Only the Nets ...
... rest players at the NBA Summer League.
The 12-day event in Las Vegas is a showcase for the NBA’s young players. By my count, nine of the top 10 picks from June’s draft have participated.
Does that make all those clubs idiots for putting such heavily invested athletes at risk of injury in meaningless contests?
Of course not. Those organizations must have all calculated that the benefits of playing outweighed the risk, given that the regular season is more than three months away.
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Summer League is miles below NBA level, but it gives these kids an opportunity to play an NBA style against guys competing for their professional livelihoods. It also gives them a head start on their teams’ programs before training camp.
The sole absentee among the top 10 has been Dallas wing Luka Doncic, whose buyout from Real Madrid has not been finalized.
Similarly, both of Brooklyn’s draft picks, forwards Dzanan Musa and Rodions Kurucs, have yet to be released from their European clubs. However, Musa, the Nets’ first-round selection (29th overall), wasn’t going to appear in any Summer League games anyway, per general manager Sean Marks.
You see, Musa just played 75 games during his club’s season and in tournaments, according to Marks.
Just checking, but isn’t an NBA season 82 games? I guess having Musa play a few minutes over the weekend if he were eligible might have caused a heart attack.
Guard Caris LeVert and center Jarrett Allen, Marks’ first-round selections from the prior two drafts, were also included on the Nets’ Summer League roster, but that was just window dressing. They sat on the bench for both games, leaving a bunch of bums to face off against clubs who sported some legitimate NBA prospects.
It’s not like Allen and LeVert are proven commodities, by the way. Though they are glistening with potential, their games, particularly their shooting mechanics, are far from finished products.
At halftime of Saturday’s affair versus the Thunder, Marks said he would look to see if there was “an opportunity” for Allen and LeVert to get some run in the final games of the summer.
An opportunity? Someone should give Marks the schedule.
Howard Trade Not Marks' Finest Moment
New York Post writer Brian Lewis threw shade on my original topic, which was blasting the Nets for their rush to buy out Dwight Howard. Marks previously yielded overpaid center Timofey Mozgov, two second-picks and a reported $5 million in cash to Charlotte in the win-win June 21 trade that finally brought Howard to Brooklyn after more than six years of teases.
However, my gleeful mood shifted to ire when it was reported first by the Washington Post's Tim Bontemps on Saturday that the future Hall of Fame center left only $5 million of his expiring $23.8 million contract on the buyout table. Thirty percent is the low end on typical givebacks, according to experts. Why wasn’t Marks using his leverage to extract more?
I had assumed that it was Howard who badly wanted out to join a winning team, with the Wizards emerging as his ultimate destination following a reported two-year, approximately $11 million deal using their full mid-level exception.
Except Lewis reported Saturday that Marks and coach Kenny Atkinson had planned the buyout from the trade’s get-go. Despite Howard being a mortal lock for double-double production, he is a known locker-room cancer, which Lewis detailed on our "City Game" podcast last week.
Wouldn’t want to mess with that Nets culture, I guess, even though the organization is selling improvement and Howard would have certainly made Brooklyn better on the court after a lousy 28-54 campaign.
Fine, even if I agree that Howard would not have been a culture fit here, the buyout opened up another can of worms.
As one Nets fan mused on Twitter, Marks will end up having surrendered Brook Lopez, a late first-round pick (used by the Lakers on promising forward Kyle Kuzma), two second-round picks (including the 2018 45th overall selection Hamidou Diallo, a freak athlete whom Charlotte subsequently dealt to Oklahoma City), while also paying Mozgov $15.3 million to stink in his 32 games last season, Howard about $18.8 million to play for Washington this season and $5 million to the Hornets.
All for D’Angelo Russell.
Not exactly the savvy asset management one would expect from an executive as widely praised as Marks.
I know, it’s all about maximizing cap space for that magical 2019 offseason, when the crème-de-la-crème of free agents will surely flock to Brooklyn.
Unfortunately, not only is that scenario pure fantasy, simply allowing Lopez to play out that final season of his old contract would have accomplished the same thing financially, albeit with Russell’s restricted free agency rights belonging to L.A. next summer instead of Brooklyn.
The only urgency, in my opinion, to buy out Howard now was if it was a precursor to further moves by Marks. It’s certainly possible, but I wouldn’t expect anything more than some bargain bigs off the scrap heap.
The Nets will reportedly have about $10.5 million in cap space after the buyout and the draft-pick signings, not enough for anything more than a minor salary dump unless one of their own expensive veterans is offloaded first.
Marks deserves more time, obviously, to fix a mess he inherited. But right now, Year 3 isn’t looking any better than Year 2.