And-Ones: Nowitzki, 2024 Draft, Extension-Eligible Players
Former Mavericks forward Dirk Nowitzki, who will be part of a star-studded 2023 Basketball Hall of Fame class, spoke to Brad Townsend of the Dallas Morning News about his upcoming enshrinement, which will take place next Saturday (August 12).
As Nowitzki explains, growing up in Germany, he was unaware about the importance of the Hall of Fame. It wasn’t until he entered the NBA that he began to learn how meaningful it is to the game’s players. He visited the Hall of Fame in person for the first time in 2018, when he witnessed the inductions of his former teammates Steve Nash and Jason Kidd. Five years later, Nash and Kidd will be the co-presenters introducing Nowitzki when he enters the Hall.
“I remember being so happy for those two; that they got to go in for the careers they had,” Nowitzki said. “I remember just sitting and soaking it all in and listening to all the speeches. Now I’m so happy, I actually can’t believe it’s my time now.”
Here are a few more odds and ends from around the basketball world:
- Jonathan Wasserman of Bleacher Report takes a look at six key storylines to watch in advance of the 2024 NBA draft, starting with a wide-open race for the No. 1 pick. One of the other topics of intrigue highlighted by Wasserman relates to the standout freshmen who will be looking to crack crowded, established rotations.
- Yossi Gozlan of HoopsHype ranks the players who are eligible to be extended before the start of the 2023/24 season, including Bucks forward Giannis Antetokounmpo and Clippers stars Kawhi Leonard and Paul George. While some of the players on Gozlan’s list figure to get new deals in the coming weeks or months, others will likely wait until 2024 or beyond to sign their next contracts.
- Depending on where the 2024/25 salary cap lands, Celtics wing Jaylen Brown has a chance to become the first player to earn $300MM on a single NBA contract. However, he certainly won’t be the last, according to Mike Vornukov of The Athletic, who explores what contracts could look like in a few years if the cap keeps increase at its current exponential rate.
Anthony Davis Becomes Extension-Eligible
Lakers big man Anthony Davis is now eligible to sign a veteran contract extension, as Bobby Marks of ESPN tweets.
Davis officially signed his current contract, a five-year, maximum-salary deal, on December 3, 2020. Typically, a player who signs a five-year contract must wait three full calendar years before he becomes extension-eligible, but the 2020 offseason was an unusual one due to the schedule irregularities caused by COVID-19.
Free agency didn’t begin until November 21 that year, with the regular season tipping off on December 22. The NBA determined that Dec. 3 of that offseason would have corresponded to August 4 in a typical offseason, which is why Davis became extension-eligible today.
Davis has two years left on his current contract — he’s owed a guaranteed $40,600,080 salary in 2023/24, with an early termination option worth $43,219,440 in 2024/25.
Exercising an early termination option is essentially the same as declining a player option — in either case, the player ends his contract a year early. However, there’s one key difference: an early termination option can’t be exercised as part of a veteran extension agreement. That means that if Davis wants to sign an extension this offseason, he would have to decline that ETO, which would lock in his current 2024/25 salary and result in his new deal beginning in ’25/26.
Davis will have until the day before the regular season begins in October to sign an extension this year. If he and the Lakers haven’t worked out a new agreement by that time, he would have to wait until the 2024 offseason to revisit his contract situation. At that point, he could either opt into the final year of his current contract and extend off that deal, or opt out and seek a new contract as a free agent.
The maximum value of a potential extension for Davis will depend on the rate at which the NBA’s salary cap increases during the next two offseasons. In an NBA Today appearance on ESPN on Thursday (YouTube link), Marks stated that a three-year extension for Davis could be worth up to about $169.1MM, but that would be based on a relatively conservative cap projection in the neighborhood of $149MM in 2025/26.
If the cap were to increase by the maximum allowable 10% in each of the next two seasons, a three-year extension for Davis could instead be worth as much as $186.6MM.
