The Angst-filled, Anxiety-fueled, Drama-obsessed 2025 NBA OFFSEASON THREAD

have to kick this off at some point so why not with this--david griffin out in new orleans

Baring some terrible lottery luck, the Sixers have managed to keep their top 6 pick.

Assuming they don't move up and get Flagg at 1, who should I hope they get at 5?

Coach Bud out in Phoenix

imagine going back to those watching the 2021 Finals and telling them that Budenholzer would be fired by both the Bucks AND the Suns in less than 4 years. you'd probably never be able to work out what exactly happened but might suspect KD was involved

well, he was basically being fired in real time during the playoffs so i think if you had told someone the bucks won the finals and bud was still fired two seasons later it wouldn't have been that surprising

in fact our understanding in that moment of bud as an obviously good but still highly flawed coach may have been the most accurate one, tho it wasn't really any issues w/ his regular season performances

hard to say much of what happened in phoenix was bud's fault and there's nothing there that a new coach is just going to fix, but there's absolutely no point in keeping him around either.

yeah when you've fired a coach 3 years in a row... maybe it's not the coach?

so the pelicans are going to replace david griffin with joe dumars in a truly alltime loser franchise move

suns had to fire bud cause booker doesnt like him and theyre desperately trying to retain him

not that retaining booker is the right move but whatre you gonna do

its the right move for the fans. i think there would be a pretty big revolt if they traded him away without his request

with those contracts for KD and Beal they're in a tight corner. that is not a team where you want anything to do with the second apron.

they should trade Booker for Austin Reaves and a 2nd rounder

vaguely ominous statement by book

Devin Booker on Phoenix Suns fans still supporting the team after they were eliminated from playoff contention:

“It took a real Suns fan to be in there tonight… I pay respect to the person that it was either their first time or maybe their last time ever seeing me play.”

noted on the lowe pod that booker said how crazy it is that they were just in the finals a few seasons ago and now theyre here.

like i said i think he gives it one more ride with whatever they can scrap together from a KD trade this offseason and if it's looking bleak again he'll ask out at the deadline.

yeah sounds right

simmons said it well on that pod -- if the team and the coach are problems but you're stuck w/ the team then your only option is to fire the coach. even if it's the third year in a row of doing so

say a thing they owe 75M in fired coaches from the last three seasons

Sam Amico
@AmicoHoops
·
3h
Report: Pelicans ownership will mandate Joe Dumars to trade Zion Williamson

the nico stuff today is just so embarrassing lol

a genuine fuckin lame

seems obvious that a lot of this was driven by luka not acting like nico was his boss, turns out only one of them is good at basketball

Sam Amico
@AmicoHoops
·
3h
Report: Pelicans ownership will mandate Joe Dumars to trade Zion Williamson

― lil $CHUB (Spottie), Tuesday, April 15, 2025 3:31 PM (six hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

you can always get the best value when trading the player is a publicly-known mandate iirc

Luka Doncic tells @malika_andrews about throwing his phone and breaking it when he found out he got traded to the Lakers 😳

"My heart was broken honestly." 💔 pic.twitter.com/rfsIGlOaBC

— ESPN (@espn) April 18, 2025

sry for the bad site, but man Nico is such a shitbag

macmahon goes deep on the dysfunction in the mavs training/medical staff and puts it all at the feet of nico https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/44704219/inside-end-luka-doncic-era-dallas-mavericks

that's a good piece, guess bad people in those positions really fucks a franchise up

mcmahon doing some serious journalism, good stuff

For awhile it felt like the era of horrendously inept front office/ownership ppl sowing chaos and creating fiascos might be coming to an end with everyone investing in analytics depts and stakes for competence getting so high… but ladies and gentlemen i am here to tell you that between Nico Harrison, Mat Ishbia, and the Michael Malone/Calvin Booth feud, happy days are here again. The human ego remains undefeated

lol otm

@tim_cato

Nico: “I did know Luka was important to the fan base. I didn’t know quite to this level.”

also this
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GpD44XbWMAEnomK?format=jpg&name=medium
from this article i cant access:
https://alldlls.com/mavericks-nico-harrison-patrick-dumont-rumors-fire-reporting/

what complete fools. truly

hawks fired landry fields as GM... sure

i feel like that’s as close as we’ll ever get to an apology and admission of regret from nico

maybe like... do a poll to a sample of your fans? you know, maybe a little research.

