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As expected.

The Clippers hold Austin's full Bird Rights and can offer up to the max.
Non-Bird rights for Wes, which is up to 120% of his previous salary/minimum.

Other options that could be used to re-sign Wes include the BAE, which is a 2 year deal worth about $4.5M (starting salary of $2.2M) and the MLE (Up to 4 years with a starting salary of $5.63M).

i'd like wes to come back, but will he really take such a small raise? it's hard to justify using the BAE on him, let alone the MLE.

I don't want either back now. at least not for the price they may be asking anyway, neither are worth the price they are asking for. baby Doc can just move on, other than his gladiator like display of the last game of our season, he really hasn't justified his future price tag and even he knows it to avoid this nepotism critisism. it is hard to avoid that talk as when he was picked up by us, he was practically a developmental player who was given playing time to gain his confidence, which no other developmental players at his level can afford. and I would have loved for Wes to pick up his option but as predictably he did not. I feel what he has given us can be replaced by simply playing Wilcox his minutes. at this moment, to me at least, Wilcox has proven that he can be the 3 and D guy Wes can provide for us overall at the cheaper price tag for the value.

i want wilcox to play more but he hasn't proven a single thing yet. letting rivers go when we can go over the cap to keep him would be a huge mistake.

Yeah, for all his flaws, Austin is a 23 year old with several NBA skills who has showed he can be a part of the rotation and improve every year. If we didn't re-sign him, there'd be several teams lickin their lips preparing good offers for him. I hope we don't overpay him, but it'd be really stupid to let him go with our lack of resources to get players of his age and skills.

I'm sure if he wasn't Doc's son, everybody would be really excited that we were able to steal a young player like him for almost nothing.

Wes is gonna make more money elsewhere and we have better options to spend our money on, so I'm cool letting him go.

We dont have a choice but to bring Austin back. We have no way to replace his role in the rotation armed with only the MLE and BAE. We have full Bird rights on Austin and need to use them. I haven't seen much of anything from Wilcox to think we can rely on him to be a member of the rotation.

Neddy wrote:I don't want either back now. at least not for the price they may be asking anyway, neither are worth the price they are asking for. baby Doc can just move on, other than his gladiator like display of the last game of our season, he really hasn't justified his future price tag and even he knows it to avoid this nepotism critisism. it is hard to avoid that talk as when he was picked up by us, he was practically a developmental player who was given playing time to gain his confidence, which no other developmental players at his level can afford. and I would have loved for Wes to pick up his option but as predictably he did not. I feel what he has given us can be replaced by simply playing Wilcox his minutes. at this moment, to me at least, Wilcox has proven that he can be the 3 and D guy Wes can provide for us overall at the cheaper price tag for the value.

I understand your sentiments, but it would be hard to find a better back up point guard who can play both sides of the ball as well as Rivers. Wes is replaceable, but he does have decent size to be a wing defender and he can shot the 3 with decent accuracy. However, I might rather have a guy like Gerald Green.

I guess my question is do we want a real type of offense in the second unit, or do we want guys like Crawford and Rivers to just make up stuff as they go along (which is what they're good at.) I'd vote for 'real offense' if it appeared we would actually have the depth to field one in the second unit, but I'm not sure that we do or will.

it's pretty much why i think jamal crawford should be shoved out the door, regardless of whether he's better than some random UDFA scrub.

i don't think the team can function optimally with both he and austin on the team (let alone pierce if he still plays), and like hell if i'd rather keep an aging crawford over austin rivers.

Cole Aldrich has joined Rivers and Johnson in opting out. We're limited to the same options for him as we are with Wes.

This was the expectation. The question becomes whether it makes sense to use the MLE to re-sign Cole as a player who is a one position backup to a C that plays what, 34-35 mpg? Does that make sense or is there a better option out there in terms of using the money?

I'm not really sure Johnson can get much more out in the market, but maybe he can, or maybe he wants that 120% raise. I liked what he did for the team, but can't really justify giving him much with the limited money options.

I'm down with giving Austin a deal like 3 years / $15 million. I'm not so down with a bench unit led by Austin/Jamal, but of course there would need to be superior options. Austin could end up pricing out of a range than makes sense for the Clippers, and if that happens we'd have to go to backup options like a Donald Sloan who Q-Rich mentioned in the off-season thread.

I know Jamal wants to play for a long time, but at his age, it wouldn't sit well with me for the team to give him a long term contract. He's a guy I'd want to give a 1+1 with a team option for his second season or some sort of unguaranteed nature to it. I know many don't want him back, and I'm no lover of his game, but I know he has a lot of fans on the team.

og15 wrote:This was the expectation. The question becomes whether it makes sense to use the MLE to re-sign Cole as a player who is a one position backup to a C that plays what, 34-35 mpg? Does that make sense or is there a better option out there in terms of using the money?

I'm not really sure Johnson can get much more out in the market, but maybe he can, or maybe he wants that 120% raise. I liked what he did for the team, but can't really justify giving him much with the limited money options.

I'm down with giving Austin a deal like 3 years / $15 million. I'm not so down with a bench unit led by Austin/Jamal, but of course there would need to be superior options. Austin could end up pricing out of a range than makes sense for the Clippers, and if that happens we'd have to go to backup options like a Donald Sloan who Q-Rich mentioned in the off-season thread.