That may seem like a risky investment for a player who has battled injuries throughout his career and who wasn’t necessarily playing at a superstar level offensively during the Lakers’ postseason run this spring (he averaged 22.6 points per game in 16 contests).
However, Davis is still one of the NBA’s top two-way stars when healthy, and he’s only 30 years old. It’s worth noting too that extending him now would pay off in the long run if the alternative is negotiating a maximum-salary free agent contract of up to five years in 2024. If the Lakers were to extend Davis now, they’d lock him into a salary below his max in 2024/25 and would only have to commit to up to four total seasons beyond ’23/24, rather than five, reducing some of the risk on the back end.
ESPN’s Brian Windhorst recently suggested that there’s an expectation the Lakers will make Davis an extension offer fairly soon, while his colleague Dave McMenamin predicted the two sides will have a deal in place before training camp.
Team USA Notes: Lineup, Kerr, Edwards, Banchero
Team USA head coach Steve Kerr isn’t prepared to name a starting five for this summer’s World Cup squad, telling reporters on Thursday at the U.S. training camp that things will “shake out over the next week or two,” as Tim Bontemps of ESPN relays.
Although Team USA’s roster features plenty of talent, it’s primarily made up of younger players who don’t have a long list of postseason awards and/or playoff achievements on their respective résumés. Most of the roster also doesn’t have much – if any – international experience, so Kerr and his staff will have to figure out quickly which players are best suited for the international game and who fits together the best.
“It’s not easy, because usually you’re talking about 12 starters in the NBA. … These guys are all starters and great players,” Kerr said. “Part of the FIBA commitment is none of that stuff matters. There’s no contracts on the line. Nobody’s getting traded. This is just us for six weeks, and I expect the same thing to happen here is what happened in [2021, for the Olympics] and in [2019, for the World Cup], in terms of the buy-in and the effort and the energy and the intensity, and, we’ll see what happens.”
Here’s more on Team USA as it begins to prepare for the 2023 World Cup, which will take place in the Philippines, Japan, and Indonesia:
- In a separate ESPN.com story, Bontemps explores how the 2023 U.S. team can draw inspiration from the 2010 iteration of Team USA, which didn’t feature anyone from the 2008 Olympic roster and was derisively nicknamed the “B-Team.” Bontemps draws parallels between rising Timberwolves star Anthony Edwards and the 2010 version of Kevin Durant, who helped lead the U.S. to World Cup gold 13 years ago during his ascension to NBA superstardom. Edwards has a chance to follow a similar trajectory, as Bontemps outlines.
- Despite its relative inexperience, this U.S. squad appears better positioned for World Cup success than the 2019 group, which finished a disappointing seventh, according to Joe Vardon of The Athletic, who predicts that Team USA will come away with a gold medal this time around. Vardon predicts that Jaren Jackson, Jalen Brunson, Mikal Bridges, and Brandon Ingram will be starters, with Edwards, Tyrese Haliburton, and Austin Reaves vying for the final starting slot.
- Team USA forward Paolo Banchero tells Vardon that his decision on whether to represent the U.S. or the Italian national team was a difficult, “drawn-out process.” The recruitment of Banchero by former Magic star Grant Hill – now Team USA’s managing director – and the fact that Paolo’s mother played for the U.S. women’s team in the 1990s helped tip the scales in favor of Team USA, as the reigning Rookie of The Year explains.
- Banchero also told Vardon that he recognizes he may have a limited role on a talented U.S. roster and he’s prepared to do whatever is asked of him. “With Orlando, I’m the leading scorer, kind of the main guy,” he said. “But here, and I’m able to do other things, whether it is affecting the game defensively, on the glass, with my passing, whatever it may be. … I think I can showcase the other parts of my game. Whatever the team needs, I would try to show that.”
