Carlos Boozer Unlikely To Sign Before Season Starts
Carlos Boozer is likely to remain unsigned for the rest of the offseason and instead seek a deal with a playoff contender after the season starts, sources tell Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo! Sports (Twitter link). Thus, it appears as though the 13-year veteran simply isn’t seeing an offer that he likes for now, though it casts doubt on the idea that he would bite on apparent interest from the Chinese league, an option that had reportedly intrigued him earlier this month.
Boozer, who turns 34 in November, made $16.8MM combined last season from the Bulls, who waived him via the amnesty clause in July 2014, and the Lakers, who submitted a partial claim of $3.251MM to snag him off waivers. He’d be hard-pressed to make even the amount of that amnesty claim on an NBA contract this season, simply because most teams have no more than the $2.814MM room exception to spend. The Mavericks, one of the latest three NBA teams reported to have interest in him, have only the room exception to use, while the Knicks, another of those interested parties, are limited to the minimum. The Rockets have more than $2.274MM left of their mid-level exception, but using it would impose a hard cap on them, and they still have yet to sign No. 32 overall pick Montrezl Harrell. The Spurs, Raptors, Pelicans, Nuggets, Nets, Lakers and Heat were reportedly interested in the Rob Pelinka client earlier this summer, but none of them have the capacity to give him as much as the Lakers paid for him last year. The Lakers renounced their Bird rights to him last month.
The two-time All-Star put up 16.2 points and 9.8 rebounds per game in 2012/13, but his numbers have declined in each of the two seasons since, and his 6.8 boards and 23.8 minutes per contest last season were career lows. Former Nets executive Bobby Marks wouldn’t be surprised if Boozer waited until Christmas to sign (Twitter link). I’d speculate that a decent chance exists that he stays on the market even longer. Ray Allen and Jermaine O’Neal, two other aging former All-Stars, chose to carry on as free agents into the season last year but never wound up signing.
What do you think Boozer will end up doing? Leave a comment to share your thoughts.
Deal Between Rockets, Chuck Hayes Falls Apart
11:18am: Andrews expressed surprise at how the deal came undone, Berman also tweets. The Rockets are one of the teams that wants Hayes in a non-playing capacity, as Andrews reveals to Jonathan Feigen of the Houston Chronicle.
“I think when we came up with the agreement, after that point, they had some other activity, the Ty Lawson trade, the Jason Terry signing,” Andrews said. “That put Chuck in a precarious situation. The result of that squeezed him out of the equation. They had some cap stuff they were concerned with. We didn’t get into a lot of details. It’s a tough situation. It’s very disappointing. This is the business. These things happen. I commend them for telling us now as opposed to dragging us through camp. We’ll explore if there are other teams interested. He wants to continue to play. There’s multiple teams that want him to join his staff, including the Rockets, if that’s what he wants to do. He wants to continue to play.”
10:59am: The dissolution of the agreement appears to have rankled the Hayes camp, as comments Andrews made to Mark Berman of Fox 26 Houston indicate (Twitter link). “We are extremely upset and disappointed. We know this is a business,” Andrews said.
AUGUST 27TH, 10:46am: The center won’t be signing with the Rockets after all, agent Calvin Andrews tells Marc J. Spears of Yahoo! Sports (Twitter link). Andrews cited “limited roster flexibility” and “other financial considerations,” a hint that the unraveling of the deal had to do with the dilemma the Rockets face with No. 32 overall pick Montrezl Harrell. Hayes, 32, has received multiple offers for coaching and front office positions, and while he has interest in going that route eventually, he remains focused on continuing his playing career for now, Andrews said.
JULY 30TH, 11:33am: Hayes’ deal includes a partial guarantee, according to Calvin Watkins of ESPN.com (on Twitter).
JULY 29TH, 9:18pm: The Rockets have agreed to terms with free agent center Chuck Hayes on a contract, sources told Marc J. Spears of Yahoo Sports (on Twitter). It’ll be a one-year veteran’s minimum deal.
