Sonny Weems and Phoenix Suns agree to 2-year deal worth $5.8 million

[Moochthemonkey]

I hope this isn't another Josh Childress signing though.

Yea this reminds me of a cheaper version of that.

At the time we signed him, Childress was like the king of Europe basketball or something and had various offers and stuff which he turned down....sounds familiar to this.

MUCH cheaper. Childress was making 3 times this amount over double the time span, under a much smaller cap.
I still don't like the signing though, if it means cutting into Goodwin and/or Warren's minutes. They've already spent enough time in the D-league and need if not are ready for atleast 20 minutes a night

You have a valid reason to throw tantrums in game threads this year if he ends up taking Goodwin's minutes, this **** is staring to get old

[nevetsov]

Don't think he takes Archie's minutes, but it does relegate Booker down the bench. Our rooks typically sit for most of their rookie season anyway, perhaps if Weems and Booker both work out next season it will give us flexibility with PJ.

[NavLDO]

I think he's strictly here to replace Tucker (and Green to a lesser extent).

Euro-seasoned defensive wing on the cheap - brings a pro's attitude and won't take his second chance for granted - plus he's taken a big paycut to get here so he'll play hard every night in the hope of securing a bigger pay-day.

Now what happens with Tucker...There's too many PFs on the Celtics and the Cavs have a big expiring and a need for wing depth.

Tucker to the Cavs
Haywood expiring to the Celtics (maybe a pick or cash as well)
Sully or Olynyk to the Suns

Agree on both fronts. He has SF size, in fact, has the same 6'10" Wingspan and 8'8" Reach as Warren, so suited well to take SF minutes, but is also athletic enough to play the 2. And at less than $3M his season, and a Team Option for next, may be a great 2 year rental for us.

This could be one of those REALLY underrated signings, or if it isn't, and he flops, it cost us literally next to nothing, but gives Booker a year to progress, or Warren as well.

[NTB]

http://www.azcentral.com/longform/sports/nba/suns/2015/07/11/phoenix-suns-sonny-weems-took-long-way-back-nba/30026185/

[NavLDO]

So, I was looking up what was being said about Weems back in the 2008 draft, and found these 'nuggets' (excuse the pun) from the expert analysis as DraftExpress regarding the Suns/Spurs draft/trade.

"In the second round, the Spurs took Phoenix to the cleaners simply for the price of moving up three spots in the draft. They landed the better player in the deal (Malik Hairston), picked up a future second round pick, and even managed to swindle some cash out of the Suns in the process. A very nice transaction all in all. Hairston has a great chance to make this team and may develop into a contributor down the road if he can improve his perimeter defense skills."

AND...

"What is surprising, though, is the way they handled themselves in the second round. In order to move up three measly spots from 48 to 45, the Suns traded a good player (Malik Hairston), a future second rounder, AND cash. We realize that the Suns are serious about getting tougher and better defensively (Dragic fits the bill there), but we’re not talking about a sure-fire NBA player by any stretch, and there aren’t even any guarantees that he will want to leave Tau Vitoria for whatever the Suns offer him. We always talk about value, value, value…the Suns did not get a lot of it here."

http://www.draftexpress.com/article/2008-NBA-Draft-Report-Card-2956/

If you find yourself, as I did, asking "who???" immediately after reading the name 'Malik Hairston', you are not alone--he played a whopping 62 games in NBA...



But, back on topic, they did like the drafting of Weems...

"Denver Nuggets

Picks: Traded a 2009 second rounder for rights to Sonny Weems (#39)

B

The Nuggets selected arguably the best athlete in this draft, Sonny Weems, early in the second round. Weems doesn’t have the willingness or knowledge of to use that athleticism to his benefit at this point, but if he can figure that out over the next few years, he could develop into a solid rotation player. He has more upside than almost anyone drafted in the second round, that’s for sure."

[TASTIC]

Bump

http://grantland.com/features/euroleague-basketball-cska-moscow-andrei-kirilenko-sonny-weems-kyle-hines-demetris-nichols/

Didn't start a new thread, but Grantland has a nice piece on CSKA Moscow, here's a great bit on Weems. I think he's really going to give us that Tyson Chandler-type defensive leadership off the bench:

Late that night, back at his 29th-floor penthouse in northwest Moscow, Sonny Weems, 28, snacks on Spanish donettes and explains why he doesn’t like the new Kendrick Lamar album. “I like to hear the real ****,” he says. While Weems lounges on a black leather sectional, two female friends from America puff from a 3-foot-tall hookah. A spiral staircase leads upstairs, where a third friend is asleep. Underneath the staircase, resting on the top of a cabinet, there is a painting of him in an Arkansas Razorbacks jersey. “Girls paint me,” he explains. Famous Amos cookies, Oreos, Air Heads, and Patrón are all at the ready; Weems asks only that we take off our shoes as we enter.

