2025-26 Team Developments: Trades / Free Agents / News / Rumors / Ideas

Wiggins rumors popping up again - hopefully it's for a for more reasonable price - no Rui and maybe a heaving protected 1st

 

Totally fine with Wiggins for expirings/Dalton/1st. Don't want to send Rui in that deal.

 

Lowe had a sports lawyer on his pod today about the Kawhi thing. The guy brought up a couple of interesting points that I don't think have been discussed much. First, the players association is going to play a role here. They certainly wouldn't be happy about the league rescinding a player's max contract 6 weeks before the season starts when no one has cap space. They probably also won't like the idea of these contracts between team sponsors and players being scrutinized, at the moment the league is pretty hands off on those across the board.

On that latter point, the other owners may think twice about pushing for a big investigation/punishment here. Seeing as there likely isn't going to be some smoking gun piece of paper that says Aspire paid Kawhi so Ballmer doesn't have to, they may not want to accidently create a precedent that teams need to proactively monitor these agreements between sponsors and players. Both Lowe and the guy think it's going to end up a slap on the wrist for the Clippers (loss of a second round pick or something), or nothing. With the lawyer guy leaning a bit toward nothing.

I was disappointed they didn't acknowledge the second prong in the provision about inferring cap circumvention, which seems to require that the player's NBA contract be below fair market value. I haven't seen the talking heads mention it much, if at all.

 

i don't see how you could revoke leonard's contract over it unless you basically caught it in real time.

the thing that disappoints me in the lawyer talk is this idea that it's infringing on rights to police this stuff. it would be different if kawhi just had a weird endorsement deal where he was paid several times more than bigger names for doing nothing. that's weird, but...the only ones hurt there are the company doing this. and one could argue that this company maybe had a vested interest in kawhi remaining with the clippers given their interest in the stadium. where it falls apart is with ballmer's large investment in the same company during the same rough time frame. that sort of thing is quite easy to police, imo.

and in a league where the owners colluded to reverse a perfectly legal trade simply because "it made the lakers too good", i can't really fathom them just looking the other way on something like this. really undermines the integrity/credibility of the operation, imo.

 

it's tough to do without rui because of wiggins's contract size. kleber/gabe/dalton needs a bit more AND heat only have one open spot, so the deal would have to expand. with rui in, it's a lot simpler that way (but makes less sense for us).

i agree that if it's expirings/knecht/lotto protected swap, i'm in. i'm not sure i throw a first on top of knecht considering that miami clearly wants off wiggins. we're giving up a ton of flexibilty next summer in such a trade (unless they take vando instead of an expiring).

 

I don't think it would be all that hard to flip Wiggins again if necessary. More teams are going to have space next summer and at least a couple will be bad teams that are going to rent it out for assets. I think you could probably dump an expiring Wiggins on someone else if you needed too, or another contending team might want him and re-direct their salary to the cap space team at the cost of an asset. But then you're trading some assets for Wiggins, and then attaching some other asset it to flip him 12 months later. Doesn't really make sense from a value proposition unless you think Wiggins makes you a legit contender. I'd be willing to roll that dice, but completely get why others wouldn't.

I could maybe get there with Rui + Dalton (no picks) for Wiggins too. We may be sending out more talent than we're bringing in, but the fit could be better. Plus Rui's long-term status with us seems to be in limbo at the moment anyway. Since I started thinking about Luka as a 3/4 defensively more than a 2/3, Rui has kind of become the square peg in a round whole rather than Austin. At least defensively. Offensively, he's a great corner shooter for Luka and Austin.

 

Do something (Silver). Do it now.

 

I’ve said it before, but I just don’t see the appetite from owners and/or the players association to really go into this too deeply.

The players union will stand up for Kawhi and will try to dissuade investigations into endorsement deals as they already feel they’re being undervalued in the CBA.

The owners know Balmer is good for the league’s valuation and he’s going to pay hundreds of millions in luxury tax over the next decade.

And it’s kind of a weird situation right? If you punish them you’re admitting you believe they did wrong doing, so if it’s a small punishment like a loss of a second round or a fine - it sets a precedent for future owners to do similar stuff. And it also loses face with the league and fans, we went light on cheating.

If you punish them harshly and make an example of them, which is probably the fairest outcome, who has the appetite as I stated above?

So I assume the punishment will be non existent but there will be a kind of notice to owners behind closed doors, this won’t be tolerated, next time it happens, all bets are off. To the fans, they’ll use aspiration as the fall guy from the investigation and say that they pulled fraud on everyone.

 

The counter to this is if the league doesn't do something about this the less wealthy owners are going to be missing out on a bunch of luxury tax payments from Ballmer and like not just now but into the future. If you let this go no reason it won't be done again.

The cheapskates should be all over this. And frankly most of the leagues uber rich owners are playing at the cheap tables in Vegas compared to Ballmer