The 10-year veteran big man played his first six NBA seasons with Houston, and GM Daryl Morey has shown a fondness for reunions with his former players. The market for the 32-year-old was been quiet this month after coming off a season of career lows – Hayes averaged just 1.7 points and 1.8 rebounds in 8.8 minutes per game across 29 appearances. He was a starter his last two seasons in Houston.
Hayes made nearly $5.959MM in 2014/15, so he’ll be taking a significant pay cut this season.
Rockets Re-Sign Jason Terry
3:44pm: The Rockets have finally followed up with an official announcement via press release.
AUGUST 24TH, 2:07pm: Terry says via Twitter that he’s officially signed (hat tip to Jonathan Feigen of the Houston Chronicle). The team has made no formal announcement, though GM Daryl Morey has acknowledged the signing with a tweet of his own.
AUGUST 19TH, 3:50pm: Terry has confirmed that he’ll be returning to Houston for the 2015/16 campaign, Mark Berman of FOX 26 tweets.
10:46pm: Along with Berman, Jonathan Feigen of the Houston Chronicle and John Reid of the Times Picayune all hear that Terry has made up his mind to sign with the Rockets for the minimum salary (three Twitter links). Watkins also adds to his earlier report (on Twitter), citing a source who says the Rockets expect Terry to officially sign Wednesday.
9:47pm: Terry will decide between the Rockets and Pelicans on Wednesday morning, Watkins tweets, contradicting Charania’s previous report that Terry has made up his mind to return to Houston next season.
AUGUST 18TH, 9:09pm: Jason Terry has decided to re-sign with the Rockets on a one-year deal, according to Shams Charania of RealGM. The Pelicans made a strong push to ink the veteran guard, as Charania notes and as Mark Berman of FOX 26 passed along in a story last week, but he instead appears poised to re-join Houston for the 2015/16 season. The Jazz were another team that the RealGM scribe reports had strong interest in Terry.
A report shortly after players became eligible to sign new contracts in July indicated that Terry was close to returning to Houston on a one-year deal, but an agreement apparently didn’t come to fruition until recently, just over a week after ESPN’s Calvin Watkins reported the Rockets were unsure if they were still in the mix to land the 37-year-old guard. The move, once official, will give Houston 13 fully guaranteed contracts for the upcoming year, presuming Terry is getting a full guarantee. The Rockets have yet to sign second-round selection Montrezl Harrell.
Charania pegs the value of Terry’s deal to be $1.5MM, although he is potentially rounding up since a minimum-salary contract for a player with 10 or more years of experience is worth slightly less than that at $1,499,187. If the deal is indeed for the minimum salary, it preserves a portion of the mid-level exception for Harrell. Terry’s minimum salary is $1,499,187, but the Rockets would only have to pay $947,276, the equivalent of the two-year veteran’s minimum, since it’s a one-year deal. It’s unclear how much partially guaranteed money Chuck Hayes has, but without him, a fully guaranteed deal for Terry would leave the Rockets about $2.5MM shy of the $88.74MM hard cap they’d trigger if they give Harrell a deal that either runs longer than two years, is worth more than the minimum, or both.
The Rockets renounced Terry’s Bird Rights earlier this month, meaning they couldn’t offer him any more than the approximately $2MM they had remaining on their mid-level exception, although they came to terms on a deal worth the minimum salary. Houston will save more than the difference between the two figures, however, since the Rockets are a taxpaying team.
Although Terry’s most formidable years are behind him, he’s capable of contributing in a limited capacity off the bench. In 77 appearances for Houston last season, Terry averaged 7.0 points and 1.9 assists in 21.3 minutes per contest. He saw an expanded role in the postseason when Patrick Beverley was sidelined with an injury, posting nightly marks of 9.2 points and 2.8 points in 28.6 minutes. With Ty Lawson and Beverley likely atop the depth chart at point guard, Terry seems positioned to play limited minutes and provide another veteran presence for a team hoping to contend for a title in 2015/16.
