www.nytimes.com
Would have liked to have read it, paywallNBA's apron era marks end of exceptionalism + free-agency winners, losers
The new CBA is making it impossible for teams like the Clippers, Warriors and Lakers to spend their way out of their mistakes.
Well yeah it's the Athletic. You should sign up it's not much and it's great content on all sports, for someone as into sports as you
NBA's apron era marks end of exceptionalism + free-agency winners, losers
The new CBA is making it impossible for teams like the Clippers, Warriors and Lakers to spend their way out of their mistakes.
OK later I will look to cut and paste it or at least the good parts
The athletic should be paying for our thoughts
Word, I don’t need to subscribe to anything, all you guys and gals in the NBA forums give me more info and insight into that league than I could ever need and then some.
Here ya go, half the article
There really are some very knowledgable people here. I’m not among them when it comes to basketball but I have fun.
You know more about the NBA than 99% of Americans and at least 50% of those who post here
I don’t know man, seems like you can run with the big dogs to me, plus your unbridled passion for OKC also speaks volumes.
Oh it speaks volumes all right, not many of them very good
Well @Mecca, @bksballer89 and @tlance can talk hoops with anyone. @Mecca would have someone like Perk waiving the white flag pretty quickly.
His opinion and everyone else’s lol
As would those others, and others besides. My point is most people don't come to a website to discuss the NBA every day, and you've never posted like you don't know what you're talking about.
We all have our good days and bad days, we have a pretty good group.
Here ya go, half the article
Call it the end of the exceptionalism era. No longer can the biggest markets and richest owners play by their own sets of rules while the rest of the NBA scrambles to keep up in the arms race.
The first 36 hours or so of free agency emphatically hammered that point home, with the richest bluebloods seeming to take the hardest hits. In particular, the three elite teams of the West Coast — the Los Angeles Lakers, LA Clippers and Golden State Warriors — all saw the combination of this year’s cap apron rules and next year’s punitive repeater tax seem to snuff out their last hopes of true title contention.
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Those three teams have entered every season for the last half decade with a championship-or-bust mantra, but already the writing was on the wall that the future would be harder. They combined to win three playoff games last season, and their best three players are 39 (LeBron James), 36 (Stephen Curry) and 33 (Kawhi Leonard).
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Remember, it was less than six months ago that the Clippers were looking like a title team, tearing through the league with a 32-9 mark in a 41-game early-season stretch. Leonard was healthy, a trade of James Harden added a jolt of shot creation and the West seemed wide open. As for the Lakers and Warriors, they aspired to similar heights, having met in a second-round playoff series in 2023 after the Lakers won the title in 2020 and Golden State in 2022.
These last two days, however, have slammed shut a series of possible doorways back to contention. The Clippers lost Paul George to free agency without compensation, the Warriors couldn’t turn Chris Paul’s contract or Klay Thompson’s free agency into an impact player and the Lakers haven’t made a single notable addition despite the willingness of LeBron James to take a pay cut.
In a second-apron environment, you can’t just throw money at your problems. None of these teams had the assets or cap flexibility to materially improve their situations. They’re not the only ones, incidentally — Denver, Phoenix, Milwaukee, Miami and others are learning the same. But they stand out the most because we’ve become inured to their exceptionalism — that whatever rules we apply to most teams don’t necessarily apply to them. In the most recent collective bargaining agreement, that is no longer true. If the Clippers and Warriors want to go $50 million into the tax, there are real consequences.
Of course, the offseason is still young. Opportunities may still come these teams’ way (keep an eye on Lauri Markkanen and Cam Johnson, for instance). And at the margins, some good decisions were made.
For instance, the Clippers’ unwillingness to give George a four-year max at age 34 is defensible in a vacuum and might be more so if they can turn his departure to Philadelphia into a sign-and-trade that generates a $50 million trade exception. There are limits on how to use an exception of that size in our brave new tax-apron world, but it’s still significant.
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The Clippers are also adding Derrick Jones, Kris Dunn and Nic Batum, as well as Kevin Porter Jr. (The fact the Clippers felt they had to resort to this move underscores their talent-addition challenges; Porter’s past locker-room demeanor and off-court issues are both red flags, in my opinion.)
LA, however, is positioned to fight another day, sitting below the tax apron with expiring money, and could even be a cap room team a year from now. (Keep an eye also on an extension for Ivica Zubac, which can run up to four years and $78 million.) Meanwhile the candle is burning out on a Leonard-Harden core, and the Clippers don’t control their next five drafts. That’s a tough environment to be much more than average.
GO DEEPER
Now what? How the Clippers will navigate the post-Paul George era
Similarly, the Warriors finally acknowledged the reality that had been slapping them in the face for the last two seasons. They completed the second half of the Jordan Poole salary dump (and what a save that was) by waiving Paul’s non-guaranteed $30 million deal, then let Thompson go and agreed to a deal with De’Anthony Melton in his stead.
This seems more jarring optically than it is in pure basketball terms. The Warriors replaced Thompson with a better, younger player who cost less, then got a $16 million trade exception and two second-round picks. This can’t be seen as anything other than a giant win, with the biggest potential snag being that they get “DiVincenzo’d” next summer if Melton outplays his one-year contract and they have no Bird rights on him.
But it’s only a win because of where the Warriors were — stuck with an old, expensive core and no longer able to buy their way out of it. The more nagging question is: What, exactly, do they do from here? The Warriors have a middling-to-good team in an awesome conference, which is how they won 46 games last year and still missed the playoffs. A similar outcome seems highly plausible again.
