Pacific Notes: Johnson, Morris, Barnes, Collison
Wesley Johnson grew tired of the individualism on the Lakers last season and sought a change this summer, as Janis Carr of the Orange County Register details. Johnson signed with the Clippers, citing the persistence of the front office that took a similar tack in its pursuit of Josh Smith, and the swingman praised the clear set of expectations that Doc Rivers has laid out for him, contrasting it to what he thought was a disjointed Lakers offense, Carr observes.
“You would go out there and want to play the right way, but everyone wanted to prove themselves,” Johnson said, according to Carr. “So nobody really knew what was going on. Nobody ever knew, so it was hard for anyone to come in and get into a good rhythm or flow. Nobody was playing together.”
See more from the Pacific Division:
- Dan Bickley of the Arizona Republic finds the sudden change of heart from Markieff Morris hard to believe, but Morris and Suns officials recently engaged in a lengthy conversation and expressed a mutual desire to make their partnership work, sources tell Steve Kyler of Basketball Insiders. “I’m excited. Happy to be back. Happy to be with my team,” Morris told Paul Coro of the Arizona Republic (Twitter link).
- Harrison Barnes would have been pleased to sign for $10MM a year as of this past June, a source told Marcus Thompson of the Bay Area News Group. The former seventh overall pick more recently turned down a four-year, $64MM offer from the Warriors, as Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo Sports reported.
- Darren Collison signed with the Kings in 2014 chiefly so he could start, but he’s a long shot to remain the team’s starter this season with new signee Rajon Rondo aboard, as Ailene Voisin of The Sacramento Bee examines. Collison wants to start, but he’s not about to rock the boat, either, Voisin writes.
- Robert Upshaw was red-flagged over concerns about the health of his heart during predraft workouts, and though doctors eventually cleared him, he believes the time he had to step away from draft prep set him back, as he explains to Pincus, who writes in a piece for the Los Angeles Times. Upshaw went undrafted and signed a partially guaranteed minimum-salary deal with the Lakers. “It was zero basketball activity, zero activity,” Upshaw said. “It’s hard to get in shape and it’s easy to get out of shape. I got out of shape really fast, it was a month’s time where I was just barely doing anything.”
- The contracts that Juwan Staten and Tony Mitchell signed with the Warriors are non-guaranteed for the minimum salary and cover only one season, reports Eric Pincus of Basketball Insiders (Twitter link). Ben Gordon‘s full contract details are still unclear, but half of his salary becomes guaranteed if he sticks for opening night, according to former Nets executive Bobby Marks (on Twitter).
Pacific Notes: Cousins, Bryant, Warriors
Kings center DeMarcus Cousins and coach George Karl called their relationship “solid” during the team’s annual media day on Monday, Jason Jones of the Sacramento Bee reports. While Karl reportedly wanted to trade Cousins after he took over as the head coach late last season, they seem to have ironed out their differences, Jones continues. Cousins called Karl “my man” and said their offseason meeting in Las Vegas was vital to establishing a relationship. “When we met in Vegas, we came to a head and we talked our differences out like men,” Cousins said to Jones. “And at the end of the day, it’s about winning games. That’s one thing me and him can agree on – we want to win and that’s our goal and that’s all that really matters, winning.” Karl gave Cousins an A-plus for his offseason training and said Cousins has shown maturity, Jones adds. “I see a different player,” Karl said. “I see a different substance of character in this guy right now.”
In other news around the Pacific Division:
- Kobe Bryant feels more uncertainty about this season than any other in his career with the Lakers, according to Mark Medina of the Los Angeles Daily News. Bryant is unsure how the team will blend together after the franchise made a number of offseason moves and drafted D’Angelo Russell as their point guard, Medina continues. “It’s a big question mark,” Bryant said during the team’s media day. “We have a lot of young guys. It’s a good mix. We have some veterans as well. But guys have never played together before, so it remains to be seen.” Bryant is also unsure how he fits into that mix after enduring three season-ending injuries in as many seasons, Medina adds.