Extension Candidate: Donatas Motiejunas
The Rockets made a somewhat unexpected postseason run to the Western Conference Finals without Patrick Beverley and Donatas Motiejunas, both of whom sat out the postseason with injury. Houston nonetheless re-signed Beverley, though he came back at a relative bargain of a deal worth four years and $23MM, and the Rockets brought in Ty Lawson, who’ll challenge him for the starting point guard position. Motiejunas already has plenty of competition at power forward in Houston, but it remains to be seen whether he, like Beverley, is prepared to do a post-injury deal with the Rockets and risk signing at an ebb tide in his leverage.
The Wasserman Media Group client has the luxury of waiting until next summer, unlike Beverley, whose contract expired at season’s end. Yet a deal during this offseason would give Motiejunas greater stability, since the Poison Pill Provision makes it difficult for teams to trade players between the time they sign rookie scale extensions and the time those extensions kick in the following July. It would also allow him to capitalize on a 2014/15 regular season in which he made 62 starts, nearly four times as many as the total number of starts he made in his first two years in the league. He played a critical role for a Rockets team that managed to overcome injuries to Dwight Howard and others and finish with the second-best record in the West before the 24-year-old Lithuanian suffered his own injury, a back ailment that required surgery.
Motiejunas averaged 12.0 points in 28.7 minutes per game this past season, with that offense coming in the quintessential Rockets way. He took less than 10% of his shots from distances that were more than 10 feet away from the basket but within the three-point line, as Basketball-Reference shows. Most of his looks were within 10 feet, as he gave Houston an interior presence, but when he ventured outside to shoot his three-pointers, he made 36.8% of them, a significant improvement on a career three-point percentage that had been 26.9% going into last season. The question of whether his strong shooting season is an outlier or a true indication of his improvement will no doubt hang over negotiations.
The 7-footer’s rebounding numbers are discouraging, as he collected only 5.9 boards per game. Some of that probably has to do with the presence of Howard, but D12 only played in 41 games and posted his lowest RPG since his rookie season. Motiejunas meanwhile rebounded less frequently per 36 minutes this past season than he did in 2013/14.
Defensively, his numbers are mixed. He was a plus on that side of the court, according to Basketball-Reference’s Defensive Box Plus Minus, and the same is true in ESPN’s Defensive Real Plus Minus, though he ranked as just the 29th-best power forward in that category this past season. The Rockets gave up 1.1 more points per 100 possessions when Motiejunas was on the floor compared to when he wasn’t, according to NBA.com, though that’s a stat that doesn’t separate him from what the other four players on the floor were doing. Still, it’s not encouraging for his case that the Rockets were a net 2.3 points per 100 possessions better overall with Motiejunas sitting.
Motiejunas was more efficient last year than he’d been in the past, as his career-best 14.4 PER indicates, but that’s still below 15.0, the mark of an average player in that category. That pales in comparison to the 18.3 PER of Terrence Jones, the other Rockets power forward up for a rookie scale extension. The relative value of Jones versus Motiejunas will color the negotiations for both. Jones missed significant time with an injury last season, too, and their numbers weren’t all that dissimilar. Still, areas of separation, such as the PER number, will loom large.
The Rockets will have about $44.5MM committed for 2016/17, assuming they pick up Clint Capela‘s rookie scale team option. That doesn’t include any money for Howard, who has a player option worth nearly $23.3MM, or Lawson, whose more than $13.2MM salary is non-guaranteed. Bring them both back, and Houston would have at least $81MM against a projected $89MM cap, and perhaps more if Howard opts out and re-signs at a higher number. An extension for either Motiejunas or Jones would make it more difficult for Houston to replace Howard if he bolts and perhaps even put the team in danger of crossing the projected $108MM tax line if Howard and Lawson remain.
Motiejunas is more power forward than center, but the $64MM over four years that Jonas Valanciunas is receiving in his extension from the Raptors is a factor. The rises in the salary cap that will come in the next few years are already having a profound effect on the economics of player salaries, and even if Motiejunas can’t quite command what his fellow Lithuanian got, it’s fair to suggest an extension would entail salaries of around $12-14MM a year.
