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Marion's leaning towards Cleveland isn't he?
2014 NBA Off-Season; Paul George suffers a double-compund-fracture, likely out for season. Speedy re
- Thread in 'Sports & Training' Thread starter Started by japanair21,
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urbetterthenme
Banned
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Gilbert Areanas is better than Lillard
dacomeup
Supporter
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He should be the feature player. Chuckers shouldn't even matter at this point.
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No idea honestly. havent looked much into it but all i know is he turned down $60 mill from the Pistons
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No reason for Suns to do that.
He either takes the QO and basically says he's gone after this year, and gives himself veto power over any trade, or he takes the 4 year / $48mil.
He's a fool for either decision. If he wants out of Phoenix, which I think is certainly possible at this point, just take the QO and bet on yourself, and go where you want after the season. Or ask for a Sign & Trade to a team of your choice so Phoenix gets something for him.
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Yup, I think hes going to Cleveland
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Bledsoe knows he just might not make it through this next upcoming season
Man, take the money and stop gambling
Man, take the money and stop gambling
moe200069
Supporter
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female has the bone structure and face of erykah badu.
someone dig up pics/names of this woman.
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Man, life ain't fair sometimes 
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He's a fool for choosing either?
EddieDoyers
formerly eddiengambino
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He's a fool for choosing either?
Well if he chose the QO, he's a fool if he has an injury this upcoming year.
If he takes the Suns offer, he ends up at this point playing somewhere he doesn't want to play for 4 years.
The proverbial lose-lose.
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He's a fool for choosing either?
Well if he chose the QO, he's a fool if he has an injury this upcoming year.
If he takes the Suns offer, he ends up at this point playing somewhere he doesn't want to play for 4 years.
The proverbial lose-lose.
They is no reason he would dislike the sun, except for that they are using restricted free agency against him
Hes down for going back, just for the right price tag, and i understand why, when he had mensicus surgery, he took the procedure for a faster return but it shortens your career, Wade had the same procedure and look at his knees
He needs the money now
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Context is what really mattered. There were multiple layers to the league's BS.
Woj eviscerated Stern with the realest **** he ever wrote. Perception is reality...word to the Chauncey Billups amnesty bid from the Clippers, which never gets much attention in the overall story.
The coincidence was uncanny: Blind bidding on the amnesty waiver wire, several teams with a chance to claim Chauncey Billups, and somehow the Los Angeles Clippers made the highest offer. All these years owner Donald Sterling was the bane of the commissioner's existence, and now David Stern needed him in the worst way. All the times Stern let the creep slide on professional and personal indiscretions, the NBA knew the Clippers were the final, most legitimate suitor still standing to bail the league out of its own self-created Chris Paul debacle.
So, yes, the Clippers bid just north of $2 million on Billups, and the NBA has left everyone justified to wonder about the purity of that process. No one blinked. No one voiced a grievance. Nevertheless, this is the fairest question of the post-lockout NBA: From Stern to deputies Adam Silver, Joel Litvin and Stu Jackson, how can anyone ever be sure – despite denials to the contrary – that someone didn't tip Clippers management to make sure they placed the highest bid?
After all, Stern and his lieutenants were no longer playing commissioner and bureaucrats, they were playing basketball God in the NBA. This isn't to charge them with fraud, but to simply say: There's an appearance of impropriety that ought to be unsettling to everyone.
Under a different circumstance, we could simply give a nod to Clippers general manager Neil Olshey for such an astute move, but these are unprecedented times in the NBA and facts are facts: Until Billups was a Clipper, the Clippers were sluggish to include Eric Gordon into the trade for Paul. The uncertain deals behind this deal should forever haunt the NBA.
Make no mistake: The amnesty bids were shuttled through the same office – the same desk – as the bidding on the superstar point guard. Whatever the outcome the NBA truly wanted, the assignment of Billups played a critical role in the outcome of the trade. It doesn't matter that the NBA muscled a better deal than the one Hornets GM Dell Demps negotiated with the Los Angeles Lakers. Pro sports are forever a results-oriented business, but this time it's different.
The process matters.
The process was everything.
"That's our problem as a league now," one NBA general manager told Yahoo! Sports. "Everything they do gets thrown into question now, because they have conflicts everywhere. It all got exposed in this one – all came out in the public."
