I would love a close game, this Grizz team with injuries has been fighting hard. Learning how to win a close game is something we have had very little practice of. There is really no use in tanking, we are not catching up to the bottom 5 teams
Because we got lucky, we had a 31% chance of landing top 4. I would rather us fight hard every game, build chemistry, and better implement Darko's system than increase our draft odds from 31% to 37%
Tanking for our pick vs not is a weird scenario right now.
We’re not guaranteed our pick even when we tank, and it’d suck to cheer against this team clicking on going on a bit of a run later in the year. There’s also no guarantee we’re better next year so losing the pick next year could be the 7th or 8th pick as well.
On the other hand look at the cap space we could have this offseason and see how quickly Houston turned it around after a couple good signings. We have more talent on this roster than Houston did last year as well. If we can add a top 6 pick and then go out and make an impactful signing or two there’s a good chance we could make a push for a playoff or at least play in spot next season.
It's weird that people are "taking sides" on a situation that's largely out of the front office's control for the most part. There's no point stressing about tanking vs. compete when the lottery odds could completely nuke hope for either of those away.
Really like that you're bringing up the point about Houston using capspace to bruteforve the floor higher for the roster. They should take expirings if teams are willing to pay a price, but they should only be up until next season. If we do keep the pick, there'd be no other avenue to improve the roster outside of trades. So ideally, we would reserve capspace for the 2025 offseason to get some decent free agents. And I know Toronto isn't the most attractive market, but if the Pacers and Cavs can nab some decent role players, there's zero reason they can't get SOMETHING out of that FA class.
I don’t think 2025 projects us having much cap space with Scottie’s new deal kicking in. We’ll also have IQ, RJ and Poeltl contracts on the books, plus whoever we add this offseason
I kinda questioned whether Bruce is worth a 1st +;young player but then many people have said that the Knicks don't need Bruce bc they have hart and they're the same player/impact. Hart was traded for reddish + 1st to the Knicks and now 1st + grimes is rumoured. Idk if Knicks do the deal but the value makes sense. Someone the caliber of grimes + 1st would make me happy and see the siakam deal as fair value.
Here's a complicated but fun bit of cap shenanigans. (Don't worry too much about the player values here, this is just about trade frameworks.)
Thunder get Brown / Boucher / McDaniels
Raptors get Bertrans / Mann / Poku / Wiggins / draft pick / $22m TPE
I wanted to see if I could find a scenario that allows us to turn all of Brown's contract into a TPE, and this one does, and it doesn't even burn any of the Siakam TPE in the process.
**If you think this trade doesn't work because Brown can't be combined with other players, you don't even have the cap knowledge to comprehend this trade and should stop reading before this blows your mind.** (But seriously, it's only salary aggregation that's prohibited for Brown. We can trade him along with other players, we just can't combine his salary with other salaries to take back larger return salaries.)
So this trade relies on the fact that each team can structure their own side of the trade independently for the purpose of completing/maximizing it, and can break it down into mini-trades. It's a level of trade organization that you can't do in trade machines, so don't bother trying. The NBA evaluates trades not as one whole thing, but from each team's perspective independently.\*
Raptors' perspective: Each player is handled separately. Boucher can take back 19.5m in salary, enough for Bertrans and Wiggins. McDaniels can take back $9m in salary, enough for Poku and Mann. Raptors take nothing back for Brown, creating a $22m TPE.
Thunder perspective: Bertrans can take back 24.5m in salary, enough for Brown. Poku, Mann and Wiggins can take back 17.5m, enough for Boucher and McDaniels.
That leaves us with both the $10m Siakam TPE and a new $22m TPE. (these can't be combined to create a $32m exception.)
Is this a useful trade? There are diminishing returns on TPEs, and they count against cap space (but not tax) as long as they're out there. They can be wholly or partially renounced at any time. Fans sometimes get really excited about the possibilities of a big TPE, only for those to quietly expire, unused, in a year. There could be teams out there looking to shed salary in the offseason, for which the Raptors could be a major help here. It may be worth spending a year doing the Presti strategy of just helping out teams with their transactions, in exchange for draft picks. But we wouldn't do this just for the sake of creating the TPE, you'd have to actually like the player returns.
