spots open for competition among the players the team invites to camp, as Aaron Falk of The Salt Lake Tribune observes. That suggests the team won’t add to its total of 13 players on fully guaranteed deals and is a positive development for Dee Bost, Jack Cooley and Kevin Murphy, the trio of players with whom the team has pacts that aren’t fully guaranteed. Still, a source tells Falk that Bost, who reportedly has a partial guarantee of $65K, still faces long odds to stick with the team.
- The Lakers aren’t about to trade franchise icon Kobe Bryant, but even if they wanted to, one NBA GM tells Chris Ballard of SI.com that they’d meet a dead end, deeming Bryant’s trade value as “zero,” based on his bloated two-year, $48.5MM extension.
Extension Candidate: Jimmy Butler
The Bulls scored a major coup when they drafted Jimmy Butler 30th overall in 2011. A team that compiled the best record in the league in the previous season, as the Bulls did, isn’t supposed to be able to find a starting-caliber player in the draft. That’s exactly what Chicago has, and then some, in Butler, who became a full-time starter just last season but had already established himself as a future building block the year before, when he started 20 regular season games and all 12 playoff games for an ailing Luol Deng. Now the task for GM Gar Forman and his staff is to keep that building block in place and ensure the embodiment of that draft-night success from three years ago doesn’t turn into either an overpaid burden for Chicago or, perhaps even worse, a former Bull.
A report from last autumn indicated that the Bulls were higher on retaining Butler for the long term than they were on Deng, and that was born out when the team traded Deng to the Cavs at midseason. Chicago isn’t alone in its affection for the 24-year-old Butler, as there was reportedly wide belief that the Wolves would ask for Butler as part of Kevin Love trade talks with the Bulls. Love appears safely on his way to the Cavs, but there’s little doubt that other teams would relish the chance to snatch Butler away.
Butler endured a tough shooting season on a Bulls team that struggled mightily to score once Derrick Rose went down with yet another injury. The subtraction of Deng didn’t help matters, either, allowing perimeter defenses to focus more keenly on stopping Butler, Chicago’s remaining wing threat. Butler’s three-point shooting percentage dropped from 38.1% in 2012/13 to 28.3% last year, even as he nearly tripled his number of attempted treys per contest. His shooting percentage from the floor as a whole dropped from 46.7% to 39.7%, reflective of his greater focus on three-pointers.
The Bulls asked Butler to do much more this past season than he’d ever done in the league, and his efficiency dropped as a result, with his PER sinking from 15.2 in his second season to 13.5 in year three. Still, it would have been difficult for just about any player to have been effective offensively on last year’s Bulls, one of just four teams in the league to score fewer than a point per possession in 2013/14, according to NBA.com. Butler isn’t capable of single-handedly carrying a scoring attack, at least not yet, but he’s defined himself as a key part of one of the most well-coordinated defenses in league history. The Bulls gave up 1.5 points fewer points per 100 possessions when Butler played, as NBA.com shows, and while Butler alone didn’t influence that statistic, Chicago has been at least slightly better defensively when he’s played in each of his three seasons with the club.
The Bulls were also more effective defensively with Taj Gibson on the floor in each of his first three seasons in the league, which was no doubt on the minds of Forman and company when they reached a deal with Gibson on a four-year, $33MM rookie scale extension two years ago. It stands as an example of the team’s willingness to lock up a player who’s a mainstay but not quite a star, a description that also fits Butler, but there are differences between the two cases. Gibson came off the bench at a position that the highly paid Carlos Boozer occupied, while Butler is a starter on the wing, where the Bulls are thin. Butler is also a more integral part of Chicago’s offense than Gibson had been when he signed his extension. Those factors combined with rising salary cap projections for years to come make it unlikely that Butler will settle for salaries anywhere in the neighborhood of what Gibson is making.