The NBA pushed aside a standing general manager, Demps, and the league office led by Stern (the commissioner), Litvin (an attorney) and Jackson (the failed GM of all GMs) ran the trade talks for the Hornets. They were no longer spectators to the machinations of the 30 teams' movements, but active participants, controlling the destiny of one of the NBA's major talents.
Jackson was the professed basketball man here, and he happens to go down as one of the worst GMs in the league's history. From signing Bryant "Big Country" Reeves to a $62 million extension to drafting Steve Francis when it was clear Francis would never play in Vancouver to trading the rights to the eventual No. 2 pick in the 2003 draft for Otis Thorpe, Jackson's run as GM stands as one of the most inept ever.
Now, Jackson was engaged in the Hornets' trade talks, helping peddle deals for one of the NBA's franchise players.
Demps wanted the Lakers trade to lift the Hornets into the playoffs, wanted a team of talent and made an initial deal that included Lamar Odom, Luis Scola, Kevin Martin, Goran Dragic and a draft pick. The Clippers had a young package on the table, but Demps believed it was important to win games, to sell tickets and get back to the playoffs again.
Demps had come from San Antonio, and he believed something strongly: He didn't want a bad team. He wanted to win. He owed it to his talented young coach, Monty Williams, to the fans buying season tickets in a small market. He wanted to trade Paul and still make the playoffs. That's considered a sin in this NBA, where small-market cap space and vague draft picks create an illusion of success in today's bottom-line financial climate.
For Stern to get on a conference call and force Demps, Lakers GM Mitch Kupchak and Rockets GM Daryl Morey to listen to him say, "Dell never thought the deal to be done," is beyond disingenuous and insulting. Stern can say it, and Demps, the Lakers and Rockets can't ever challenge him. Demps made the deal because no one had ever told him of the league's mandate to receive young players and picks for Paul until after they killed the initial Lakers trade, league sources said.
It never mattered to Stern the hundreds of hours that those teams and the Boston Celtics and Indiana Pacers invested into deals that Stern wouldn't have allowed anyway. All Stern ever cared about was freeing himself of lawsuit liability, keeping the NBA from another super-team perception with the Lakers and selling the Hornets for every final dollar. Everything else was someone else's mess to clean up.
The NBA let the deal reach fruition, and then abruptly canceled it. It wouldn't be long until Stern's underlings started to pass word onto league personnel that Demps hadn't been forthcoming to the league office on the Clippers offer, that he couldn't be trusted, that the NBA had every right to take over the talks. If Demps wants to keep a job in the NBA, you'll never hear him explain his side.
"Dell's problem was that every time he forwarded something to the league office, he felt it got leaked within an hour," said one friend of Demps. "That's why I think he became more careful of that."
The ripples of the NBA holding up the Paul trade have impacted teams beyond the Hornets. The Houston Rockets had worked for two full years to get into position to make a deal for an elite player like Pau Gasol. While the Rockets were stuck in this web, trade partners were falling off the board, committing to free agents and leaving the market. Had the Rockets been able to make the deal for Gasol, they would've had the space to sign Nene to the $67 million deal Denver gave him. Suddenly, the Rockets would've been a 50-, 55-victory team again and back in Western Conference contention. Now, they're reeling.
Once the initial trade was canceled and the whispers out of New York began to damage Demps' good name, teams soon became reluctant to deal with the non-decision maker of the process. The Hornets tried to revive the three-way trade with the Lakers and Rockets, but when the NBA contradicted what Demps told L.A. and Houston about what needed to change to complete the deal, those teams knew he had been rendered irrelevant.
"Once it was the NBA running things, it was no longer a negotiation process," one official said. "It was a shakedown."
The Hornets told trade partners it was likely they could accept the Rockets' and Lakers' packages with minimal changes: a first-round pick from the Lakers and minor assets from the Rockets, perhaps a second-round pick. As it turned out, the NBA demanded Kyle Lowry and Patrick Patterson be added to Houston's offer. Now, the Rockets had been told five of their top six players were needed to get Gasol in a trade.
The Rockets would've walked anyway, but the Lakers beat them to it. One league official says owner Jerry Buss' attitude basically was the NBA had gone too far, and he pulled his team out of the talks. Soon, the Lakers sent Lamar Odom to the Mavericks and it became clear: The NBA's machinations and maneuvering had dramatically impacted the Western Conference's balance of power.