til i learned that there was someone who thought nico harrison had irreproachable basketball expertise

what complete fools. truly

― slob wizard (J0rdan S.), Monday, April 21, 2025 2:29 PM (thirty-seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

seriously unbelievable

how has Harrison not been fired yet lol

bullying/booing works
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Hw9HsVf2bs

get his ass

how has Harrison not been fired yet lol

― lil $CHUB (Spottie), Monday, April 21, 2025 3:30 PM (eighteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

dumonts gotta save face he fires nico now and it looks like he got worked, bet they put someone above nico and let him fade into bolivian

i feel like they’re keeping nico on so as to not be bullied into submission by their fanbase and because the davis/kyrie injuries mean he + they can ostensibly claim that the new vision for the team hasn’t been able to play out yet

i think what would scare me if i was the owner is that nico has been pretty open about not thinking much longer than 3-4 years down the road, just recently replied “i intend to fulfill my contract” (three years) when asked about his long term future with the franchise, and has a demonstrated track record of putting future assets in trades for immediate improvements. so to let that person make even more decisions in that vein seems like a very poor idea when you know you’re at the very least going to be the one person left holding the bag

thats why you gotta give him a boss

feels like one of those situations like the kings & pelicans where they turn to some perceived steady hand, old guy who's been around the block done it before etc who is their joe dumars

they coulda played some of these cards for sure... but once dumont dropped those quotes today you gotta follow that up with a firing, im afraid.

guess nico had another press conference have not checked it out but people are saying its bad

including chuck https://bsky.app/profile/dimeuproxx.bsky.social/post/3lnebxelhg22m

feels like one of those situations like the kings & pelicans where they turn to some perceived steady hand, old guy who's been around the block done it before etc who is their joe dumars

― slob wizard (J0rdan S.), Monday, April 21, 2025 1:02 PM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is the way. always works

only his original partner in crime from his playing days can out-dumars the dumars. time to ring up isiah thomas, nico, that'll right the ship

oh man

watched the colorado-dallas hockey game last night. there was a row of guys sitting behind the stars bench all wearing FIRE NICO t-shirts

yeah maybe it was unclear but that’s exactly what I was advocating. would permit stars to move and still be paid, and prevent the sort of jaylen brown/mobley situations where you’re sort of forced to pay a top 30 player top 10 money

that being said if the purpose of the supermax is to help teams retain their own players, if that extra 5% of the cap were to be removed from the capsheet, maybe they should just get rid of the supermax altogether and flatten out the salaries overall a bit. there could also be an unintended consequence where the only teams who choose to pay that under the table money are the teams withbthr deepest pockets

with the*

one thing they definitely should do tho is make it so that the raises tied to all NBA and other awards don’t count against the cap

this is a very good idea

pulling this from this athletic piece (https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6523492/2025/07/31/restricted-free-agency-jonathan-kuminga-offseason-nba/) with two of their writers discussing RFA as a dialog:

Still, I can’t get the Kuminga/Golden State issue out of my mind. The Warriors don’t want Kuminga, and Kuminga doesn’t want to be in The Bay. Yet, the Warriors weren’t willing to forgo extending him a qualifying offer ($7.9 million for 2025-26), the mechanism that keeps him restricted instead of unrestricted. Thus far, Kuminga doesn’t want to accept it. Given what we know about the risks of an 82-game season on the body, I don’t blame him. I’d want to lock in a longer deal, too.

The problem lies with the qualifying offer, then. Right now, it is 135 percent of your previous contract, in most cases. Of course, you have a window, during the offseason after the player’s third year, to agree to an extension and avoid any sort of free agency following his fourth year.

So, let’s keep that — except if the two sides don’t come to a deal, the qualifying offer is 225 percent of the previous salary (or, make up your own formula, like the NFL’s franchise tag), which makes the one-year deal more enticing for the player and more problematic for the team. Maybe with the raised qualifying offer, you extend the window for teams to exclusively negotiate with their pending RFAs. Essentially, make the team have to make a hard choice about the player’s future, with more paths to unrestricted free agency.

i can't get deep in the specifics of the implications of this idea, but bumping up the qualifying offer to where it has some teeth makes sense to me, and i think the aim of "making the team make a hard choice" would be fairest to everyone involved.

