Southwest Notes: Barea, Simmons, Baynes
Wesley Matthews saw his four-year deal with the Mavericks spike from around $13MM a year to a max contract worth $16,407,500 this season and $70,060,025 total when DeAndre Jordan reneged on his deal to play for Dallas, and Matthews isn’t the only one to benefit financially from that flip-flop. The Mavs upped their deal with J.J. Barea from two years and roughly $5.7MM to four years and $16MM before the point guard officially re-signed today, reports Tim MacMahon of ESPNDallas.com (Twitter link). The move means the Mavs have less cap flexibility but get to keep their $2.814MM room exception, which initially seemed ticketed for Barea’s original deal. In any case, Barea is sticking around.
“They knew I wanted to be there for a long time,” Barea said to MacMahon (Twitter link). “They wanted me there for a long time, so we made it happen.”
Here’s more from around the Southwest Division:
- Guard Jonathon Simmons wows with his athleticism, but he hadn’t had as much as an invitation to an NBA training camp since going undrafted in 2012 until the Spurs agreed to sign him to a two-year contract with a fully guaranteed salary for this season, writes Jeff McDonald of the San Antonio Express-News. McDonald chronicles the unlikely ascension of the former Spurs D-Leaguer.
- The Spurs lost out on Aron Baynes, who signed a deal reportedly worth as much as $20MM over three years with Detroit, and Pistons coach/executive Stan Van Gundy cited Baynes’ free-throw percentage as one unconventional reason why the team was willing to pay him. Vince Ellis of the Detroit Free Press has the details. “Free-throw shooting, obviously, was a problem for us last year, next-to-last in the league, and Aron’s the best free throw-shooting big out there,” Van Gundy said. “Eighty-five percent at the line last year, that’s a huge thing for us in games, especially coming down the stretch. So that was also a big thing — maybe bigger for us than for other people with big guys.” Baynes actually hit 86.5% of his free throws last season, better than Van Gundy indicated, and he’s a career 84.7% shooter from the stripe.
- Russ Smith picked up a $150K partial guarantee on his salary this season with the Grizzlies when he remained on the roster through Wednesday, as the schedule of salary guarantee dates shows.
Mavs Re-Sign J.J. Barea
JULY 16TH, 10:05am: The deal is official, the team announced via press release.
JULY 6TH, 3:47pm: J.J. Barea will re-sign with the Mavericks, he tells Carlos Rosa Rosa of El Nuevo Dia (hat tip to Ken Berger of CBSSports.com). Rosa indicates that it’s a three-year pact with annual salaries of $2.8MM and a player option on year three, though a third year would require the team to use cap space instead of the $2.814MM room exception. Berger and TNT’s David Aldridge indicate that it’s just two years at $5.6MM total (Twitter link), which would fit within the exception, seemingly a necessity if the Mavs are to fit all of their agreements under the cap without pulling off salary-clearing maneuvers.
The Mavs and Barea had been nearing a deal since late last week, as Aldridge first reported, though it seemed just a couple of days prior that he was close to signing with the Heat. The Bulls and Lakers also reportedly had interest in the client of Dan Fegan, an agent with close ties to the Mavs.
Dallas has Non-Bird rights on Barea, but they only provide for 120% of the minimum, since he signed for the minimum with the Mavs after he cleared waivers from the Timberwolves at the beginning of the season. Thus, the Mavs appear to be turning to other means to keep the waterbug point guard in the fold.
Atlantic Notes: Pressey, Prokhorov, Williams
Phil Pressey, whom the Celtics waived today, is already drawing interest from other teams, according to agent Aaron Mintz, as Adam Himmelsbach of the Boston Globe reports, though he’d have to clear waivers before he could sign. In any case, Celtics president of basketball operations Danny Ainge had no shortage of praise for the point guard, as Himmelsbach relays.
“Phil may be my favorite player I’ve ever been around in the NBA, as a player, a coach or as an executive,” Ainge said. “It was a very difficult morning for me today. He’s a player I’d want on my team all the time. Unfortunately, we just have an abundance of small guards already. It’s unfortunate. He’s helped us a lot in the last two years, and he’s a classy and hardworking player.”
Here’s more from around the Atlantic Division:
- An announcement could come within the next two weeks that Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov has bought Bruce Ratner’s 20% stake in the Nets, a move that would give Prokhorov 100% of the team, Bleacher Report’s Ric Bucher says (video link). The possibility still exists that Prokhorov will move in the other direction and sell off his majority interest, but the indications are strong that he’ll indeed buy the remaining shares of the team, Bucher says. Such a deal would also see Prokhorov’s interest in the Barclays Center rise from 45% to 100%, according to Bucher. Still, the move may well have more to do with debt that Ratner’s company owes Prokhorov and his partners than Prokhorov’s desire to own all of the team and the arena, since according to NetsDaily, Ratner faces a deadline to resolve that debt.