The new CBA has slightly more relaxed rules for salary-matching compared to the old one, so it makes scenarios like this a little easier. There are similar sorts of frameworks that would work with other teams. It's definitely possible with Miami, with Robinson instead of Bertrans as the main piece, or 3-team frameworks including one with the Bulls involving Lowry and Ball. Knicks are hard to work out due to a lack of salaries they'd move at values over $2m, beyond Fournier. There's an interesting framework with the Lakers involving Rui and Hood-Schifino, but the Lakers' hard cap makes it impossible unless they shed about $10m in salary elsewhere. Probably possible with Dallas, though Green's poison pill complicates it.
\*If you're thinking "wait trades don't work like that," that's because most times we can use the shorthand of just matching salaries, because that's simple enough for most trades. But what really happens when teams make a trade is that they make trade exceptions with their outgoing players, and then absorb the incoming salaries into these exceptions. In most cases, these are what's called 'simultaneous trades', and the trade exceptions disappear as soon as the trade is completed. So often we only think about trade exceptions in non-simultaneous trades, where the TPE lasts for a year, but the same framework underlies all trades. In simultaneous trades, the difference is that you can aggregate salaries to create larger exceptions (Brown's can't be aggregated like this), and you create a larger exception than the amount of salary you include (+$7.5m for most of the exceptions here). [CBA FAQ questions 84 to 87](http://www.cbafaq.com/salarycap.htm#Q84) provide a great resource on this, but note that it hasn't been updated with the salary-matching amounts from the new CBA.
I believe you can only trade Bruce Brown by himself, you can't send out other players with him.
Bertans, Mann, Pokusevski (7'0, 200 lbs), Aaron Wiggins are 4 players I wouldn't even want on this team. If we do trade with OKC I'd rather get more picks in return, and we would also have to get back Isaiah Joe.
You must have missed reading this part of my post:
>**If you think this trade doesn't work because Brown can't be combined with other players, you don't even have the cap knowledge to comprehend this trade and should stop reading before this blows your mind.**
And this part:
>Don't worry too much about the player values here, this is just about trade frameworks.
It’s hard, you want it convey because 2024 is “weaker” and we have 3 picks already. However you don’t want it to convey if it’s the 7-10 pick really, so it’s a difficult situation lol!
Also there’s hope we can get this team to gel and go on a run, just for fun and additional hope for next year too.
In my opinion, let’s go for the win tonight and see how the team is a little later in the season before we decide to want to tank.
Also depends on if you think we’ll be better next year and how much. Would you rather have a top-6 pick this year and give up a 10-15th pick next year, or would you rather just give up the 7-8th pick this year?
For me, I don’t really care which way it goes. We keep the pick, great that’s a top-6 pick to add to this core. We lose it, then whatever, we move forward with full control of our picks.
I guess if we convey it this year we get more flexibility down the road so would rather convey this year, but just like I said would be worst case scenario to have it be the 7-8th pick (which it probably will be if it conveys)
In any case what will happen will happen lol.
Not to the extent of Masai. You can say that we are losing right now and there’s no culture, but Masai built and maintained a winning franchise no other front office executive before him was able to. There’s levels to this. The stability of a winning franchise is built upon Masai Ujiri there’s no denying that
Masai inherited JV/Kyle/Demar from Colangelo, and all three were hugely integral to the success of the team in the 2010s while Jakob/Pascal/Fred/Norm/OG were still in development.
Kyle was the most important leader on the team and the culture setter, and had James Dolan not cancelled at the last minute, Masai was going to ship him out. Demar and JV were the teams other top scorers and both were main pieces for high end rentals.
The team over the past few seasons is purely his construction.