that definitely makes sense

baseball's formula is "the mean salary of the league’s 125 highest-paid players" which last year was a 1/21 contract. per the article below only 14 players (out of hundreds) have accepted a QO since the system was implemented in 2012, but it's still beneficial for teams because if you offer a player a QO and he declines it to sign w/ another team then you get draft pick compensation that comes between rounds 1 and 2 in the draft

https://www.mlb.com/news/2024-25-qualifying-offer-candidates-and-decisions

there can be downsides to this system too ... you could argue it over incentivizes teams to let their players walk. it also strangles the trade deadline market a bit because teams have to go above and beyond a late first round pick in trade value in an offer for any player who is about to be subject to the QO (zac gallen of the dbacks was one such case this season). but it's still a system that gets players to FA far more often than not and balances that out by compensating the teams when that happens. both sides mostly walk away happy. which is all to say that there are a bunch of better ways to do this than how the NBA does it now

San Antonio Spurs star De'Aaron Fox has agreed to a four-year, $229 million maximum contract extension with the franchise, Klutch Sports CEO Rich Paul told ESPN.

its a lot money and im happy for him but i do kinda wonder what the spurs cap sitch will look like when wemby's extension kicks in by 2027-8. could be looking pretty bloated when castle and harper get extended each of the following two years respectively, so i kidna expect fox will not play all 5 of those years in sa. unless he becomes like an all-nba player next to wemby, who knows.

thats a lot of money for deaaron fox, might work out for the spurs as a bridge guy until their young guys reach their prime tho

if it’s true that teams secretly agree to contract extensions with players upon trading for them and honor that agreement regardless of what may happen after then this is definitely one of those situations

totally

for better or worse, spurs are a franchise that honors their word

you really cant tell a guy who specifically wanted to come to your team to take a hike players pay attention to stuff like that

it's true, i think it'll ultimately be fine anyway. fox is clear and way the spurs #2 guy for the next few seasons, and if they experience any real playoff success he'll be a major reason why.

Role Player Hollafame Class of 2025 TIEBREAKER VOTE

just fyi

love the fox deal for the nuggets

there can be downsides to this system too ... you could argue it over incentivizes teams to let their players walk. it also strangles the trade deadline market a bit because teams have to go above and beyond a late first round pick in trade value in an offer for any player who is about to be subject to the QO (zac gallen of the dbacks was one such case this season). but it's still a system that gets players to FA far more often than not and balances that out by compensating the teams when that happens. both sides mostly walk away happy. which is all to say that there are a bunch of better ways to do this than how the NBA does it now

Or you could be like the NFL and offer comp picks for lost free agents AND have a franchise tag. Baseball also has 6 years of team control vs 4 for NBA players and 5 for NFL players. I'd be curious if the NBAPA would prefer 6 years of team control with say the last 2 having some form of salary arbitration like baseball, or 5 without like the NFL (fifth being a team option for only for 1st round picks iirc) instead of having RFA.

I mean, if a player would rather there be a 5th year of control than be an RFA, they could easily do that by accepting the offer sheet...

yeah but the fifth year option for the no 7 overall pick in the NFL is somewhere between $16m-$24m depending on playing time and accomplishments. the QO for kuminga is a well below average salary for an NBA player

Yeah I mean clearly the RFA system stinks for these players, but on the other hand - do we think Kuminga is getting a big offer if he was an UFA? The Nets are the only team with cap room (and the Jazz a little), and they're still tanking.

With the current system heavily incentivizing players to re-sign with their existing teams, no stars move in FA anymore, which means the competing teams don't try to get a ton of cap space. So the only teams with cap space are terrible teams that would rather tank than make marginal improvements and be mediocre.

Although I guess some guys do still get big FA deals - Myles Turner, Nickeil Alexander-Walker

we can debate all day about kuminga's true value or how much he would get on the open market -- it's incontrovertibly true that he would be getting offers in excess of 2/40 w/ the second year not even being guaranteed. there are enough teams who would be interested in a 22 year old wing who was a top 10 pick and has proven to have some level of NBA skillset. NAW getting 4/62 feels like a pretty good comp -- NAW has been better the last few years and is an easier fit, however is four years older and has less of a pedigree. maybe kuminga's offers would be like 4/50? it's way off from what he wants but is still $30m+ more in guarantees than what he has on the table. there is no evidence that the warriors are offering him anything close to what his market value would be as an UFA even in this current cap environment