Josh Hart: “Hopefully” I’ll Sign Extension With Knicks
Speaking to reporters on Thursday at Team USA’s pre-World Cup training camp, Knicks forward Josh Hart discussed his decision to pick up his $12.96MM player option for 2023/24, as well as the club’s addition of his former Villanova teammate Donte DiVincenzo.
Perhaps most importantly, Hart addressed his contract situation going forward, expressing a desire to sign a deal that will keep him in New York for multiple seasons.
“Hopefully,” Hart said when asked about a long-term extension, per Ethan Sears of The New York Post. “Opting in, I was gonna take it one day at a time. We get there and then we can start having that conversation. Hopefully — that’s a place where I want to be and a place I want to call home. So we’ll see.
“… It was a hard decision (to exercise the option), but New York is somewhere I wanted to be. And we’ll get to everything else, hopefully later down the line. But opted in, New York is where I want to be. It’s where I want to call home. I feel like that was the best decision to do.”
Hart will become extension-eligible on August 9. He would be able to tack up to four new years onto the final year of his current contract and could receive a raise of up to 40% on his current $12.96MM salary, with subsequent 8% annual increases. That would work out to a maximum starting salary of $18,144,000 and a four-year total of $81,285,120.
The fact that Hart decided to play for Team USA this summer is a strong signal that he and the Knicks intend to get something done sooner rather than later, in Sears’ view. The 28-year-old admitted he had “a little bit” of apprehension about suiting up for the U.S. World Cup team and risking injury before he locked in a long-term deal, but he determined that the opportunity to achieve the dream of representing his country was worth it.
As Ian Begley of SNY.tv writes, when Hart opted into a $12.96MM salary for the coming season rather than declining his option to negotiate a higher salary, it helped generate enough flexibility below the luxury tax line for the Knicks to make a competitive offer for DiVincenzo, who signed a four-year deal worth about $47MM, plus incentives.
The Knicks weren’t DiVincenzo’s only suitor, so Hart may not have known that his option decision would result in a reunion with his former Wildcats teammate. But he said on Thursday that, in picking up his option, he wanted to give New York the “chance to be the best team that it could be and help them compete.” He’s excited for what DiVincenzo will bring to the team.
“He’s a New York style player. That blue-collar, hard work thing – that’s what he does,” Hart said, according to Begley. “He’s going to go defend multiple positions, be tough, be gritty, help us win games. New York is going to love him. He’s definitely a guy that we needed, that we wanted and happy we got.”
Atlantic Notes: Harrell, Nets, Hart, Brown
Although reserve big man Montrezl Harrell tore the ACL and medial meniscus in his right knee this summer, the Sixers intend to keep him on their roster, at least for the time being, per Keith Pompey of The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Though Pompey notes that Harrell, who inked a one-year, minimum-salary contract to return to the Sixers, most likely will not recuperate in time to play for the team in 2023/24, he believes retaining the former Sixth Man of the Year is the right play. Pompey suggests the Sixers could look to package his salary in a trade later.
Given that Harrell was the third or possibly fourth center on the club’s depth chart, he wasn’t likely to have played major minutes anyway. The 6’7″ vet averaged 5.6 PPG and 2.8 RPG in 2022/23, his lowest numbers since his 2015/16 rookie season.
There’s more out of the Atlantic Division:
- The Nets still have three roster spots – including one two-way slot – open ahead of training camp this fall, Net Income of Nets Daily writes. Net Income notes that the team still has its bi-annual exception and full mid-level exception at its disposal, and its $157MM in cumulative player salary puts it $9MM beneath the NBA’s $165MM luxury tax threshold. The free agent market at this point is a bit threadbare, so one wonders if Brooklyn would opt to use more than a veteran’s minimum on any of the still-available personnel.
- Knicks swingman Josh Hart becomes extension-eligible on August 9, but as Fred Katz of The Athletic notes, that isn’t stopping him from partaking in Team USA during this month’s FIBA World Cup. Katz writes that the typical move these days for players with big money potentially on the line is to preserve their bodies and avoid possible offseason injuries until a deal is done, but Hart is happy to buck that trend. An extension of his current deal could net him, at most, a four-year contract worth up to $81.3MM.
