I just made a thread about trying to steal Claxton or Bruce Brown Jr from the Nets to hurt them and help our picks. I hadn't even seen this. If they don't resign Irving I could see Durant demanding a trade. This is wild. The value of those picks could explode!
Unfortunately, based on past history, not re-signing Irving hurts the value of those picks due to the opportunity to now sign a $30mm+/yr player that shows up and contributes night in and night out. Tying up cap on someone who plays infrequently and causes upheaval when he does play was the absolutely best scenario. Not to mention that KD's interest and will seems to go down when asked to carry the team like he has had to do the past two seasons.
Harden was a bonafide MVP candidate at the time. It's looking like we traded him at precisely the right moment, excluding the fact that we would've had more time/leverage in the offseason.
I'm still upset that we didn't get a blue chip prospect for Harden, one of the best players in the league at the time. The Thunder got SGA, Gallinari, and five first round picks for Paul George after his trade demand. SGA already had an extremely promising rookie season. I understand Kawhi forced LA's hand, but we got the smallest return for a superstar in his prime that I've ever seen. OKC almost got the same draft picks from us (thank god for our 1-4 protection) plus CP3 for Russ, that we got for Harden. The Harden trade might pan out, but so far it has contributed little to our rebuild. We need the Nets to collapse otherwise our only return on Harden was the ability to tank for the past two years and some mid first round picks.
By losing Irving's cap they don't automatically gain an equal amount of cap in its place. I'm absolutely no cap expert but wouldn't it take some pretty big time maneuvering to get enough cap space for a 3rd legit player next to Durant/Simmons? Durant will be 34 starting next season btw
The Nets have $121M in salary committed for next year, not including Kyrie, and the projected salary cap is $122M. Not sure how you think they'll be able to sign a $30mm+/yr player in his place. If he walks they can only replace him with a MLE player. Good luck with that.
They don't have picks, they might go full rebuild and try to get picks back instead of patchwork like the lakers. I could see the Lakers trying to give a first for Irving for Westbrook swap.
If those picks all become top 5 or better what are we going to do with them @D-rock @Nook ? Will we keep adding potential franchise changing players once we finally build our championship competing core? Don't want us to end up like how the warriors drafted wiseman and can't develop him since there was a system in place.
It will depend where we're at that time. We still don't know how Green and this year rookie will turn out in 2 yeas.
No it doesn't. They can let him walk and they still won't have more than the taxpayer MLE to sign a free agent with. They have no cap room to sign another star.
Our situation was different because we owed our top 4 pick, and no blue chip prospect that we could get would be better then the 50% chance to keep that pick, so adding someone like simmons or whoever that would have helped us win would have been a catastrophe
Doesn't matter because no way the nets do that. Westbrook and Durant? And Summon? Lmao, Yeah ok. And then on top of that if the Lakers aren't giving up AD or Lebron the nets can do better than a Lakers first and RW.