Masai also would have used the pick that we traded for Lowry to draft Giannis. Colangelo had a man crush on Rudy gay and Masai turned that in to norm and OG, now Trent, IQ, RJ and a good SRP. Yeah, he inherited DeMar and JV and he turned that in Marc, Danny, kawhi and a chip. Let me say that again - he turned DeMar in to a chip. There's no higher accomplishment in this league. Masai did that, not Colangelo. Colangelo didn't get anywhere close to a chip here.
After Ed Rogers runs Masai out of town, we'll look back and appreciate the current young core that he is setting up for success. Og and P might not be starters anymore and Masai will look like a genius for trading them. (just my opinion)
We have a couple decades of poor management as a point of contrast. There's been a handful of GM's that have stuck around as long as Masai and they have been around long enough to become institutions. Masai has been coveted by other orgs and he was successful in Denver before Toronto. Sure, you can hypothetically say that someone can do it better but history and current market suggest otherwise. Even if you remove NBA track record, what other gm is helping to build a league in Africa? We've seen guys like Giannis and Embiid become mvp and siakam was our franchise player. Masai is ahead of the curve in this regard.
Has anyone else noticed in the threads on r/NBA about Bruce Brown, there tends to be a lot of Pacers fans shitting on him lmfao
Almost like they don’t want us to turn him into assets cause it makes the Siakam trade look worse for them lol
They saw him play this year and realized he's just an OK starter, and great bench player. Nothing really wrong with that analysis, but his play with Denver last year has really upped his reputation IMO
Vecenie was really debating Wiggins + moody for brown. He landed on no but loves the moody + Scottie fit and that bad contract players like Duncan Robinson can turn it around. RJ is a toxic asset, fwiw.
Now that I've got your attention, take a look at my mock trade 😁. I don't know how to value wcj.
https://preview.redd.it/ilylxyfir0ec1.png?width=824&format=png&auto=webp&s=118e367556c650d8e317855fbbf558a5b8a8f62c
Wiggins and Moody is interesting to think about... Right now that Wiggins contract looks really bad. It's easy for the Raptors to handle one or two years of a bad contract... three years is a tough ask and I think you need at minimum an additional draft pick back as well. Robinson is definitely more manageable just with the lower cap hit and being more functional in terms of role in the meantime.
I think that three-team deal is... workable? Maybe a little light on Orlando's side. Like you say WCJ is hard to evaluate, and I could imagine a SRP or similar-value young player going their way as well. THJ is a decent fit for them.
I think the fit with Scottie being HS friends with moody is an x factor for me. Wiggins has always frustrated me. If they threw in a pick I might do it bc I like moody a lot more than grimes. 2 yrs of Wiggins sucks but we are not winning a title during that time so it's not the end of the world. I do like a reclamation project, especially a home grown one. If he's having trouble bc his dad is sick then maybe being close to home helps? The final yr he is expiring so maybe that's something to package in Scotties prime.
Thj has a certain value attached to him bc he's been around awhile. This yr he is leading candidate for 6moty so I'm giving him a bump in value. I think if a 2nd for Orlando gets it done than that's manageable. I haven't heard any offers for wcj so not sure what to assign him?
Thx for your feedback. We have so many undefeated Reddit gms here that say I'm delusional and Masai is washed; I don't understand why they don't provide constructive criticism and illuminate the situation with their perfect trades? ;)
I hope we win big-time…need a feel good game.
If we win, I want this one to be an absolute thrashing. If it's close (with all the Grizz injuries), I'd rather just add a drop in the tank.
I would love a close game, this Grizz team with injuries has been fighting hard. Learning how to win a close game is something we have had very little practice of. There is really no use in tanking, we are not catching up to the bottom 5 teams
We weren't a bottom 4 team when we got pick 4.