- Although he inked a new five-year, maximum-salary contract extension this offseason, All-Star Celtics wing Jaylen Brown still has one glaring issue in his game: protecting the ball. As Jared Weiss of The Athletic notes, Brown coughed up the ball 66 times during the 2023 playoffs, including eight incredibly costly turnovers in a Game 7 Eastern Conference Finals defeat against the Heat. Weiss takes a look at how Brown might be able to limit this particular problem going forward.
Terrence Williams Sentenced To 10 Years In Prison
Former Nets swingman Terrence Williams has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for defrauding the NBA’s Health and Welfare Benefit Plan for former players, per Priscilla DeGregory of The New York Post.
In 2021, Williams and 17 other ex-NBA pros were charged for an elaborate plot to steal $5MM from the league. Last year, he pled guilty to coordinating the scheme, which required he and his fellow ex-players cumulatively submit at least that amount in phony claims between 2017 and 2021. Williams also earned $346K in kickbacks for setting up the operation, DeGregory notes.
The most notable name on the list of additional players charged was former six-time All-Defensive Team shooting guard Tony Allen, who won a title with the Celtics as a reserve in 2008.
As part of an already established plea agreement, Williams was also ordered to pay $3.1MM in restitution and forfeitures. $2.5MM of that sum will be doled out in restitution to the league’s health care plan, while $650K will be forfeited to the federal government.
“Williams recruited medical professionals and others to expand his criminal conspiracy and maximize his ill-gotten gains,” the case’s prosecutor said, per DeGregory. “Williams not only lined his pockets through fraud and deceit, but he also stole the identities of others and threatened a witness to further his criminal endeavors.”
The then-New Jersey Nets selected Williams with the No. 11 pick in the 2009 draft out of Louisville. He spent just a year-and-a-half with the Nets, and subsequently bounced around during a brief four-season NBA career. Across 153 regular season games with the Nets, Rockets, Kings and Celtics, Williams averaged 7.1 PPG on .412/.317/.659 shooting splits, 3.6 RPG, 2.4 RPG and 0.5 SPG.
In addition to a later stint with the Lakers’ NBAGL affiliate, then called the Los Angeles D-Fenders, the 6’6″ shooting guard/small forward also played for international clubs in China, Turkey, the Dominican Republic, the Philipines, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Israel, and Venezuela.
Serge Ibaka Hopes To Keep Playing In NBA
Veteran big man Serge Ibaka, who has been in the NBA for 14 seasons, is still looking for his next opportunity as free agency’s second month gets underway.
In a new interview with Shams Charania of The Athletic (Twitter video link), Ibaka explained how he can still help clubs in the league ahead of the 2023/24 season.
“A lot of things that I can bring to a team… basketball, experience of winning, playing with great players,” Ibaka said.
Speaking to Charania, the 33-year-old explained, from his perspective, how his season as a deep-bench reserve with the Bucks went awry. He was flipped to the Pacers in February as part of the four-team deal that sent Kevin Durant to the Suns, and Indiana subsequently waived him. Ibaka claimed that Milwaukee told him ahead of the year that he would be used as an injury replacement.
“[Then-head coach Mike Budenholzer] told me to my face: Listen, you’re coming here, I promise you nothing — but you never know, it’s a long season, guys can have injuries, you have to stay ready,” Ibaka said (h/t to The Athletic’s Eric Nehm and other staffers).
That proved not to be the case, and the club was cagey about why it continued to mostly hold him out even when big men ahead of him in the team’s rotation were hurt.
“It got to some point where I cannot take this anymore,” Ibaka said. “I love this game so much, but if this is going to take my peace of mind, my joy, it’s not worth it. I earned my respect in this league. At least communicate. I’m not asking about playing, I’m just asking for communication.”