It’s difficult to envision Rockets GM Daryl Morey, who values flexibility, committing to a number like that. Houston will have a tough time clearing cap space next summer anyway, but Morey has proven adept at that. The extension would also compromise Morey’s flexibility for trades this season, given the Poison Pill Provision. Morey and company will probably have discussions with the Motiejunas camp and make at least a token offer, but I doubt that reaching a deal will be a priority. Motiejunas has incentive to make the Rockets think twice about such a stance, given his strong season, but he’d probably have to take less than he could command on the open market to get Morey to budge, and little reason exists for him to take a discount if he’s looking to capitalize on his performance.
Should the Rockets sign Motiejunas to an extension? Leave a comment to give us your thoughts.
And-Ones: Williams, Thomas, Nunnally
Alan Williams, who starred at UC Santa Barbara and made an impact during summer league, was surprised that no NBA team was willing to give him a guaranteed contract, according to Paul Coro of The Arizona Republic. Instead, Williams signed with the Double Star Eagles in Qingdao, China, grabbing an overseas spot that usually isn’t available once NBA training camps end in October. “It gave me financial stability, which is something a lot of people don’t get in their first year,” Williams said. “It gives me an opportunity to go out there and develop my game more and play for a pretty good team. Culturally, I get to go to a whole different continent and see how they play.” Williams thought he might get more interest from NBA teams after an impressive performance with the Rockets‘ summer league squad. He averaged 20.5 points and 11.8 rebounds in four games and was named to the all-NBA Summer League second team. Williams is hoping for another shot at the NBA once his CBA season ends in February or March.
There’s more news tonight from around the basketball world:
- Tyrus Thomas, the fourth pick in the 2006 draft, still dreams of returning to the NBA, writes Alex Kennedy of Basketball Insiders. Thomas missed the entire 2013/14 season after undergoing an anterior cervical discectomy and fusion for an arachnoid cyst. He signed a 10-day contract with the Grizzlies in January, but only appeared in two games. At 29, he is training for another shot at the league and hopes to be in someone’s camp next month.
- James Nunnally has signed with Sidigas Avellino of the Italian Serie A, according to Emiliano Carchia of Sportando. Nunnally, another UC Santa Barbara product, appeared in a combined 13 games with the Hawks and Sixers during the 2013/14 season. He spent last season with teams in Spain and Israel, and played for the Pacers‘ entry in this year’s summer league.
- Several teams took risks this summer, and Lang Greene of Basketball Insiders evaluates the best and worst of them, including the Lakers‘ and Knicks‘ draft picks, the Rockets‘ deal for Ty Lawson, the Raptors giving big money to DeMarre Carroll and Cory Joseph and the Kings‘ gamble on Rajon Rondo.
Wizards Notes: Temple, Oubre, Camp Deals
The summer has been relatively quiet for the Wizards, with the trade for Jared Dudley and the Alan Anderson signing perhaps the team’s most significant moves. Washington is hoping it’s a different story a year from now, with native son Kevin Durant poised to hit free agency. While we wait to see how that storyline develops, see the latest from the nation’s capital:
- Jazz coach Quin Snyder, and not the Utah front office, is the party that expressed interest in Wizards guard Garrett Temple, according to a source who spoke with J. Michael of CSNMidAtlantic (Twitter link). The Wizards don’t appear eager to trade Temple, and it seems unlikely he’ll be changing teams, Michael tweets.
- Kelly Oubre intrigued the Hornets and the Heat, who had this year’s ninth and 10th picks, respectively, and the Celtics and Rockets tried to move up to draft him, reports Sean Deveney of The Sporting News. Ulimately, the Wizards came up with the package the Hawks accepted for the No. 15 overall pick, allowing Washington to come away with the small forward from Kansas. Deveney chronicles the struggle Oubre’s family faced in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which forced them from their home in New Orleans 10 years ago.
- The Wizards aren’t offering partial guarantees with their training camp invitations, Michael writes in a separate piece, and that was a factor in the decision undrafted Maryland shooting guard Dez Wells made to turn down an offer from the Wizards for a deal with the Thunder instead, Michael adds.