It appears as though Chicago would like to keep Butler around, as I surmised last month when I predicted that the Bulls and the Happy Walters client would come to terms on a four-year, $42MM extension. That’s $9MM more than Gibson saw, but there’d still be a decent chance that it would end up a relative bargain for the Bulls, particularly if the deal is backloaded. Chicago already has about $58.6MM in commitments for 2015/16 and $43.8MM for 2015/16, so creating enough wiggle room as possible beneath the tax threshold will be important as the team attempts to contend in the next few years.
There’s a case to be made that the Bulls should hold off on an extension to see whether Butler’s offensive efficiency improves with Rose back in the lineup. Butler and Rose have only shared the floor for 273 total minutes over their careers, so surely Chicago is curious to see how they mesh in more significant time together. That question mark shouldn’t dissuade the Bulls from committing to a reasonable extension this offseason, lest Butler’s negotiating power increase commensurate with his continually expanding role on the team. Restricted free agency proved more kind this year to Gordon Hayward and Chandler Parsons, a pair of wing players on the market’s second tier, than it has for point guard Eric Bledsoe and big man Greg Monroe, seemingly more attractive options. That would bode well for Butler, even though there are few certainties in restricted free agency, as this summer’s surprises have shown.
It’s quite a risk in today’s NBA for a team to commit an average of more than $10MM a year to a swingman who’s just a 30.9% three-point shooter, but for the Bulls, it appears worth it to do so with Butler. Chicago’s primary focus is on defense, anyway, where Butler has proven valuable, and Gibson’s blossoming offensive game is evidence that coach Tom Thibodeau and his staff are adept at continually developing players well into their careers. Butler needs to improve for the Bulls to have reaped a bargain with such an investment, but there’s plenty of evidence to suggest he’ll do just that.
Pacers To Work Out C.J. Fair
Undrafted combo forward C.J. Fair will audition with the Pacers next month, his father tells Mike Waters of The Post-Standard. The Mavs and other NBA teams have invited the former Syracuse standout to camp, but he’s held out for guaranteed money, as Waters reported earlier.
Fair entered draft night as the 54th best draft prospect in Chad Ford’s ESPN.com ratings, while Jonathan Givony of DraftExpress had him down at No. 75. He averaged 4.0 points and 2.6 rebounds in 13.4 minutes per game for the Mavs’ summer league team but put up more impressive numbers in college, where he averaged 16.5 PPG and 6.4 RPG in 37.8 MPG. The 6’8″ Fair shot an eye-popping 46.9% from behind the arc on 1.6 such attempts per game as a junior, but he suffered a severe regression this season, nailing just 27.6% of his 2.6 three-point attempts per contest. Waters reported last month that Fair received an offer worth $200K from a European team, but the 22-year-old turned it down and changed agents, hiring Joel Bell.
Indiana has 13 guaranteed deals, plus two partially guaranteed pacts with Luis Scola and Shayne Whittington and a non-guaranteed arrangement with Adonis Thomas. That would give Fair plenty of competition were he to join the team for training camp, but it nonetheless appears as though he’d have at least an outside chance of making the opening-night roster.
Joel Przybilla Retires
Center Joel Przybilla has retired, reports Charley Walters of the St. Paul Pioneer Press (Twitter link). The veteran of 13 NBA seasons last played in the NBA with the Bucks in 2012/13, and he didn’t wind up with an NBA deal last season in spite of his optimism in the spring of 2013 that he would find one.
The 7’1″ Przybilla started most of his nearly 600 NBA games, though he never averaged more than 6.4 points per contest. He was instead well-regarded for his work on the boards, having led the league during the 2008/09 season in total rebound percentage, a measure of the percentage of rebounds a player grabbed while on the floor, according to Basketball-Reference. He was also a rim-protecting presence, as he averaged 1.4 blocks in just 19.8 minutes per contest over the course of his career.