Across just 16 games with the Bucks, the 6’10” center/power forward averaged 4.1 PPG and 2.8 RPG last season. Though the 2019 NBA champion may no longer be his peak All-Defensive Team self, he at least seems optimistic that he has more left to give.
Dmytro Skapinstev Signs Exhibit 10 Deal With Knicks
The Knicks have inked center Dmytro Skapintsev to an Exhibit 10 contract, the team announced on Thursday (Twitter link).
The 7’1″ big man most recently suited up for the Knicks’ Summer League team, where he averaged 7.4 PPG, 6.6 RPG, 2.6 APG and 1.8 BPG.
Skapintsev played internationally for clubs in his native Ukraine and in Lithuania before joining New York’s G League affiliate, the Westchester Knicks, for the 2022/23 season.
Across 28 regular season games with Westchester last year, including eight starts, Skapintsev averaged 8.1 PPG, 5.9 RPG, 1.6 APG, and 0.6 BPG. He shot 60.8% from the floor and 77.8% from the field in those contests.
Exhibit 10 deals can include optional bonuses worth up to $75K. If the 25-year-old is cut prior to the regular season, he could rejoin Westchester as a returning rights player. Should he stay with Westchester for at least 60 days, he would earn that bonus.
New York now has a full 21-man offseason roster, with 12 players on fully or partially guaranteed contracts, six on non-guaranteed deals, and three on two-way pacts.
Knicks Sign Obadiah Noel To Exhibit 10 Deal
5:32pm: New York has officially announced the signing of Noel to an Exhibit 10 deal (Twitter link).
1:12pm: The Knicks intend to sign free agent guard Obadiah Noel to an Exhibit 10 contract, league sources tell Michael Scotto of HoopsHype (Twitter link).
It will be the first NBA contract for Noel, who went undrafted in 2021 after four college seasons at UMass-Lowell. The 24-year-old has spent his first two professional seasons playing in the G League.
During the 2021/22 season, Noel played for the Raptors 905, Toronto’s NBAGL affiliate. He held modest averages of 6.2 points on .393/.232/.783 shooting in 22 regular season games (17.1 minutes).
The 6’4″ guard began the ’22/23 G League season with the Raptors 905 during the fall Showcase Cup, but his minutes were further reduced, and he caught on with the Westchester Knicks, New York’s affiliate. He had a solid showing during the regular season, averaging 10.6 points, 2.9 rebounds, 2.1 assists and 1.4 steals on .487/.382/.689 shooting in 29 games (26.8 minutes).
With a crowded backcourt and all three two-way slots filled, the most likely outcome is that Noel will be waived by the Knicks before the season starts. In that scenario, he would be eligible for a bonus worth up to $75K if he spends at least 60 days with Westchester in ’23/24.
Hornets Waive Xavier Sneed
The Hornets have waived forward Xavier Sneed, who was on a two-way contract, per a team press release.
Sneed, 25, spent most of the 2022/23 season with the Greensboro Swarm, Charlotte’s NBAGL affiliate, appearing in a total of 44 games with the club across the Showcase Cup and regular season. In 32 regular season appearances (31.2 MPG), Sneed averaged 12.5 points, 4.7 rebounds, and 2.4 assists per night with a .393/.318/.738 shooting line.
He received a 10-day contract from Charlotte at the end of last season and then signed a two-way deal just before the season ended. He appeared in four games with the Hornets, averaging 4.3 points in 12.0 minutes.
Sneed, who also had brief NBA stints with the Grizzlies and Jazz, has spent the bulk of his three-year professional career playing in the G League, primarily with the Swarm. The former Kansas State product went undrafted in 2020.
As our roster count shows, the Hornets currently have 14 players on standard contracts (12 guaranteed), a pair on two-way deals after releasing Sneed, two unsigned restricted free agents (P.J. Washington and Theo Maledon), and one unsigned draft pick (James Nnaji, who was selected 31st overall).