Rockets Face Tough Choice With Montrezl Harrell
Jason Terry helped the Rockets make a key step toward completing their roster for the season ahead, agreeing this week to return on what appears to be a one-year, minimum salary deal. That leaves Houston with wiggle room to sign No. 32 overall pick Montrezl Harrell, but the Rockets still face a dilemma as they attempt to do so. Signing Harrell, a Rich Paul client, would almost certainly impose a hard cap on the team, and Harrell’s contract would leave the Rockets so close to that cap that they’d have almost no room to maneuver the rest of the season, barring some kind of other move to clear salary.
The collective bargaining agreement calls for a hard cap of $4MM above the tax threshold on teams that use the $5.464MM non-taxpayer’s mid-level exception instead of the $3.376MM taxpayer’s mid-level. The Rockets have already re-signed K.J. McDaniels for nearly $3.19MM. That’s close enough to $3.376MM that any use of the mid-level for a full-season salary for Harrell would push the Rockets above that figure and trigger the hard cap.
Houston couldn’t have paid McDaniels nearly as much had they not used the mid-level, because they didn’t have cap space and because their Non-Bird rights with McDaniels would provide no more than about $1.014MM, which is 20% greater than the minimum. They were hemmed in with McDaniels because he took his one-year required tender from the Sixers last year, the very sort of scenario Houston is seemingly trying to avoid with Harrell.
High second-round picks almost always end up with more than the minimum salary. That’s the case with each of the five second-round picks from No. 31 through 39 who have signed with their NBA teams so far this summer. Thus, the Rockets probably wouldn’t be able to convince Harrell and Paul to take a deal via the minimum-salary exception, unless it’s his required tender. That tender functions like a miniature version of a qualifying offer. Teams have to submit required tenders to their second-round picks no later than September 5th, or they lose the draft rights to them and they become free agents. The tender is for a one-year, non-guaranteed contract at the minimum salary. Some second-rounders wouldn’t sign the tender out of fear that their teams would cut them in training camp, leaving them with no salary for the season ahead. That’s assuredly not the case for Harrell, who was just two picks shy of becoming a first-rounder and who had been a lottery prospect at times during his college career at Louisville.
Harrell could seek a lucrative deal overseas, but if he signs his required tender, he’d become an NBA free agent next summer. That proved a lucrative path for McDaniels, last year’s No. 32 overall pick, who took his required tender from the Sixers a few months before they traded him to the Rockets. No second-round pick from last year will make a salary this season that comes close to the nearly $3.19MM that McDaniels will see.
Harrell’s association with Paul adds another wrinkle. Paul recently declared that Tristan Thompson, another of his clients, wouldn’t re-sign with the Cavs next year if he took his qualifying offer this summer. The Rockets would have the right to match offers for Harrell next year if he signs his required tender this year, a privilege the Cavs wouldn’t have with Thompson if he takes his qualifying offer, but Houston wouldn’t have Harrell’s Bird rights. The Rockets would probably have to use cap space or their mid-level to keep him, just as with McDaniels. The Gilbert Arenas provision would be around to protect the Rockets from having to commit more than the non-taxpayer’s mid-level, but the Rockets would surely prefer to avoid a bidding war for a player with whom they currently have exclusive NBA negotiating rights.
Averting that scenario may prove just as thorny for GM Daryl Morey and company, however. Any deal that Houston gives Harrell this season that’s worth more than the minimum salary or runs for more than two years would result in a hard cap. The Rockets have a payroll of $85,233,113, according to Eric Pincus of Basketball Insiders, not counting the minimum salaries for Terry and Chuck Hayes, whom the Rockets have also agreed to sign. Both Terry and Hayes reportedly have one-year deals for the minimum salary. Since their pacts only cover one year, the Rockets would have to pay them no more than $947,276, the two-year veteran’s minimum. The Hayes deal apparently carries only a partial guarantee, though it’s unclear just how much guaranteed money is involved. Assuming Terry’s deal is fully guaranteed, and assuming Harrell would take a first-year salary equivalent to the $1,170,960 that No. 33 overall pick Jordan Mickey will make this season, according to Pincus, Houston’s payroll would be $87,351,349 absent of Hayes. The hard cap would be $88.74MM, so depending on the amount of the partial guarantee for Hayes, the Rockets would only have about $1MM to play with the rest of the season.
