2022 NBA OFF SEASON DRAFT FREE AGENCY TAMPERING ETC

reflecting upon the gobert trade seems pretty clear they were aiming for just being a playoff team for a while and rudy is a very reliable regular season floor raiser, also heard connelly is a big stats guy so he prob loves rudy lol

zach lowe talked to the good wolves guy at the athletic and he said there was an ownership push for this too and marc lore is also a big stats guy.

They will be better

i mean who cares you gave the store away anyway

When it comes to the Wolves, "being better for a few years" could be an all-time high point for the franchise, so it's not unreasonable to think the store that they gave away wouldn't have been very well-stocked anyway.

think you got lost in the metaphor there

lmao if nets just sit and ride this out

― terence trent d'ilfer (m bison), Tuesday, July 5, 2022 1:05 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

i mean they have to at least pretend

some pretty funny reactions to them signing tj warren, which i don’t think is indicative of anything other than that they told tj warren they’d have minutes for him.

okay!

Statement from Jody Allen pic.twitter.com/oAezfb398o

— Portland Trail Blazers (@trailblazers) July 5, 2022

good to know!

email me if anything changes i guess

I think fundamentally you guys aren't Wolves fans so you ask "Why?" instead of "Fuck it, why not?"

have definitely seen more wolves positivity elsewhere compared to here

at some point it's important enough to simply work on improving your franchise's reputation even if your ceiling is below the finals

I mean the value they gave up was ridiculous, I was pretty bummed out about it, now I'm just like oh well this is going to be something

But if we, say, top out similar to Utah I will be happy to watch good, competitive basketball

Also I think there was a good chance running it back with the same core could have ended up outside the playoffs, we squeaked in

should be better than utah i think, worst case the defense outside of gobert is just as bad as utah's was but the offense is better

Maybe could they work on improving the reputation of the Minneapolis police while they're at it. Couldn't hurt.

the "stats" stuff with gobert is really funny to me. do the t wolves have access to his stats in the playoffs

feel like theres a big downside risk of gobert starting another global pandemic too

this trade keeps making me think about when the sixers paired up horford and embiid

that Jody Allen statement might as well say they’re riding out the franchise valuation inflation market to the very end, to the moon, hodl etc, but then I really wish they’d sold to knight who would at least guarantee the team sticks around

i've heard that sentiment a few places but isn't knight quite elderly at this point?

yeah but he presumably would create a deeper trust to manage the situation going forward, as much as I can barely stand the guy I’ll admit that knight’s commitment to oregon athletic and educational institutions is rock solid (well, the ones he personally cares about, he’s that kind of billionaire)

I dunno, part of this is what is success? Is nothing short of a championship success? Let's say Denver never gets over the hump, was that team a failure? Was this Celtics team this year a failure? Stockton/Malone Jazz?

If this Wolves tops out without a finals, maybe? But it's certainly wouldn't be like the Nets or Clippers (obv Clips could def still work out)

I guess it depends. Jord def seems to approach hoops from a omniscient "Dr Manhattan of Hoops" way, I'm more just a rube

even wolves fans could prob find a way to get sick of exiting the playoffs in the first couple rounds after a while, and i do think making moves that put a cap on your team from a performance time flexibility or whatever perspective is def a con worth considering when doing deals, but mostly i just think overpaying like they did is bad policy, also i dont like rudy gobert

but on the other hand they might be pretty good idk theres always a lot of unknown with a new mix of guys whether the supporting cast holds up etc but they could def imho be a consistent playoff maker

yeah i think we all agree this was mostly about improving their floor in the regular season and trying to consistently make the playoffs for the next several years but i think there were ways to do that without such a nuclear move.

even if i buy into the idea that they need to play KAT at the 4, getting gobert in response to that need is a very extreme allocation of resources--like using a sledgehammer to put a picture hanger up on the wall. a cheaper defensive center plus flexibility while edwards develops makes much more sense to me.

a cheaper defensive center plus flexibility

paging Mr Looney

they def werent thinking about ants timeline, gobert is 30 which is a problem on its own, but ant is only 20 and theyre giving up all these picks that they should be using to build around him

damn joker looking trim out there

Well, if Nikola Jovic is going to take and make these. pic.twitter.com/6vs6WsOXi6

— Steve Jones Jr. (@stevejones20) July 5, 2022

you wanna be locked into the lad and probably kat but committing to ages 30-34 of gobert could
Really be an anchor around the whole operation for a decade to come seems like to me

The Wolves behaved like a franchise that can't attract top level free agents, has a history of sucking and new ownership desperately eager to show they are going to turn things around in short order.

jovic cant be the joker jokic is the joker jovic is the jover

xxp

the jester

Isn't the Riddler the off-brand Joker?

fuck you, frank gorshin was a legend

i'm going to become the riddler

Re wolves sometimes it’s good just to be competitive and a really good team, you might find a path to the finals or conference finals by way of injuries or a run of good matchups (teams that don’t have a good small ball lineup). Raising your floor is always a good idea especially when you have a guy like ant who could raise the ceiling on his own. But the contract and price is really the only problem.

Hope it works out for you Matt. The hawks era around that 60 win season were legit fun to watch even if deep in my heart I knew they could beat bron and the cavs.

Memphis Grizzlies No. 38 pick Kennedy Chandler has agreed to a four-year, $7.1 million rookie deal, his agent Ryan Davis tells @TheAthletic @Stadium. The contract contains the largest guaranteed salary – $4.94M – for an American second-round pick.

— Shams Charania (@ShamsCharania) July 5, 2022

Pretty crazy, they must really love him

ya thats weird

need to know if cade is shrinking

Big Rank pic.twitter.com/EmwXyaqUnJ

— Ashton (@AshtonDaTrainer) July 4, 2022

chet holmgren (and the rest of the thunder) tipping off on espn right now

might have to view that

i listened to the zach lowe podcast w/ jon the athletic wolves writer & i found a lot of what he said about the wolves thinking to be wishful, to say the least. the part that is hard for to me get over is why they hired tim connelly just to execute a "trade every pick for one guy" trade. it's like they hired some great combat fighter and then threw all his weapons into a lake. idk. jon was saying that the t wolves are zigging where the rest of the league is zagging, and as a general rule if the t wolves are thinking they're one step ahead of every other team i'm going to assume they're actually about to zig right off a cliff.

chet got a block

chet got a dunk

i don't get that grizzlies thing, can a second rounder, like, hold out for a huge contract? seems unprecedented, congrats to his agent

the part that is hard for to me get over is why they hired tim connelly just to execute a "trade every pick for one guy" trade. it's like they hired some great combat fighter and then threw all his weapons into a lake.

― J0rdan S., Tuesday, July 5, 2022 9:05 PM (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah good point picks are kinda the tools of his trade

mb the griz contract was a promise