She’s right, it’s called charcoal

Must be tough to publish a blog post at 9:20 a.m.

The real story here is the Reddit user who broke this story 24 hours in advance. u/SEAinLA, and has also broken a number of other stories -- the Marcus Smart contract terms, Embiid extension, Kyrie trade, etc. I demand an investigation!

They can dump JR and George Hill after this year for a combined like $3M total — the last year of their deals is very minimally guaranteed.

Partially, but you eventually want to transition any really talented guys away from the catcher position anyway just because of the toll it takes on your body.

In theory it’s not that bad, but having it on the books eliminates any flexibility the Raptors might have had, at the cost of losing in the EC Semis every year*

Denver is below the tax now. They have part (but not all) of the non-taxpayer MLE. So they have a bit more room than you state in this article -- the taxpayer MLE doesn’t apply to them.

Yes, there’s a difference between raging against this because the owner is cheap versus as a result of bad basketball moves.

If you read this author’s articles, most of them are just dumping on teams for not paying luxury tax without any actual nuance of how the NBA salary cap works/opportunity cost/etc.

Otherwise agree with your post, but one note: dumping Faried and Arthur’s salaries don’t give the Nuggets any more room to sign players next year. They were expiring contracts so wouldn’t have been tying up cap space for 2019 (aside from their cap holds, which Denver could have quickly renounced).

Avery Yang’s pieces are all just “they moved salary to avoid playing the luxury tax!!!” so you’ve got to just ignore that.

didn’t say LA wasn’t great for regular folks too. Just that a lot of the drawbacks can be mitigated when you are obscenely wealthy.

There’s a big difference between “regular person living in LA” and “absurdly wealthy/famous/powerful person living in LA”

The Cinderella runs are one of the greatest parts of March Madness. However, the data has consistently borne out year-after-year that mediocre finishers in power conferences perform better in the tournament than the top mid majors.

I’m not really sure this is a legitimate criticism of the team for letting LMAM walk. There’s zero evidence the team doesn’t plan to use the taxpayer MLE — and they might be planning on using it for Carmelo. There are other options for it, too, like splitting it up to sign various second round picks to guaranteed…

It’s entirely possible that they did but he simply turned them down.

Yes, he could be good as well. Rookies are hard to count on for big playoff minutes, though, and when projecting NBA three point shooting, there’s almost no correlation between college three point % and NBA %. Looking at college FT% is much more accurate, and he was only an average at best FT% — 71%.

Update: Wilson Chandler is a semi-useful piece. They could’ve done a lot worse with that cap space than him.

If they can get better versions of those players, sure. Seth Curry has already been signed and Crawford is 38 and has shot 34% from three the last four years and doesn’t do anything else (rebounding, playmaking, defense, etc.).

Yes, I saw his shooting at the end. It wasn’t good. But they were close with the Warriors not because of their outrageous offense, but rather the insanely good defense they played on the Warriors. Ariza is very useful for that.