- Small forward Harrison Barnes claims that extension talks with the Warriors are “going well,” Rusty Simmons of the San Francisco Chronicle reports. Barnes reportedly turned down a four-year, $64MM offer but expressed confidence during the team’s media day that a contract can be finalized before the Nov. 2nd deadline, Simmons continues. GM Bob Myers said last week that he expects the negotiations to go down to the wire, Simmons adds.
- Veteran power forward Nikoloz Tskitishvili, who is in training camp with the Clippers, feels he’s ready for the NBA again after playing in six countries over a nine-year span since leaving the United States, according to Rowan Kavner of Clippers.com. “I’m just enjoying what I do,” he said to Kavner. “With this mentality, I got better. All of a sudden, I was like, ‘Yeah, I can do this.’ I think I’m ready for it.”
Warriors Sign Ben Gordon
The Warriors have signed Ben Gordon, the team announced via press release. Marc Stein of ESPN.com reported last week that they were close to a deal, and Monte Poole of CSN Bay Area later reported that a signing was on the way (Twitter link). It’s unclear what sort of guaranteed money, if any, is involved, though it’ll have to be for the minimum salary, since Golden State doesn’t have the ability to pay him more after spending most of its taxpayer’s mid-level exception on Leandro Barbosa.
The market for Gordon, 32, hadn’t been robust after the Magic released him in June, almost a year after signing him to a two-year, $9MM deal. Orlando gave Gordon the fewest minutes per game (14.1) of his 11-year career and, with the second year of his deal non-guaranteed, decided to cut ties, despite somewhat of a bounceback performance for the former third overall pick, who’d shot a career-worst 27.6% from behind the arc for Charlotte in 2013/14. The Warriors have reportedly been seeking an extra shooter, and Gordon, a 40.1% three-point marksman, nailed 36.1% of his long-range attempts this past season.
It’ll be an uphill battle for Gordon to make the opening night roster. Coach Steve Kerr is high on James Michael McAdoo, who has a partially guaranteed contract, and 13 others have fully guaranteed deals. The addition of Gordon brings Golden State to 20 players, the preseason limit.
Will Gordon stick for the regular season? Comment to give your input.
Celtics Rumors: Crowder, Lee, Sullinger
Celtics coach Brad Stevens is confident that a new five-year, $35MM contract won’t change Jae Crowder‘s game, writes Steve Bulpett of The Boston Herald. Boston acquired the 25-year old in a December trade with Dallas and rewarded him with the big contract over the summer. He averaged 9.5 points and 4.6 rebounds in 57 games for the Celtics after the deal. “With Jae, you do feel like even with that understanding that he’s going to play and the comfort of a long-term contract, it doesn’t change how he plays,” Stevens said. “He’s a competitive guy. He wants to do well, and he’s prideful. He would play just as hard in an open gym game in the summer as he will when it’s all on the line.”
There’s more this morning out of Boston:
- David Lee, who was acquired from the Warriors in an offseason deal, likes the chemistry he sees in Boston, according to A. Sherrod Blakely of CSNNE.com. “That’s something we had last year in Golden State and something that is already well-established here,” Lee said. “The guys get along great and that was part of their success towards the end of the year last year; kind of establishing that from the start with some fresh faces.” Lee is looking for a bounce-back year in Boston after appearing in just 49 games with Golden State last season. A lingering back injury and the emergence of Draymond Green limited his playing time.
- Lee already sees similarities between the Celtics’ camp and Steve Kerr’s first camp with the Warriors last season, writes Mark Murphy of the Boston Herald. Kerr guided Golden State to 67 wins and an NBA title while finishing second in the Coach of the Year balloting. “The details are the biggest thing,” Lee said. “[Stevens is] a numbers guy and a technical guy. He throws a lot of stats in there about how the team can get better from last year, and how thin the line is from being fourth and 12th. It’s good for players to know from Day 1 what needs to be accomplished.”