That would handicap the team if it wants to make a trade, since the Rockets wouldn’t be able to do a deal that brings their salary above the hard cap. Houston would have to be especially choosy with midseason signees, since their salaries couldn’t add up to more than the $1MM or so that the team would have left to spend. Claiming an intriguing player off waivers would be nearly impossible. Houston could create more flexibility with a salary-clearing trade, but the Rockets, who are title contenders, must be careful not to trim too much talent from the roster, especially after injuries left the team thin at critical times last season. Waiving a player via the stretch provision before September 1st would represent another path to increased flexibility beneath the hard cap, but that, too, would reduce talent, since no obvious waiver candidate exists.
The constraints of that hard cap nonetheless seem more palatable than allowing Harrell to hit the open market next year. The Rockets could match competing bids for him, since he’d be eligible for restricted free agency, but they wouldn’t truly hold sway over his price point. A hard cap would provide Morey with a measure of control, since he’d have several months to find a trade that reduced salary without draining talent. That’s a difficult task, but Morey has proven among the most canny and creative dealers in his eight-plus years in charge of Houston’s front office. No one stands a better chance of wriggling free from the chains of the hard cap than he does.
Regardless, we’ll soon find out just which less-than-appealing option the Rockets choose. For now, we know simply that the Harrell dilemma proves that negotiations between teams and their second-round picks are infinitely more fascinating than the straightforward rookie scale signings of their more celebrated first-round counterparts.
What do you think the Rockets should do with Harrell? Leave a comment to tell us.
Latest On Carlos Boozer
7:54am: The Shandong Lions, another Chinese team, are also going after Boozer, as Sportando’s Emiliano Carchia indicates via Twitter.
12:26am: The Sichuan Blue Whales and other Chinese teams are expressing interest in Carlos Boozer, and while the Rob Pelinka client is intrigued, he’s still pursuing NBA deals, reports Marc Stein of ESPN.com (Twitter links). News regarding the 33-year-old has been scarce since a late-July report indicated that the Knicks, Rockets and Mavericks were eyeing him. The 33-year-old has lingered in free agency since July, when the lucrative five-year deal he signed with the Bulls expired. He made $16.8MM last season as a member of the Lakers, though Chicago paid all but the $3.251MM figure the Lakers bid when they claimed him via amnesty waivers.
Few NBA teams have more than the $2.814MM room exception to spend at this point. The Mavs have that amount available, though they already have deals with 20 players, the offseason maximum. The Knicks spent the room exception on Kevin Seraphin and have only the minimum to offer. The Rockets have about $2.274MM worth of their mid-level that they could spend, though doing so would leave the team hard-capped and without the means to give No. 32 pick Montrezl Harrell a market-value contract. Boozer and the Clippers reportedly had mutual interest in July, but they only have the minimum to spend, and while the Spurs, Raptors, Pelicans, Nuggets, Nets, Lakers and Heat have all apparently had interest over the course of the summer, it’s unclear if that’s the case now. Thus, I’d speculate that Boozer is only receiving minimum-salary offers from NBA teams at this point.
Andray Blatche signed a three-year, $7.5MM deal with China’s Xinjiang Flying Tigers this past spring, and a few weeks ago Shavlik Randolph inked a contract for at least $4.5MM over three years, numbers that suggest that Boozer, if he went to China, stands a decent chance to top the $1,499,187 he’d see on an NBA minimum deal. Still, Metta World Peace wound up with less than that in his deal with Sichuan last summer. A Chinese team would nonetheless offer Boozer a chance to double-dip, since the Chinese Basketball Association ends well in advance of the NBA season, giving players an opportunity to latch on with NBA teams at prorated salaries for the stretch run.
Will Joseph of Hoops Rumors examined Boozer’s free agent stock in depth earlier this month.
Where do you think Boozer ends up? Comment to tell us.