It's a business decision that the Warriors have decided they are happy to live with. Kerr pretty clearly doesn't think too much of Kuminga, and I assume he'd would prefer to move him for a more reliable veteran. Once they've nailed him down on a cheap short term contract it will make him attractive trade bait for a deal that would certainly include future draft assets, as soon as the CBA allows them to include him in a trade. This maneuver should make that move as profitable for GSW as possible. Yes, this is a cutthroat way of operating.

i think the little bit of leverage that kuminga has over the warriors is that they have never found a trade offer for him that they liked enough to do it and if he signs a deal w/ them that is basically a walking expiring contract it even further nukes his trade value

friends, your offseason hangover cure is finally here

It's the 8th Annual I Love Hoops NBA Role Player Hollafame - Class of 2025 Inductees

FROM SHAMS:

NHL Carolina Hurricanes owner Tom Dundon has agreed to buy the Portland Trail Blazers from the estate of Paul G. Allen for a valuation of over $4 billion, sources tell ESPN.

will the blazers have a real org now

i think the hurricanes have been one of the better hockey franchises for a minute but james dolan also owned the rangers when they were great so who knows

hurricanes have been good but my understanding is that dude is very hands-on; it's worked there so far but not sure that translates to hoops

don’t really know the first thing about hockey, but dundon is apparently not very well-regarded as an owner. he was voted the worst owner in the NHL by a large margin in a recent Athletic poll

also anecdotally for what it’s worth, based on some knowledge from the pro pickleball scene, where he also owns a team, he’s pretty well known for being cheap and out of the picture

some knowledge from the pro pickleball scene

I will not be shamed!

lol

shame shame

pickleball is a nasty vc scheme btw

hmmm not sure I follow

After reading about betting on little league betting and now be alerted to an actual pro pickleball league, I might be bowing out of American sports for a bit

i would merely suggest that you, iirc a literal doctor saving lives and shit, might better spend your free time sleeping or fucking rather than learning about pro pickleball

(and if you must, NHL hockey is much better than pickleball)

I play all the time! it’s fun and a great way to meet ppl. I don’t watch the pros regularly but I keep up enough to know who’s good and what the dramas are

I actually like hockey a lot I have just struggled to get a foothold because it wasn’t part of my formative sports years. like followed the oilers because of mcdavid seems lame

I am probably more informed on the various podcast appearances of michael porter jr than the average fan just because of his connection to the nuggets and my algorithm, but man. I always knew he was a bit of a moron but he’s really not holding back his homeschool ass takes any more

curious mike more like stupid mike

pickleball is a nasty vc scheme btw

― lag∞n, Thursday, August 14, 2025 11:12 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

hmmm not sure I follow

― brony james (k3vin k.), Friday, August 15, 2025 12:38 AM (sixteen hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

ton of money being dumped into it by the usual suspects creating things like fake pro leagues where lebron pretends to own an team and whatnot, the nasty part is doing shit like trying to get tennis courts replaced with their lil wiffle ball game, dont get me wrong playing the game is all well and good my aunt is a fiend but this but does every thing in the world have to have an accompanying pr-investment scheme

oh major league pickleball, the team-based thing, is for sure a pump and dump situation and a bubble about to pop — this runs concurrently with the PPA, which is just individual singles/doubles tournaments much like pro tennis and is the thing I pay attention to. even the PPA is kind of a shady organization but I’m not a “fan” of the tour in that sense, I just watch some matches because I play somewhat seriously and like to watch the best players. I don’t really agree about the tennis courts thing but that’s another conversation I’m sure everyone else would prefer we have elsewhere

you cant disagree that tennis courts are being replaced with pickleball courts thats just a fact

it is is just not a big deal. I don’t like when basketball courts get converted tho

a pretend sport shouldnt be stealing a real sports courts

otm they have vc money they can afford new courts from scratch

pickleball is super fun to play, try it sometime! screw whatever predatory shit is going down with pro leagues but it's a blast to play and great exercise without over stressing your knees and elbows like tennis

I will say that at least people use the pickleball courts at the park

I actually like hockey a lot I have just struggled to get a foothold because it wasn’t part of my formative sports years. like followed the oilers because of mcdavid seems lame

not lame at all! mcdavid regularly does astonishing things, and is incredible to watch, and hasn't even won the cup yet so it's totally fine