In the end, Stern wouldn't allow the NBA to walk away without claiming a victory. This is Stern's NBA, where he's always believed the end justifies the means. For 30 teams competing, that largely should be the case. Yet, this wasn't the Hornets competing to make a deal. This was the league office forcing itself into the trade market, dictating NBA winners and losers and leaving too much carnage, too many questions, in its wake. Once the commissioner entered the fray, the embarrassment of losing was never an option.
The league insists this was a normal negotiation process, but it was nothing close. As an institution, it is easy to renege on a deal for a top-five player and seek out a better one because you never have to negotiate with these people again. That's an unfair advantage for the NBA, and purely destructive for those left in the job in New Orleans.
For all the suspicions those inside and out of the league have about the motives and agendas of those running the NBA, this was an episode to turn the cynical downright despondent. You win, Clippers. You lose, Lakers and Rockets. You win Chris Paul, you lose Dell Demps. The NBA waved its wand, and everyone else lives with the consequences. This was wrong, and Gordon and Minnesota's draft pick will never, ever make it right.
One minute, the Clippers wouldn't budge on trading Gordon and the 2012 first-round pick, and the next, the deal was done. Across Stu Jackson's desk, there passed the trade packages for Paul and the so-called secret amnesty bids for Billups. Always a nice, tidy completion for Stern.
Perhaps no one will ever know the truth about how Chris Paul became a Clipper, about perhaps where the lines blurred between a negotiation and a shakedown. Nevertheless, the star point guard gets to throw lobs to Blake Griffin in Hollywood, Demps gets to repair his credibility in the draft lottery, the Lakers and Rockets get shafted and Stern and his unforgiving, unrelenting Olympic Tower gang reminds the NBA once again: Our league, our whims.
"Let's not talk too much about how the sausage was made," Stern said late Wednesday.
All these years, all the episodes, and something never changes: David Stern never wants that curtain pulled back.
So, yes, the Clippers bid just north of $2 million on Billups, and the NBA has left everyone justified to wonder about the purity of that process. No one blinked. No one voiced a grievance. Nevertheless, this is the fairest question of the post-lockout NBA: From Stern to deputies Adam Silver, Joel Litvin and Stu Jackson, how can anyone ever be sure – despite denials to the contrary – that someone didn't tip Clippers management to make sure they placed the highest bid?
After all, Stern and his lieutenants were no longer playing commissioner and bureaucrats, they were playing basketball God in the NBA. This isn't to charge them with fraud, but to simply say: There's an appearance of impropriety that ought to be unsettling to everyone.
Under a different circumstance, we could simply give a nod to Clippers general manager Neil Olshey for such an astute move, but these are unprecedented times in the NBA and facts are facts: Until Billups was a Clipper, the Clippers were sluggish to include Eric Gordon into the trade for Paul. The uncertain deals behind this deal should forever haunt the NBA.
Make no mistake: The amnesty bids were shuttled through the same office – the same desk – as the bidding on the superstar point guard. Whatever the outcome the NBA truly wanted, the assignment of Billups played a critical role in the outcome of the trade. It doesn't matter that the NBA muscled a better deal than the one Hornets GM Dell Demps negotiated with the Los Angeles Lakers. Pro sports are forever a results-oriented business, but this time it's different.
The process matters.
The process was everything.
"That's our problem as a league now," one NBA general manager told Yahoo! Sports. "Everything they do gets thrown into question now, because they have conflicts everywhere. It all got exposed in this one – all came out in the public."
The NBA pushed aside a standing general manager, Demps, and the league office led by Stern (the commissioner), Litvin (an attorney) and Jackson (the failed GM of all GMs) ran the trade talks for the Hornets. They were no longer spectators to the machinations of the 30 teams' movements, but active participants, controlling the destiny of one of the NBA's major talents.
Jackson was the professed basketball man here, and he happens to go down as one of the worst GMs in the league's history. From signing Bryant "Big Country" Reeves to a $62 million extension to drafting Steve Francis when it was clear Francis would never play in Vancouver to trading the rights to the eventual No. 2 pick in the 2003 draft for Otis Thorpe, Jackson's run as GM stands as one of the most inept ever.
Now, Jackson was engaged in the Hornets' trade talks, helping peddle deals for one of the NBA's franchise players.