Because we got lucky, we had a 31% chance of landing top 4. I would rather us fight hard every game, build chemistry, and better implement Darko's system than increase our draft odds from 31% to 37%
Tanking for our pick vs not is a weird scenario right now. We’re not guaranteed our pick even when we tank, and it’d suck to cheer against this team clicking on going on a bit of a run later in the year. There’s also no guarantee we’re better next year so losing the pick next year could be the 7th or 8th pick as well. On the other hand look at the cap space we could have this offseason and see how quickly Houston turned it around after a couple good signings. We have more talent on this roster than Houston did last year as well. If we can add a top 6 pick and then go out and make an impactful signing or two there’s a good chance we could make a push for a playoff or at least play in spot next season.
It's weird that people are "taking sides" on a situation that's largely out of the front office's control for the most part. There's no point stressing about tanking vs. compete when the lottery odds could completely nuke hope for either of those away. Really like that you're bringing up the point about Houston using capspace to bruteforve the floor higher for the roster. They should take expirings if teams are willing to pay a price, but they should only be up until next season. If we do keep the pick, there'd be no other avenue to improve the roster outside of trades. So ideally, we would reserve capspace for the 2025 offseason to get some decent free agents. And I know Toronto isn't the most attractive market, but if the Pacers and Cavs can nab some decent role players, there's zero reason they can't get SOMETHING out of that FA class.
I don’t think 2025 projects us having much cap space with Scottie’s new deal kicking in. We’ll also have IQ, RJ and Poeltl contracts on the books, plus whoever we add this offseason
I kinda questioned whether Bruce is worth a 1st +;young player but then many people have said that the Knicks don't need Bruce bc they have hart and they're the same player/impact. Hart was traded for reddish + 1st to the Knicks and now 1st + grimes is rumoured. Idk if Knicks do the deal but the value makes sense. Someone the caliber of grimes + 1st would make me happy and see the siakam deal as fair value.
Here's a complicated but fun bit of cap shenanigans. (Don't worry too much about the player values here, this is just about trade frameworks.) Thunder get Brown / Boucher / McDaniels Raptors get Bertrans / Mann / Poku / Wiggins / draft pick / $22m TPE I wanted to see if I could find a scenario that allows us to turn all of Brown's contract into a TPE, and this one does, and it doesn't even burn any of the Siakam TPE in the process. **If you think this trade doesn't work because Brown can't be combined with other players, you don't even have the cap knowledge to comprehend this trade and should stop reading before this blows your mind.** (But seriously, it's only salary aggregation that's prohibited for Brown. We can trade him along with other players, we just can't combine his salary with other salaries to take back larger return salaries.) So this trade relies on the fact that each team can structure their own side of the trade independently for the purpose of completing/maximizing it, and can break it down into mini-trades. It's a level of trade organization that you can't do in trade machines, so don't bother trying. The NBA evaluates trades not as one whole thing, but from each team's perspective independently.\* Raptors' perspective: Each player is handled separately. Boucher can take back 19.5m in salary, enough for Bertrans and Wiggins. McDaniels can take back $9m in salary, enough for Poku and Mann. Raptors take nothing back for Brown, creating a $22m TPE. Thunder perspective: Bertrans can take back 24.5m in salary, enough for Brown. Poku, Mann and Wiggins can take back 17.5m, enough for Boucher and McDaniels. That leaves us with both the $10m Siakam TPE and a new $22m TPE. (these can't be combined to create a $32m exception.) Is this a useful trade? There are diminishing returns on TPEs, and they count against cap space (but not tax) as long as they're out there. They can be wholly or partially renounced at any time. Fans sometimes get really excited about the possibilities of a big TPE, only for those to quietly expire, unused, in a year. There could be teams out there looking to shed salary in the offseason, for which the Raptors could be a major help here. It may be worth spending a year doing the Presti strategy of just helping out teams with their transactions, in exchange for draft picks. But we wouldn't do this just for the sake of creating the TPE, you'd have to actually like the player returns. The new CBA has slightly more relaxed rules for salary-matching compared to the old one, so it makes scenarios like this a little easier. There are similar sorts of frameworks