Pacific Notes: Ezeli, Butler, Crawford
Warriors center Festus Ezeli, who is eligible to sign a rookie scale extension prior to the deadline this fall, wants to remain with Golden State long-term, Diamond Leung of The Bay Area News Group writes. “I don’t want to leave,” Ezeli said. “I love this team. I love my teammates. The fans here are unbelievable. I’m inspired to come in every day and see even our best player, Stephen Curry, just working really hard. So this whole team and being here, the chemistry that we have, you can’t buy this anywhere. You can’t get it anywhere else.” Hoops Rumors’ Chuck Myron took an in-depth look at Ezeli’s extension candidacy earlier this month, which can be viewed here.
Here’s more out of the Pacific Division:
- Metta World Peace‘s one-year, minimum salary deal with the Lakers doesn’t include any injury protection or guaranteed salary, Eric Pincus of Basketball Insiders tweets.
- Kings swingman Caron Butler, who signed with the team this offseason, says he is looking forward to the challenge in Sacramento, and noted that he was offered more money from other teams, Deuce Mason of Sports 1140 relays (on Twitter).
- With the Clippers‘ offseason additions adding depth to the team’s rotation, swingman Jamal Crawford‘s minutes are likely to suffer, a sacrifice that he is willing to make for the good of the team, Robert Morales of InsideSoCal.com relays. “I think it will be a lot of sacrifice, obviously, to sacrifice minutes, whatever it may be,” Crawford said. “Your common goal has to be winning.“ The Clippers were reportedly exploring trades involving the two-time Sixth Man of the Year shortly before the draft, with other reports this summer indicating that the Heat, Cavs and Knicks have held interest, but Doc Rivers recently said that the team was unlikely to deal Crawford.
- Rivers noted that the Clippers now possess the most talent that they have had since he’s been a part of the organization, Ben Bolch of The Los Angeles Times tweets.
Warriors Officially Add Four For Camp
The Warriors have officially signed free agent guards Ian Clark and Juwan Staten along with free agent forwards Tony Mitchell and Jarell Eddie, the team announced via a press release. Clark and Eddie will receive approximately half of their salaries if they make the Warriors’ opening night roster, Eric Pincus of Basketball Insiders noted. Clark would receive $474K on the contract he signed, while Eddie would make $423K. The length and terms of the pacts for Staten and Mitchell have not yet been relayed. Golden State has a roster count of 19 players, including 13 possessing full guarantees.
Clark, 24, had hoped the Nuggets would re-sign him after his summer league performance, in which he averaged 13.4 points per game and made 12 of 24 total three-point attempts, but Denver renounced its rights to him to clear cap room. The guard’s career NBA averages through 53 contests are 2.4 points, 0.7 rebounds, and 0.5 assists to accompany a slash line of .369/.344/.875.
Staten, 23, was the 81st-best draft prospect this year in Chad Ford’s ESPN Insider rankings, while Jonathan Givony of DraftExpress had him at No. 98 about a week before the draft. His playing time shrunk this past season as a senior compared to his junior year, when he averaged six more minutes per game. The 5’11” Ohio native put up 14.2 points, 4.6 assists and 2.0 turnovers in 31.3 minutes per contest for the Mountaineers this year.
Mitchell has yet to make his mark at the NBA level. In 2013/14, the forward saw just 3.8 minutes per game for the Pistons with averages of 1.0 PPG and 1.2 RPG. This past season, Mitchell did not see a single second of NBA action as Pistons coach/exec Stan Van Gundy kept him in the D-League for seasoning to start the year. A late December trade sent Mitchell to the Suns, but he dropped from the roster early on in the New Year. In February, Mitchell signed on with a Puerto Rican club when there was apparently little or no NBA interest.
Eddie, who turns 24 in October, made his mark as a three-point shooter while in the D-League for most of last season, nailing 127 of his 281 in-game attempts, a sizzling 45.2%, for the affiliate of the Spurs. He averaged 12.9 points in 26.2 minutes per game, but nonetheless made only 18 starts in 44 appearances for that team and didn’t receive a call-up to San Antonio. The Spurs and the Pacers both had him on their summer league squads last month, and he continued his sharpshooting, connecting on 46.3% of his 67 shots from behind the arc.
Latest On Steve Nash
SEPTEMBER 25TH, 3:53pm: The Warriors have officially hired Nash, confirming that he’ll serve as a player development consultant, the team announced via press release.