Demps wanted the Lakers trade to lift the Hornets into the playoffs, wanted a team of talent and made an initial deal that included Lamar Odom, Luis Scola, Kevin Martin, Goran Dragic and a draft pick. The Clippers had a young package on the table, but Demps believed it was important to win games, to sell tickets and get back to the playoffs again.
Demps had come from San Antonio, and he believed something strongly: He didn't want a bad team. He wanted to win. He owed it to his talented young coach, Monty Williams, to the fans buying season tickets in a small market. He wanted to trade Paul and still make the playoffs. That's considered a sin in this NBA, where small-market cap space and vague draft picks create an illusion of success in today's bottom-line financial climate.
For Stern to get on a conference call and force Demps, Lakers GM Mitch Kupchak and Rockets GM Daryl Morey to listen to him say, "Dell never thought the deal to be done," is beyond disingenuous and insulting. Stern can say it, and Demps, the Lakers and Rockets can't ever challenge him. Demps made the deal because no one had ever told him of the league's mandate to receive young players and picks for Paul until after they killed the initial Lakers trade, league sources said.
It never mattered to Stern the hundreds of hours that those teams and the Boston Celtics and Indiana Pacers invested into deals that Stern wouldn't have allowed anyway. All Stern ever cared about was freeing himself of lawsuit liability, keeping the NBA from another super-team perception with the Lakers and selling the Hornets for every final dollar. Everything else was someone else's mess to clean up.
The NBA let the deal reach fruition, and then abruptly canceled it. It wouldn't be long until Stern's underlings started to pass word onto league personnel that Demps hadn't been forthcoming to the league office on the Clippers offer, that he couldn't be trusted, that the NBA had every right to take over the talks. If Demps wants to keep a job in the NBA, you'll never hear him explain his side.
"Dell's problem was that every time he forwarded something to the league office, he felt it got leaked within an hour," said one friend of Demps. "That's why I think he became more careful of that."
The ripples of the NBA holding up the Paul trade have impacted teams beyond the Hornets. The Houston Rockets had worked for two full years to get into position to make a deal for an elite player like Pau Gasol. While the Rockets were stuck in this web, trade partners were falling off the board, committing to free agents and leaving the market. Had the Rockets been able to make the deal for Gasol, they would've had the space to sign Nene to the $67 million deal Denver gave him. Suddenly, the Rockets would've been a 50-, 55-victory team again and back in Western Conference contention. Now, they're reeling.
Once the initial trade was canceled and the whispers out of New York began to damage Demps' good name, teams soon became reluctant to deal with the non-decision maker of the process. The Hornets tried to revive the three-way trade with the Lakers and Rockets, but when the NBA contradicted what Demps told L.A. and Houston about what needed to change to complete the deal, those teams knew he had been rendered irrelevant.
"Once it was the NBA running things, it was no longer a negotiation process," one official said. "It was a shakedown."
The Hornets told trade partners it was likely they could accept the Rockets' and Lakers' packages with minimal changes: a first-round pick from the Lakers and minor assets from the Rockets, perhaps a second-round pick. As it turned out, the NBA demanded Kyle Lowry and Patrick Patterson be added to Houston's offer. Now, the Rockets had been told five of their top six players were needed to get Gasol in a trade.
The Rockets would've walked anyway, but the Lakers beat them to it. One league official says owner Jerry Buss' attitude basically was the NBA had gone too far, and he pulled his team out of the talks. Soon, the Lakers sent Lamar Odom to the Mavericks and it became clear: The NBA's machinations and maneuvering had dramatically impacted the Western Conference's balance of power.
In the end, Stern wouldn't allow the NBA to walk away without claiming a victory. This is Stern's NBA, where he's always believed the end justifies the means. For 30 teams competing, that largely should be the case. Yet, this wasn't the Hornets competing to make a deal. This was the league office forcing itself into the trade market, dictating NBA winners and losers and leaving too much carnage, too many questions, in its wake. Once the commissioner entered the fray, the embarrassment of losing was never an option.
The league insists this was a normal negotiation process, but it was nothing close. As an institution, it is easy to renege on a deal for a top-five player and seek out a better one because you never have to negotiate with these people again. That's an unfair advantage for the NBA, and purely destructive for those left in the job in New Orleans.