Przybilla was a 1998 McDonald’s All-American who attended the University of Minnesota before the Rockets picked him ninth overall in the 2000 draft. Houston promptly traded his rights to the Bucks, the team that will go down as the one with which he both made his debut and played his final game. He also appeared with the Hawks, Blazers and Bobcats. The BDA Sports Management client walks away from the game having earned more than $44.7MM in the NBA, as his Basketball-Reference page shows.
Latest On Rajon Rondo
Now that the Wolves have officially traded Kevin Love, Rajon Rondo seemingly looms as the next most likely superstar trade candidate. Still, the Celtics aren’t anxious to deal the point guard in part because they’re eager to see how he plays at the beginning of this season, when he’ll be more than a year and a half removed from tearing his right ACL, writes Gary Washburn of the Boston Globe. Rondo can become a free agent next summer.
The 28-year-old Rondo, like most star veterans in their primes, is unlikely to sign an extension, as Washburn notes, adding that Rondo would be especially reluctant to do so with the Kings. Sacramento was reportedly one of the teams most active in pursuing him at the deadline this past season and the Kings had talks with the Pistons earlier this summer about acquiring Josh Smith, a close friend of Rondo’s. Still, it’s unclear if the point guard would be more inclined to consider a long-term future with the Kings were they to trade for his former Oak Hill Academy teammate.
The Celtics hold Eric Bledsoe in high regard, Washburn also writes, speculating that Bledsoe might end up as Rondo’s replacement in Boston. Bledsoe’s camp and the Suns, who employ former Celtics executive Ryan McDonough as GM, appear to have stalemated in talks about a new deal, and Phoenix has begun to examine sign-and-trade possibilities involving the restricted free agent. Bledsoe has the chance to hit unrestricted free agency next summer, but only if he takes take the unusual step of signing his qualifying offer, worth about $3.7MM, for this season.
Celtics president of basketball operations Danny Ainge has time and again batted down persistent Rondo trade rumors that date back to shortly after the Celtics traded Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett to begin a rebuilding project. Three GMs told Steve Bulpett of the Boston Herald earlier this summer that Rondo’s trade value wouldn’t be all that high, anyway, perhaps suggesting that other teams share Boston’s desire to gauge his health. Bulpett also heard from rival execs who had reservations about Rondo’s consistency and personality. In any case, Rondo’s scoring and assists per game were down last season in the 30 games he played after returning from injury, and his 40.3% shooting was the worst of his career.
Contract Details: Inglis, Heat, Jazz, Hamilton
The pace of signings is slow this time of year, but teams continue to add to their rosters. Eric Pincus reveals some previously unreported details about a handful of these signings within his latest updates to the salary pages at Basketball Insiders, so we’ll pass along the news here:
- The Bucks are giving 31st overall pick Damien Inglis guaranteed salaries of $820K this season and $855K for 2015/16, both amounts that are more than the minimum, as Pincus notes (Twitter link). It’s a three-year deal in all that features a non-guaranteed season at the minimum salary in the contract’s final year. Milwaukee used part of its cap space to accommodate the signing.
- Tyler Johnson‘s minimum salary with the Heat this season is guaranteed for $75K, while his minimum salary for next season is without a guarantee, according to Pincus. Reggie Williams is receiving a non-guaranteed minimum salary in his pact with the Heat this year, as Pincus also reveals.
- The Jazz gave Dee Bost a $65K guarantee this season, while the other two years of his three-year contract for the minimum salary are non-guaranteed, Pincus reports. Pincus also notes that the team gave Jack Cooley a three-year deal for the minimum, though it remains unclear whether any of Cooley’s pay is guaranteed. Utah used cap space rather than the minimum-salary exception on Bost and Cooley, since the minimum-salary exception only allows for two-year deals.
- The Raptors have the means to shell out more than the minimum salary, but they didn’t give Jordan Hamilton any more than that, as Pincus documents. Hamilton’s deal is reportedly partially guaranteed, but just how much he’s guaranteed remains unknown.
- Darius Morris is on a one-year deal with the Blazers, Pincus shows.