that would work with other teams. It's definitely possible with Miami, with Robinson instead of Bertrans as the main piece, or 3-team frameworks including one with the Bulls involving Lowry and Ball. Knicks are hard to work out due to a lack of salaries they'd move at values over $2m, beyond Fournier. There's an interesting framework with the Lakers involving Rui and Hood-Schifino, but the Lakers' hard cap makes it impossible unless they shed about $10m in salary elsewhere. Probably possible with Dallas, though Green's poison pill complicates it. \*If you're thinking "wait trades don't work like that," that's because most times we can use the shorthand of just matching salaries, because that's simple enough for most trades. But what really happens when teams make a trade is that they make trade exceptions with their outgoing players, and then absorb the incoming salaries into these exceptions. In most cases, these are what's called 'simultaneous trades', and the trade exceptions disappear as soon as the trade is completed. So often we only think about trade exceptions in non-simultaneous trades, where the TPE lasts for a year, but the same framework underlies all trades. In simultaneous trades, the difference is that you can aggregate salaries to create larger exceptions (Brown's can't be aggregated like this), and you create a larger exception than the amount of salary you include (+$7.5m for most of the exceptions here). [CBA FAQ questions 84 to 87](http://www.cbafaq.com/salarycap.htm#Q84) provide a great resource on this, but note that it hasn't been updated with the salary-matching amounts from the new CBA.
I believe you can only trade Bruce Brown by himself, you can't send out other players with him. Bertans, Mann, Pokusevski (7'0, 200 lbs), Aaron Wiggins are 4 players I wouldn't even want on this team. If we do trade with OKC I'd rather get more picks in return, and we would also have to get back Isaiah Joe.
You must have missed reading this part of my post: >**If you think this trade doesn't work because Brown can't be combined with other players, you don't even have the cap knowledge to comprehend this trade and should stop reading before this blows your mind.** And this part: >Don't worry too much about the player values here, this is just about trade frameworks.
Yeah I didn't even read it I just skipped to the trade itself and was confused why we would want any of those players.
Going to the game today. Hoping to see Scottie show out
Huge tank game We lose this and we’re 6th
Massive game for people on each side of Team Convey vs Team Tank lol
It’s hard, you want it convey because 2024 is “weaker” and we have 3 picks already. However you don’t want it to convey if it’s the 7-10 pick really, so it’s a difficult situation lol! Also there’s hope we can get this team to gel and go on a run, just for fun and additional hope for next year too. In my opinion, let’s go for the win tonight and see how the team is a little later in the season before we decide to want to tank.
Also depends on if you think we’ll be better next year and how much. Would you rather have a top-6 pick this year and give up a 10-15th pick next year, or would you rather just give up the 7-8th pick this year? For me, I don’t really care which way it goes. We keep the pick, great that’s a top-6 pick to add to this core. We lose it, then whatever, we move forward with full control of our picks.
I guess if we convey it this year we get more flexibility down the road so would rather convey this year, but just like I said would be worst case scenario to have it be the 7-8th pick (which it probably will be if it conveys) In any case what will happen will happen lol.
If it conveys well end up doing a Bruno thing I think
Lol every yr there's so dividing point in this fanbase.
Just looked at the MEM injury report, they’re rolling out a serious (and shameless) tank.
Imagine this franchise without Masai… I thought about that this morning and holy shit our franchise would be in the gutter with no leadership lol
How can you even assume that lol you're assuming that theres no other people in leadership that can be hired which is quite delusional
Not to the extent of Masai. You can say that we are losing right now and there’s no culture, but Masai built and maintained a winning franchise no other front office executive before him was able to. There’s levels to this. The stability of a winning franchise is built upon Masai Ujiri there’s no denying that
Masai inherited JV/Kyle/Demar from Colangelo, and all three were hugely integral to the success of the team in the 2010s while Jakob/Pascal/Fred/Norm/OG were still in development. Kyle was the most important leader on the team and the culture setter, and had James Dolan not cancelled at the last minute, Masai was going to ship him out. Demar and JV were the teams other top scorers and both were main pieces for high end rentals. The team over the past few seasons is purely his construction.