- The precise amount of money the Nets will have on their cap each of the next five years as a result of the buyout and stretch of Deron Williams‘ contract is $5,474,787, reports Eric Pincus of Basketball Insiders (All Twitter links). That means he gave up exactly $16MM in the buyout. His new contract with the Mavericks is worth $5.4MM this year and $5.6MM next season, according to Pincus, so assuming he remains on that contract through the end of 2015/16, and assuming he and the Nets didn’t waive set off rights, Brooklyn’s obligation for 2015/16 will be further reduced to about $3.197MM.
- Shooting guard Daniel Hackett, who worked out for the Knicks, has a verbal agreement to sign with Olympiacos of Greece, sources tell Sportando Emiliano Carchia. New York was willing to sign Hackett for training camp, Carchia adds, but it looks like he’ll stay overseas.
- Fenerbahce Ulker said the contract that former Celtics forward Gigi Datome signed with them covered two years, but it includes a player option for a third, according to Mark Murphy of the Boston Herald.
Southwest Notes: Mavs, Williams, Calathes
Mavericks owner Mark Cuban spoke Tuesday with Clippers owner Steve Ballmer and “it started off more than a little frigid,” as Cuban recounted via Cyber Dust, his social media app, and as the Dallas Morning News relays. That’s not surprising, given the DeAndre Jordan saga, but Cuban said he and Ballmer cleared the air.
“I told him exactly what I told other owners, I didn’t have a problem with his hail Mary approach to keeping a player,” Cuban wrote. “I understood why they did it. And even how they did it. They got their player back. End of story.”
Cuban said he doesn’t have a problem with the July Moratorium, which seemingly helped facilitate Jordan’s reversal, but even if he did, the moratorium doesn’t look like it’s going away anytime soon. Here’s more from around the Southwest:
- Deron Williams‘ two-year deal with the Mavs is worth $10MM and includes a player option, according to Marc Stein of ESPN.com (Twitter link).
- The clock appears to be ticking on an NBA future for Grizzlies restricted free agent Nick Calathes. The point guard denied to Ronald Tillery of The Commercial Appeal that he has signed with Panathinaikos of Greece, but he’ll commit to that team if he doesn’t find an NBA deal today, according to David Pick of Eurobasket.com (Twitter link). Calathes is drawing NBA interest, but he’s hesitant to continue as a backup, Pick hears. The Mavericks have reportedly contacted him, though that was two weeks ago. Memphis has the power to match all competing bids from NBA teams, but not from overseas clubs.
- Panathinaikos is close to a deal with center Nikola Milutinov, this year’s 26th overall pick, Sportando’s Enea Trapani writes. Regardless, Milutinov won’t soon be joining the Spurs, the team that drafted him, as San Antonio has informed the NBA that it won’t sign him or 2013 No. 28 pick Livio Jean-Charles during 2015/16, allowing San Antonio to remove their cap hits, notes Eric Pincus of Basketball Insiders (Twitter links).
- The Rockets reportedly had hopes of signing draft-and-stash prospect Marko Todorovic this summer, but that won’t be happening, as the big man has signed a three-year deal with Khimki Moscow, the Russian club announced (Twitter link; hat tip to Sportando’s Emiliano Carchia).
- Spurs GM R.C. Buford said he and the front office didn’t think that they would have been able to snag Ray McCallum if he’d have been a free agent on the open market, so they were pleased to pull off the trade with the Kings that brought him in, as Dan McCarney of the San Antonio Express-News chronicles. McCallum, who’s excited about the deal, earned a $200K partial guarantee on his salary when the Spurs didn’t waive him Sunday.
- A $390,089 sliver of Houston’s Jeremy Lin trade exception expired Monday, though it was essentially too small to use. The Rockets had already used the majority of the exception, once worth $8,374,646, to trade for Corey Brewer and Alexey Shved in December.
- Brewer’s new three-year deal with the Rockets is worth precisely $23,420,913, as Eric Pincus of Basketball Insiders shows.
Mavs Eye Tyrus Thomas
The Mavericks are among the parties who’ve observed workouts that former No. 4 overall pick Tyrus Thomas is staging in Las Vegas, as David Pick of Eurobasket.com hears (Twitter link). Thomas has looked strong, Pick notes, passing along that Turkish powerhouse Fenerbahce Ulker has been watching, too. It’s the latest development in the Mavs’ wide-ranging search for another big man to complement trade acquisition Zaza Pachulia in the wake of DeAndre Jordan‘s reversal of his decision to sign with the team.