I know Jamal wants to play for a long time, but at his age, it wouldn't sit well with me for the team to give him a long term contract. He's a guy I'd want to give a 1+1 with a team option for his second season or some sort of unguaranteed nature to it. I know many don't want him back, and I'm no lover of his game, but I know he has a lot of fans on the team.

while i 100% absolutely understand the rationale behind not using your MLE on the backup C position with a deandre jordan in tow..

in reality i think our organization isn't good enough with the offseason process to find the optimal guy for the MLE. like yes, of course it makes a lot more sense to find some cheapo vet. min dude to replace cole and be more of a 4-5-ish hybrid, and to get a true starter at the MLE. but thus far the team hasn't been able to reliably upgrade its weaknesses from year to year, and i don't think that the MLE is going to solve SF for us anyway. imo just go with what you know is good even if it isn't the 100% best thing to do schematically. i'd much rather keep cole and gamble on another SF than gamble on both a new backup C and a new SF and then have both moves self-destruct.

assuming cole is willing to stay for MLE, of course.

nickhx2 wrote:

og15 wrote:This was the expectation. The question becomes whether it makes sense to use the MLE to re-sign Cole as a player who is a one position backup to a C that plays what, 34-35 mpg? Does that make sense or is there a better option out there in terms of using the money?

I'm not really sure Johnson can get much more out in the market, but maybe he can, or maybe he wants that 120% raise. I liked what he did for the team, but can't really justify giving him much with the limited money options.

I'm down with giving Austin a deal like 3 years / $15 million. I'm not so down with a bench unit led by Austin/Jamal, but of course there would need to be superior options. Austin could end up pricing out of a range than makes sense for the Clippers, and if that happens we'd have to go to backup options like a Donald Sloan who Q-Rich mentioned in the off-season thread.

I know Jamal wants to play for a long time, but at his age, it wouldn't sit well with me for the team to give him a long term contract. He's a guy I'd want to give a 1+1 with a team option for his second season or some sort of unguaranteed nature to it. I know many don't want him back, and I'm no lover of his game, but I know he has a lot of fans on the team.

while i 100% absolutely understand the rationale behind not using your MLE on the backup C position with a deandre jordan in tow..

in reality i think our organization isn't good enough with the offseason process to find the optimal guy for the MLE. like yes, of course it makes a lot more sense to find some cheapo vet. min dude to replace cole and be more of a 4-5-ish hybrid, and to get a true starter at the MLE. but thus far the team hasn't been able to reliably upgrade its weaknesses from year to year, and i don't think that the MLE is going to solve SF for us anyway. imo just go with what you know is good even if it isn't the 100% best thing to do schematically. i'd much rather keep cole and gamble on another SF than gamble on both a new backup C and a new SF and then have both moves self-destruct.

assuming cole is willing to stay for MLE, of course.

That's certainly a good point, so it's going to be an interesting decision. I guess Jeff Green will be the planned starting SF when the seasons starts, assuming the team can re-sign him. Of course I think the guy should only get like $6 million/year and no more than two guaranteed years, but you know, lol...

The guy we mentioned in the other thread was Solomon Hill, showed some nice stuff with Indiana. A possible backup C is a guy like Miles Plumlee, and Brandon Bass is a another guy that I suppose could be used as a backup PF/C off the bench also even though he's only 6'8.

I think MLE should work for Cole since that's the range of what Ajinca got last off-season. If we're going with Cole with the MLE, then we're looking at the BAE for a SF, though of course what happens with Austin also plays into this. If Austin goes, then there would also be a need for a decent enough bench PG.

with regards to exceptions, i didn't really see a whole lot of enticing names out there, so i would be fairly happy if we went into the next offseason with cole at the MLE and luc at the BAE. a lot of people are clamoring for a real SF (hilarious how nobody thinks green is our guy anymore lmao), but to me luc might be all we need on the starting front.

i think it's fairly reasonable to think our starting 5 with luc fully integrated might be tops in the league, given our overall efficiency rankings on both offense and defense without blake, and considering we had to roll out paul pierce's corpse every other night. and correct me if i'm wrong but i don't think we really got to see a good stretch of games where we had all of cp3/blake/jj uninjured with a luc fully comfortable in his role.

I'd like Cole and Austin back, both are good reserve players. Hopefully Pierce retires.

We have Green's Bird Rights as well?

Quake Griffin wrote:We have Green's Bird Rights as well?

Yes.

I think the days of getting a starter with the MLE are over. We'll see in a few weeks, but with the amount of capspace everyone has and the limited number of good payers, I'm starting to think guys like Cole Aldrich and Solomon Hill are gonna get out of our range with the MLE. The more I read guys with access to NBA executives, the more I think Aldrich is gonna get, at minimum, a Koufos/Gibson/Splitter type of contract.

I don't agree that we need to keep Austin because we have no other options and our hands are tied or whatever. There's always gonna be undervalued players to be had in a 4th guard type of role, Donald Sloan is one as og mentioned, maybe Jarred Jack's health is worth a gamble, maybe we can get a guy with our pick, etc. There's options. We need to keep Austin because he's evolving into a good player and has a lot of upside though. Let's not make this another self deprecating thread that undervalues everything we have, Austin is good in his own right, not because of our cap situation.

I do agree that I like everything better if Jamal isn't around and the 2nd unit has some good structure. Hopefully some team like Sacramento or Minnesota values his veteran leadership off the bench and snatches him out of Doc.

I really believe jamal will stay and I am ok with that. however with wes and Austin I don't care if they go. I do not want to over pay Austin and with doc as coach I see problems down the road. wes on the cheap would be ok. he has some up side and a good attitude. i hope they find a way to keep cole. he is a key guy to me. hopefully we can get lucky in the draft.

Is Courtney Lee in his age 31 season an upgrade from Jamal?

I didn't watch him play this year.