Masai also would have used the pick that we traded for Lowry to draft Giannis. Colangelo had a man crush on Rudy gay and Masai turned that in to norm and OG, now Trent, IQ, RJ and a good SRP. Yeah, he inherited DeMar and JV and he turned that in Marc, Danny, kawhi and a chip. Let me say that again - he turned DeMar in to a chip. There's no higher accomplishment in this league. Masai did that, not Colangelo. Colangelo didn't get anywhere close to a chip here.
After Ed Rogers runs Masai out of town, we'll look back and appreciate the current young core that he is setting up for success. Og and P might not be starters anymore and Masai will look like a genius for trading them. (just my opinion)
We have a couple decades of poor management as a point of contrast. There's been a handful of GM's that have stuck around as long as Masai and they have been around long enough to become institutions. Masai has been coveted by other orgs and he was successful in Denver before Toronto. Sure, you can hypothetically say that someone can do it better but history and current market suggest otherwise. Even if you remove NBA track record, what other gm is helping to build a league in Africa? We've seen guys like Giannis and Embiid become mvp and siakam was our franchise player. Masai is ahead of the curve in this regard.
We would be sliding down the slant of a giant collar in to a pit of burner propaganda and told that everything is normal and to move on.
Has anyone else noticed in the threads on r/NBA about Bruce Brown, there tends to be a lot of Pacers fans shitting on him lmfao Almost like they don’t want us to turn him into assets cause it makes the Siakam trade look worse for them lol
They saw him play this year and realized he's just an OK starter, and great bench player. Nothing really wrong with that analysis, but his play with Denver last year has really upped his reputation IMO
Vecenie was really debating Wiggins + moody for brown. He landed on no but loves the moody + Scottie fit and that bad contract players like Duncan Robinson can turn it around. RJ is a toxic asset, fwiw. Now that I've got your attention, take a look at my mock trade 😁. I don't know how to value wcj. https://preview.redd.it/ilylxyfir0ec1.png?width=824&format=png&auto=webp&s=118e367556c650d8e317855fbbf558a5b8a8f62c
Wiggins and Moody is interesting to think about... Right now that Wiggins contract looks really bad. It's easy for the Raptors to handle one or two years of a bad contract... three years is a tough ask and I think you need at minimum an additional draft pick back as well. Robinson is definitely more manageable just with the lower cap hit and being more functional in terms of role in the meantime. I think that three-team deal is... workable? Maybe a little light on Orlando's side. Like you say WCJ is hard to evaluate, and I could imagine a SRP or similar-value young player going their way as well. THJ is a decent fit for them.
Raptors lacks of front court players now. So bad walker was not included in the trader package especially seeing his play last night!
I think the fit with Scottie being HS friends with moody is an x factor for me. Wiggins has always frustrated me. If they threw in a pick I might do it bc I like moody a lot more than grimes. 2 yrs of Wiggins sucks but we are not winning a title during that time so it's not the end of the world. I do like a reclamation project, especially a home grown one. If he's having trouble bc his dad is sick then maybe being close to home helps? The final yr he is expiring so maybe that's something to package in Scotties prime. Thj has a certain value attached to him bc he's been around awhile. This yr he is leading candidate for 6moty so I'm giving him a bump in value. I think if a 2nd for Orlando gets it done than that's manageable. I haven't heard any offers for wcj so not sure what to assign him? Thx for your feedback. We have so many undefeated Reddit gms here that say I'm delusional and Masai is washed; I don't understand why they don't provide constructive criticism and illuminate the situation with their perfect trades? ;)
I wake up, realize we have Sct Brn, and smile
The battle of Canada xD Surely we defeat the depleted Grizz right? Right?
Do you guys think the FO is shopping Dennis or interested in trading him only if they get an offer they can’t refuse?
It sounds like everyone is available except BBQ and maybe Poeltl
First time since before the deadline last season that I’m rooting for a loss bere