Various reports from the past few days have indicated the Mavs are interested in Ryan Hollins, Tyler Hansbrough, Elton Brand, JaVale McGee, Samuel Dalembert and Kevin Seraphin. Some of them, Seraphin in particular, would probably command more than the minimum salary, but that doesn’t figure to be the case for Thomas, who has been out of the NBA since 2012/13, save for a 10-day contract with the Grizzlies this past season.
Thomas didn’t have much of a chance to play with Memphis, scoring four points in his seven total minutes of action across two games, and he didn’t light it up in more extensive time with the Grizzlies’ D-League affiliate, averaging 5.6 points and 4.1 rebounds in 18.7 minutes per game over 16 contests. He turns 29 in August, still young enough to sustain hope that he’ll tap into at least a measure of the potential that made him such a high draft pick coming out of LSU in 2006.
Mavs Sign Deron Williams
The Mavericks have signed unrestricted free agent Deron Williams, the team announced in a press release. Williams became a free agent Monday when he cleared waivers from the Nets as part of a much-publicized buyout deal. Marc Stein of ESPN.com reported Friday that Williams, a Dallas-area native, was expected to sign a two-year contract worth about $10MM, though Stein later said the deal would be worth between $10MM and $12MM (Twitter link).
The deal with the Mavs will set off a portion of the money that Brooklyn still owes the Jeff Schwartz client. Set-off rights absolve Brooklyn from paying half the difference between what Williams will make each year with Dallas and the one-year veteran’s minimum salary each of those years. The terms of Williams’ buyout, in which he forfeited all but about $27.5MM of the nearly $43.374MM left on his contract, call for the Nets to pay him about $5.5MM a year for the next five seasons. The contract only covered this season and next, but Brooklyn used the stretch provision to spread out its remaining commitment to him.
Nets coach Lionel Hollins denies that Williams’ failure to see eye-to-eye with him, which reportedly led to an altercation in which the point guard had to be restrained from going after his coach, was the reason Brooklyn saw fit to move on. Williams doesn’t figure to find a more sympathetic coach in Dallas, where Rick Carlisle clashed with Rajon Rondo this past season. The deal with Williams helps offset the void at point guard that Rondo left when he and the team essentially parted ways during the playoffs during the playoffs, and it also helps salve some of the wounds from DeAndre Jordan‘s reversal of his decision to sign with the Mavs.
Yet Williams is no longer the top-flight point guard he was when the Mavs courted him in free agency during the summer of 2012, when he spurned Dallas to instead re-sign with the Nets. The now 31-year-old Williams scored fewer points per game and saw fewer minutes per game this past season than any year since he was a rookie. Still, he was more efficient in his time on the floor than fellow former Nets All-Star Devin Harris, who’d otherwise be in line for the starting job in Dallas, and Williams comes without the cost of assets that trading for Ty Lawson or Brandon Jennings probably would.
Mavs Express Interest In Ryan Hollins
The Mavericks continue to look for offseason solutions at center, and the team is now showing interest in unrestricted free agent Ryan Hollins, Marc J. Spears of Yahoo! Sports reports (Twitter link). Dallas was jilted by free agent DeAndre Jordan, who returned to the Clippers after having reached a verbal agreement with the Mavs, and is seeking to add depth at the position. The franchise recently acquired Zaza Pachulia from Milwaukee, who could end up starting for the team in 2015/16.
Hollins, 30, made 46 appearances for the Kings last season, averaging 3.0 points, 2.2 rebounds, and o.4 blocks in 9.6 minutes per contest. His career numbers through nine NBA campaigns are 3.7 PPG, 2.2 RPG, and 0.5 BPG, with a slash line of .581/.000/.651.
Dallas has also reportedly had interest in Carlos Boozer, Samuel Dalembert, JaVale McGee, Elton Brand, and Tyler Hansbrough, as well as Amar’e Stoudemire, prior to his signing with the Heat.
Pacers Ink Jordan Hill
1:25pm: It’s a one-year, $5MM deal, tweets Candace Buckner of the Indianapolis Star.
JULY 14TH, 1:06pm: The deal is official, the team announced.
“We’re happy to have Jordan as part of our team,” Pacers president of basketball operations Larry Bird said. “He brings size and energy to our front court and we look forward to see how he plays an up-tempo game. We know he can rebound and score points for us and we look forward to having him.”
JULY 9TH, 6:49pm: The Pacers and unrestricted free agent Jordan Hill have committed to signing a contract, Sean Deveney of The Sporting News reports (Twitter links). The length and amount of the deal is not yet known, as the details are still being worked out, Deveney adds.