The girls head upstairs as the Duke-Gonzaga game from this year’s Elite Eight begins, streaming through Weems’s Cyrillic-keyboarded MacBook and beamed onto a 60-inch flat screen. He watches as Jahlil Okafor catches the ball and is guarded by Domantas Sabonis, son of Soviet and Lithuanian hall of fame center Arvydas. “Really, that’s his son?” Weems asks. “He’s big as ****.” Then, referring to Okafor: “Who’s that dude on Duke?”

Weems received a one-game suspension for his role in the Enisey brawl, so he won’t dress for the next day’s home date with Nymburk. He regrets nothing. “We’re Americans,” he says. “We don’t take that ****. Where I’m from, if someone gets that close to me, I don’t know what they’re going to do.”

The shooting guard, born with cleft feet, grew up in West Memphis, Arkansas, right across the Mississippi River from Tennessee. He played two years of junior college ball, led Arkansas to two NCAA tournament appearances, and was selected by the Chicago Bulls with the 39th pick in the second round of the 2008 NBA draft before being traded to Denver. Weems was the lone rookie on the Carmelo Anthony–led Nuggets team that made the Western Conference finals in 2009. Besides Anthony, he spent his first NBA season around Allen Iverson, J.R. Smith, and Chauncey Billups (who was acquired for Iverson after three games). “My rookie year, can you imagine walking in the locker room?” Weems says.

Weems ended up on the Raptors, where he played from 2009 to 2011, earned rotation minutes, befriended DeMar DeRozan and Amir Johnson, and saw Chris Bosh split for Miami. “Chris is different,” Weems says. “He’s the type of dude, you’ll walk into his house and he’ll be listening to Erykah Badu and drinking tea or some ****.” Weems’s 1-year-old daughter, Sienna, nicknamed Ladybug, lives in Toronto with her mother. They visited a few weeks earlier, and Sienna’s marker and crayon drawings are still taped to a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the northern edge of Moscow’s darkened urban sprawl. “I just want to make enough money to take care of my daughter,” he says. “That’s all I want. Make sure she has a good life.”

After the 2011 lockout began, Weems was the first NBA player to sign overseas, with the Lithuanian club Zalgiris. A foot injury hurt Weems’s prospects of returning to the NBA, so he opted for a more lucrative opportunity with CSKA. “I was scared as ****,” Weems recalls of his initial decision to play in Russia. “In the U.S. we just see the bull. [But] it’s safer here than anywhere in America.”

Weems re-signed with CSKA before this season, and his three-year deal, reportedly worth $10 million, made him the highest-paid American player in Europe. He says he misses the NBA. Still, he turned down an offer from the Atlanta Hawks to stay in Moscow. “[Teams] can talk to us about minutes,” he says. “But at the end of the day, it’s all about the money.”

CSKA has plenty of the latter. The club’s $43 million budget outpaces even its richest Euroleague rivals. According to team president Andrei Vatutin, 45 percent comes from the team’s corporate owner Norilsk Nickel, a mining and smelting giant that was once led by Brooklyn Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov. Vatutin doesn’t provide a breakdown for the other 55 percent but says he tries to decrease ownership’s burden through sponsorships.

The club, which was under the direct management of the Soviet military until the fall of the USSR, has been formally independent for more than 20 years, but in many ways it remains the Kremlin’s team. In a statement written for the club’s 90th anniversary in 2013, Putin wrote: “I am pleased to note that today representatives of the red and blue club are among the recognized leaders in Russian and international sports.” Ivanov, the president’s chief of staff, sits courtside in sunglasses at almost every home game and occasionally stops by the locker room to give pep talks. “You-gotta-win-type ****,” Weems explains. “He’s a cool guy, though.”

As we watch Duke pull away in the second half against Gonzaga, Weems admits to feeling frustrated after the previous day’s practice. He says he recently started to “care about legacy more,” but right now there’s a divide in the locker room. “I’m not gonna name any names,” he says about rifts within the roster. But he grants that the team felt different earlier in the season, during CSKA’s winning streak: “Everybody bought in. There weren’t any egos. Now we’re not having fun. If we get back to where we were, we’ll definitely win the Final Four.”

[NTB]

Thanks for reads NavLDO and TASTIC.

I've been hyped up for Weems since the first day. He will be AT LEAST Gerald Green with a brain. And most importantly, with defense.

[Mulhollanddrive]

Sounds a bit Morris Brothers from that piece, don't know anything else about him.

[Frank Lee]

A couple of girls and a hookah? Cookies too ?

Life is good in Moscow