Josh Howard done for the season with torn ACL Flip says.
It looks like Howard has played his last game as a Wizard. Washington has a team option for another year ($11.8 million), but they’re not likely to exercise it. Without his salary on the books, the franchise can sign a max free agent this summer.
In his trade deadline rankings, Chad Ford discusses the Grizzlies’ quandary with Rudy Gay.
With so many teams getting under the cap, it almost guarantees that one of them will panic this summer and overpay for Rudy Gay. (The Knicks, Nets, Clippers and Wizards all like him.) Will Michael Heisley really pay the max for Gay? If not, chances are they lose him this summer.
Gay fits the profile of a non-max player who could very well get max money this summer. There are eight teams that currently have enough money to sign a max player and two of those teams (the Knicks and the Heat) that have enough cap space to sign two max free agents. So, this summer, there will be room for 10 max players, but looking at our list of the top potential free agents, there are only three players — LeBron, Wade and Bosh — that I’d offer a max contract. Granted, guys like Amare Stoudemire, Joe Johnson and Carlos Boozer are likely to get huge long-term contracts, but still, that’s just six guys for 10 slots (not even counting teams like Cleveland and Toronto, who can re-sign LeBron and Bosh, respectively).
This means non-max players like Rudy Gay and David Lee will probably end up with bigger contracts than they deserve because the teams that miss out on LeBron, Wade, Bosh, Amare, etc. will panic and overpay so that they aren’t stuck with a gaping hole heading into the 2010-11 season. Certain teams may hold onto their cap space for the following summer, but it depends on who is likely to be available and how poor of a season that team is prepared to have.
So if you’re a fan of the Nets, Clippers, Timberwolves, Kings and Wizards…or the Grizzlies…be prepared.
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No one really knows what LeBron will do this summer, not even LeBron. But Mitch Lawrence of the NY Daily News says you can cross three teams off the list.
First, the Clippers…
James isn’t playing second fiddle to Kobe Bryant and the Lakers, even if Clippers GM Mike Dunleavy traded off Marcus Camby, Al Thornton, Sebastian Telfair and got rid of Ricky Davis to create a maximum salary slot for the express purpose of landing James.
Kobe is turning 32 this season and isn’t going to play forever. He has already played 1,158 games and his knees are eventually going to give out, so LeBron wouldn’t be playing “second fiddle” for long, if at all. LeBron might see the taking of L.A. and the resurrecting of a long-maligned franchise as a worthy challenge. Will LeBron sign with the Clippers? Probably not, but not because of Kobe. The Clippers’ best player, Baron Davis, is already 30 and injury-prone, and owner Donald Sterling doesn’t have a very good reputation.
Next up, the Nets…
Ric Bucher wrote the following in the ESPN rumors section:
…since Raptors PF/C Chris Bosh made it clear over All-Star weekend that he’s not interested in leaving Toronto to be the second banana elsewhere.
Here’s what Bosh actually said, courtesy of the Toronto Sun.
“I was just looking at what people say and it’s like: ‘Chris is going to go here and play with him or this, this and that.’ I’m like: Wait a minute. I feel like I should be built around. And maybe that’s just my ego talking, but I feel that I’m a very good player in this league and I’m only going to get better. So … maybe we should be getting somebody (in Toronto).”
From the what-did-he-mean-by-that portion of the program came this little tidbit from Bosh: “Things you like and dislike change daily,” Bosh said, “(which makes it) impossible almost to not only predict the future, but predict your feelings.”
How do you leave this exchange thinking that Bosh “made it clear that he’s not interested in leaving Toronto to be the second banana elsewhere”? To me, it sounds like a guy who is angry at the media for assuming that he’s leaving Toronto this summer. He suggests that the team should be “getting somebody” in Toronto, but the Raptors aren’t going to have any cap space for the next couple of summers — they did their “getting” last summer when they signed Hedo Turkoglu.
So if the Raptors finish the season with 44 or 45 wins and bow out in the first round of the playoffs, does anyone really think that Bosh isn’t going to think long and hard about playing elsewhere? Being “built around” is fine, but as history has shown, it takes two superstars to win a NBA championship, and the Raptors only have one.
Bucher is taking Bosh’s words as gospel — that he’s not leaving Toronto to play with LeBron or Wade elsewhere — but in the very same interview Bosh admits what he likes or doesn’t like changes daily, and says it’s impossible to predict the future. I have no problem if Raptor fans find comfort in Bosh’s words, but Bucher is making that extra leap by saying that Bosh has ruled out playing somewhere else, and that’s simply not what the man said.
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Ronnie Brewer has been dealt by Utah to the Grizzlies in exchange for a protected future first-round pick, according to Ross Siler of the Salt Lake Tribune, Woj and a bunch of others with Twitter accounts.
The deal makes sense: By trading Brewer, the Jazz ease their logjam — sorry, Kevin — of wing players, freeing minutes for Wesley Matthews, C.J. Miles and Kyle Korver. More significantly, the Jazz will ease their luxury-tax burden, with the Grizzlies having the cap space to absorb Brewer’s $2.7 million salary.
“We had three or four players that were competing for minutes and we were able to turn that into a future asset,” Jazz general manager Kevin O’Connor told Siler.
Memphis needed a guard, and Brewer is a decent player, though his PER is down to 13.12 this season after a great sophomore (18.30) season and a solid third (16.19) year. (Remember, 15.00 is the league average.) The bottom line is that he’s playing the same minutes (31+) but his shot attempts dropped from 10.2 per game last season to 7.8 this season. That’s going to result in a drop in PER.
On his Twitter page, Adrian Wojnarowski speculated about what this means for Rudy Gay:
This means Memphis is unlikely to pay Rudy Gay this summer.
I wouldn’t go that far, but it does give Memphis a solid starter if Gay does bolt this summer.
Photo from fOTOGLIF
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