This soon-to-be signing likely comes as a blow to the Mavericks, who were reportedly interested in Hill, as well as have a void at the pivot, which the 27-year-old could have helped fill. The Lakers had expressed interest in re-signing Hill, though the acquisition of Roy Hibbert likely ended any chance of Hill returning to Los Angeles next season. The Lakers had declined their $9MM team option on Hill for 2015/16.
Hill, a BDA Sports Management client, is coming off a career year for production. The five-year veteran averaged 12.0 points per game this past season, the first in which he’s put up a double-digit scoring average. His 7.9 rebounds and 26.8 minutes per game, as well as his 57 starts, were also career highs.
Atlantic Notes: Sixers, Miller, Ellington, Mickey
The Sixers, for all their losing on the court, continue to turn a profit, and the value of the franchise has at least tripled since owner Josh Harris and his partners bought the team in 2011, Grantland’s Zach Lowe reports. Thus, Harris continues to appear patient with a slow, draft-focused rebuild, and even as last month’s draft was going on, the Sixers were in talks with teams in the bottom half of the lottery, seeking to acquire their picks, Lowe hears. Philadelphia is reportedly interested in Norris Cole, but it remains to be seen if that manifests into the first free agent signing of much significance in the tenure of GM Sam Hinkie. Here’s more from around the Atlantic Division:
- The Nets appeared likely to waive Quincy Miller shortly after acquiring him from the Pistons on Monday, but a source tells Marc Stein of ESPN.com that Brooklyn plans to keep him at least through the start of training camp in the fall (Twitter links). It’ll cost the Nets a $50K partial guarantee if they keep him through Wednesday.
- Wayne Ellington‘s two-year deal with the Nets is worth $3,067,500, reports Eric Pincus of Basketball Insiders.
- The Celtics and No. 33 overall pick Jordan Mickey began negotiations on Monday, reports Steve Bulpett of the Boston Herald (on Twitter), and confidence about the ability to reach a deal surrounded the opening of the talks, MassLive’s Jay King hears. Still, neither side is in a hurry, Bulpett tweets. Mickey, a client of Matt Babcock, is expected to seek guaranteed money, King writes.
- Gigi Datome spoke with the Mavericks, Clippers and Wizards, but those teams wouldn’t promise him that he’d be a part of their rotations, tweets Mark Murphy of the Boston Herald. The former Celtics forward just signed with Turkey’s Fenerbahce Ulker.
- Celtics president of basketball operations Danny Ainge doesn’t see deals for veterans like David Lee and Amir Johnson as antithetical to a youth-focused approach, believing that vets can serve important mentorship roles, as Steve Bulpett of the Boston Herald details.
Multiple Teams Eye Carlos Boozer
July 13th, 9:15pm: The Nuggets and Knicks, in addition to the Pelicans, Clippers, Raptors and Spurs, are interested in Boozer, according to Michael Scotto of Sheridan Hoops (Twitter link).
1:21pm: The interest between Boozer and the Clippers is mutual, a source tells Ben Bolch of the Los Angeles Times (Twitter link).
July 7th, 1:12pm: The Pelicans are also showing interest, Broussard tweets. His latest dispatch doesn’t include the Spurs, so it’s unclear if they’re still in the mix after reaching a deal with David West.
July 6th, 1:21pm: Free agent Carlos Boozer is in talks with the Clippers, Spurs, Mavericks and Raptors, sources tell Chris Broussard of ESPN.com (Twitter link). Ramona Shelburne of ESPN.com first reported that the Spurs had expressed interest, while Broussard identified San Antonio and Dallas on the eve of free agency as teams that were poised to pursue the Rob Pelinka client, along with the Nets, Rockets, Heat and incumbent Lakers.
The Mavs and Spurs would appear to have the most to spend among the four teams that Broussard reports in connection with Boozer today, as they have the $2.814MM room exception at their disposal. However, it seems Dallas is nearing a deal for that exception amount, and San Antonio reportedly has interest in David West, perhaps at that same price point. It looks like Toronto has its room exception earmarked for Bismack Biyombo, while the Clippers have $2.088MM left on their mid-level in the wake of Paul Pierce‘s deal and the departure of DeAndre Jordan.
Boozer, who’ll turn 34 in November, expressed a willingness to take a bench role as he expressed his desire to re-sign with the Lakers. Someone close to the power forward told Barry Jackson of the Miami Herald that he wouldn’t be surprised if Boozer signed with the Heat this summer, though it’s unclear if either the Lakers or the Heat still have interest.