“Steve Nash was one of the best guards to ever play in this league and we are so happy to add him to our staff and have him working with our players,” Warriors coach Steve Kerr said in the team’s statement. “Even though he possessed incredible individual skills and abilities, Steve always played the game with a team-first mentality, which is something that we emphasize greatly within our group. Steve and I have a great relationship from our time together in Phoenix while I was general manager, and we share a lot of beliefs about how the game should be played and about the work ethic that goes in to being great. I can’t wait to work with him again and have him around our team.”
The two-time MVP also expressed his enthusiasm for the partnership.
“I look forward to joining Coach Kerr and his great staff and helping out in any way that I can,” Nash said. “The Warriors played such a beautiful style of team basketball last season and it’s a style that I am very familiar with and enjoyed playing throughout my career. This team is extremely talented, as they proved in winning the championship last season, but they also have a number of core players who are relatively young in their careers. That is a very unique blend and I’m excited about the opportunity to work with these guys and hopefully pass along some of the lessons that I learned during my career.”
SEPTEMBER 24TH, 1:00pm: Nash seemed to confirm in a video with Sportsnet Central’s Caroline Cameron that he’ll be working on the Warriors staff this season, as Diamond Leung of the Bay Area News Group transcribes. Nash answered a question about how he can help Stephen Curry and said that “hopefully I’ll learn as much from him as he will from me.”
SEPTEMBER 15TH, 1:58pm: The Mavericks held out hope as recently as late June that they could convince Steve Nash to come out of retirement to play for them this coming season, sources told Marc Stein of ESPN.com. The 41-year-old is nearing a deal to join the Warriors as a part-time player development consultant, as Stein also reports. The point guard announced his retirement in March, months after a nerve ailment had sidelined him for the season and made it seem doubtful, at best, that he would ever return to action. The Lakers held on to his contract until waiving him in April.
Nash spent six seasons in Dallas between 1998 and 2004, blossoming along with Dirk Nowitzki, who remains a close friend and whose charity softball game Nash took part in this summer, as Stein notes. Mavs owner Mark Cuban told Kenneth Arthur of Rolling Stone last year that his worst move as an owner was letting Nash sign with Phoenix in 2004. Nash’s level of play reached even higher levels when he was with the Suns, the team with which he won both his MVP awards.
Dallas had only spot duty in mind for Nash this time around, but Nash made it clear last year that if he were to play again, he would only do so as a Laker, as Stein points out. The Cavs tried and failed to convince Nash to push for a buyout from the Lakers last season that would have allowed him to finish up 2014/15 in Cleveland, as Stein reported in March. Nash said then that he wanted to live in Southern California forever, but while he’s poised to join a Northern California team, he’d only spend a few days each month with the Warriors, Stein writes.
The Mavs, as they stand, have no shortage of point guards, with four on the roster. That includes offseason addition Deron Williams and J.J. Barea, who re-signed with the team this summer, as well as holdovers Devin Harris and Raymond Felton.
What do you think Nash’s greatest legacy as a player will be? Leave a comment to share your thoughts.
Western Notes: Rivers, Grizzlies, Rush
Clippers coach/executive Doc Rivers told Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo Sports that almost losing DeAndre Jordan to the Mavericks made him realize how fragile a franchise’s window of contention can be, and it pushed him to improve the team as a whole this summer. “Losing him would’ve always gnawed at me,” Rivers said. “But it wouldn’t have stopped me. I would’ve said, [expletive] that, we’re going to figure out a way to get this right.’ But it also triggered something else for me. It might have been my front-office wake-up call. I was not a pleasant guy to me, or my staff, after I thought we lost him – and even after we got him back. We had a lot of ‘come-to-Jesus’ meetings.”
“And we rolled up our sleeves, and we got better,” Rivers continued. “Listen, maybe it’s because when we got here, the team was pretty good and we didn’t think we had to get that much better. I don’t know why. At end of the day, even the way D.J. did it, it turned out to be a blessing for our franchise. For me, it made me understand fully. We’ve got to do this [expletive] right, and build this team. It’s our responsibility.”