Texas Notes: Matthews, Harrell, Duncan, Fredette
The Mavericks figure to have a balanced offensive attack again this season, writes Earl K. Sneed of Mavs.com, but max-salary signee Wesley Matthews appears the best bet to take over the role of lead scorer from Monta Ellis, who’s now a Pacer, Sneed adds. That’s not a familiar job for Matthews, but given the similarity between the offense he was a part of under former Mavs assistant Terry Stotts with the Blazers and the one that Mavs coach Rick Carlisle employs, the shooting guard is confident he can expand his game, as Sneed relays.
“You know, I’ve never been one to allow someone to label me,” Matthews said. “I always continue to try to get better. I’m not a content type of person. If they come up with a term three-and-D and they want to fit me in that category, that’s fine. But there’s not a thing that I don’t think I can do on the court, and I’m excited for the opportunity. You know, talking to coach Carlisle, I’m obviously familiar with the system, having ran it in Portland. And talking to him, there’s opportunities that he sees how I can help this team. And I’m excited for those opportunities.”
See more from around the Texas triangle:
- The Rockets and Montrezl Harrell, this year’s No. 32 overall pick, remain in talks, as Calvin Watkins of ESPN.com writes at the end of a report on Jason Terry‘s decision to re-sign with Houston. A market value deal for Harrell, which would entail more than the minimum salary, or a contract that stretches more than two years would trigger a hard cap of $88.74MM for the Rockets, who are already approaching that amount.
- Tim Duncan knows some adjustment will be involved, but he’s enthusiastic about the marquee offseason additions the Spurs made, as Mike Monroe of the San Antonio Express-News relays (Twitter link). Duncan re-signed with the Spurs on a discounted deal with a no-trade clause that will pay him $5.25MM with a player option worth $5,643,750 for 2016/17, according to Eric Pincus of Basketball Insiders.
- The Spurs have a history of turning around faltering careers like his, but the pressure is on Jimmer Fredette to show he can stick in the NBA, as Alex Kennedy of Basketball Insiders examines. Fredette signed only a partially guaranteed deal with the Spurs, so he’ll have to prove his worth right away, Kennedy adds.
And-Ones: Turner, Vandeweghe, Horford
Hawks big man Al Horford is entering the final season of his current deal and will be eligible to become an unrestricted free agent next offseason. But Horford’s eye is on the coming season, and he won’t discuss his future until next summer, Chris Vivlamore of The Atlanta Journal Constitution relays. “My focus right now is to get better individually and help our team be the best team that we can be,” Horford said. “I have the same mindset and that is to help our team win and put us in a good position and try to be better. As far as the contract stuff, I’m going to wait until the season is over. I’m not going to let that linger and be a distraction. The focus is to be on the Hawks, on our team and getting better. Once the season ends, we’ll be able to sit down and talk and figure out all of that.”
Here’s more from around the league:
- The NBA officially announced today that Kiki Vandeweghe has been promoted to Executive Vice President, Basketball Operations for the league, a move that had seemed likely for months. He moves up from vice president of basketball ops and replaces the retiring Rod Thorn. Vandeweghe’s new position puts him in charge of player discipline, among other duties. “Kiki is one of the sharpest basketball minds in the NBA,” NBA commissioner Adam Silver said. “In addition to his storied UCLA and NBA playing career plus his extensive experience as a general manager, coach, and TV analyst, he has most recently helped drive innovations in analytics that are reshaping the league in areas such as scheduling, game statistics, and player health.”
- Myles Turner has transformed from an injured high school junior who was an afterthought to college recruiters into a candidate to start at center for the Pacers this season, as Alex Kennedy of Basketball Insiders details. This year’s No. 11 overall pick performed well at summer league, leading to some thought of him as a Rookie of the Year contender, but coach Frank Vogel has reminded the big man not to get carried away, as Turner tells Kennedy.
- The Rockets have officially hired Matt Brase as the coach of Rio Grande Valley Vipers, their D-League affiliate, the team announced (via Twitter). Brase replaces former coach Nevada Smith, who spent two seasons with the Vipers and compiled an overall record of 60-46, including a mark of 27-23 last season.