For all the suspicions those inside and out of the league have about the motives and agendas of those running the NBA, this was an episode to turn the cynical downright despondent. You win, Clippers. You lose, Lakers and Rockets. You win Chris Paul, you lose Dell Demps. The NBA waved its wand, and everyone else lives with the consequences. This was wrong, and Gordon and Minnesota's draft pick will never, ever make it right.
One minute, the Clippers wouldn't budge on trading Gordon and the 2012 first-round pick, and the next, the deal was done. Across Stu Jackson's desk, there passed the trade packages for Paul and the so-called secret amnesty bids for Billups. Always a nice, tidy completion for Stern.
Perhaps no one will ever know the truth about how Chris Paul became a Clipper, about perhaps where the lines blurred between a negotiation and a shakedown. Nevertheless, the star point guard gets to throw lobs to Blake Griffin in Hollywood, Demps gets to repair his credibility in the draft lottery, the Lakers and Rockets get shafted and Stern and his unforgiving, unrelenting Olympic Tower gang reminds the NBA once again: Our league, our whims.
"Let's not talk too much about how the sausage was made," Stern said late Wednesday.
All these years, all the episodes, and something never changes: David Stern never wants that curtain pulled back.
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QO=?
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Qualifying Offer. It's a 1 year salary at the end of a contract, that if a team offers it to a player makes them a Restricted Free Agent, unless it is you market level, the players almost never accepts it.
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I also feel like people forgot about or chose to ignore the other letter from Dan Gilbert. Maybe he should've wrote it in Comic Sans, idk.
That entire process stunk, man. It felt dirty as hell and that's not only select fans saying it, it was the opinion of many high-level front office execs as well. I was one of the rare non-Lakers fans on NT disgusted by how it went down. I don't feel bad for them, they've usually been on the right side of things falling into place and this doesn't tip that scale, but that doesn't absolve the manipulation of this ****.
At the very least...it's pathetic the league allowed itself to fall into the predicament of making that decision. The sorry *** players union just sat there and took it up the butt too.
Let's not 'eem get into the draft lottery.
What a ******* hypocrite. And that aside, LOL @ bringing up a potential Dwight Howard deal as a point of argument.
That entire process stunk, man. It felt dirty as hell and that's not only select fans saying it, it was the opinion of many high-level front office execs as well. I was one of the rare non-Lakers fans on NT disgusted by how it went down. I don't feel bad for them, they've usually been on the right side of things falling into place and this doesn't tip that scale, but that doesn't absolve the manipulation of this ****.
At the very least...it's pathetic the league allowed itself to fall into the predicament of making that decision. The sorry *** players union just sat there and took it up the butt too.
Let's not 'eem get into the draft lottery.
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illoquent aka dsk
Hit it on the head. Part of the reason people try to rationalize "Basketball Reasons" because of the team involved, as you said they normally fall on the right side of things.
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Stern was the best thing that ever happened to the NBA, he knew it but never showed it, but it shows.
Built it into a powerhouse.
Illoquent you posted some good stuff there. Don't know where it's from, or if it's true, or if it's "Woj" being Woj but, I can tell you this, the business of it makes sense, and makes it believAble
Built it into a powerhouse.
Illoquent you posted some good stuff there. Don't know where it's from, or if it's true, or if it's "Woj" being Woj but, I can tell you this, the business of it makes sense, and makes it believAble
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If the NBA know whats right they veto this Love trade, so much has been agreed to before the deal is even possible just doesnt feel right
Unlike the veto of the chris paul trade this veto will actually have substance behind it
Unlike the veto of the chris paul trade this veto will actually have substance behind it
Lake Shore Drive
formerly slp product
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I've forgotten all about the salty Gilbert letter regarding the Paul trade.....maybe the owners should rally and veto the Love trade
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There is a reason CP is the Player President, dude isn't going to say a thing against the owners in the next CBA, puppet like the real President.
Different level, same principle.
Different level, same principle.
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I'm just trying to figure how Gilbert was wrong.
You don't want a trade vetoed? Don't try to trade for a player on team that's owned by the 29 other owners you are competing with.
You don't want a trade vetoed? Don't try to trade for a player on team that's owned by the 29 other owners you are competing with.
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Sounds more like don't be the Lakers and try to continue greatness by trading for a player on a team owned by the other 29 owners.
Stern made that clear based on what we just read, he punked them and showed his very power
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