Here’s more from out West:
- It remains to be seen if the Grizzlies can manufacture enough offense from the outside to take the next step toward a title, and while the team has improved in this area over the summer, Memphis may be lucky just to escape the first round of the playoffs, Tim Bontemps of New York Post (Facebook link) opines in his season preview.
- After a 2014/15 campaign that saw him shoot an abysmal 11.1% from beyond the arc, Brandon Rush hopes to emerge as a viable sixth man candidate for the Warriors this season, Monte Poole of CSNBayArea.com writes. “It was a bad year for me, an awful year,” Rush told Poole. “It was one of the worst years I’ve ever had, individually. I’ve shot in the mid-40s [from three-point range] for most of my career. To be able to go out there last year and not be able to make a shot, not be able to play . . . it made me hungry to get into the gym and go hard this summer.”
Warriors Close To Camp Deal With Ben Gordon
The Warriors and Ben Gordon are close to agreement on a deal for training camp, reports Marc Stein of ESPN.com (Twitter links). Gordon has remained in free agency since he cleared waivers from the Magic, who released him in June rather than guarantee his $4.5MM salary. Golden State doesn’t have the capacity to give the 11-year veteran and former Sixth Man of the Year more than the minimum salary, and it would appear that little, if any, guaranteed money would be involved.
Gordon, who’s hit 40.1% of his career three-point attempts, would give Golden State an extra shooter, an asset the team has been looking for, Stein notes. He bounced back this past season, knocking down 36.1% of his treys, after an uncharacteristic 27.6% three-point shooting performance for Charlotte in 2013/14. The 32-year-old nonetheless saw a career-low 14.1 minutes per game in his year with Orlando, fueling the notion that the Magic overpaid when they struck a two-year, $9MM deal with Gordon in 2014.
[RELATED POST: Speights Savors Title As Contract Year Looms]
Golden State already has 19 players with either signed contracts or verbal agreements, leaving just one open spot for camp, as our roster count shows. Room on the regular season roster is similarly tight, with 13 full guarantees and a partial guarantee for James Michael McAdoo, who has drawn raves from coach Steve Kerr.
Should the Warriors sign Gordon? Leave a comment to tell us.
And-Ones: Durant, DeRozan, Warriors, Bennett
Kevin Durant is fully cleared for training camp, Thunder GM Sam Presti said, according to Royce Young of ESPN.com (Twitter link). Thus, the former MVP is ready for the start of a pivotal season for the Thunder, who’ll surely do what they can to prove their worth as a contender before Durant can bolt in free agency next summer, and for Durant himself, who’s out to prove he can stay healthy after a broken foot cost him all but 27 games this past season. While we wait for action to begin in a 2015/16 campaign sure to include plenty of chatter about Durant’s future, see more from around the NBA:
- It’s certainly no shock, but GM Masai Ujiri conceded that DeMar DeRozan won’t be talking about an extension with the team this season in advance of his ability to opt out next summer, as Ujiri said this week on SportsNet’s Free Association podcast. The Aaron Goodwin client becomes eligible for an extension on October 31st, three years from the day that he inked a rookie scale extension with Toronto, but unlike those sorts of extensions, veteran extensions come with sharp financial limits that discourage players from signing them.
- The Warriors don’t have much cap flexibility, but their existing roster and superior management team, which includes Executive of the Year Bob Myers, has them atop the ESPN Insiders Future Power Rankings, which rate teams based on their potential for success over the next three seasons.
- Former 15th overall pick Austin Daye has hired agent Obrad Fimic of the AltiSport agency to negotiate deals in Europe, Fimic announced (on Twitter). The Hawks waived Daye in July, but no indication of NBA interest has emerged since.
- The Timberwolves didn’t provide Anthony Bennett with the tools to succeed on the court, as Flip Saunders‘ lack of enthusiasm for three-pointers encouraged the former No. 1 overall pick to launch too many long twos, one of myriad problems with Bennett’s game, opines Ben Golliver of Sports Illustrated. Still, Bennett deserves blame for many of his shortcomings, too, and he’ll need to show improvement just to carve out a niche as a reserve stretch four, Golliver believes.