bwgood77 wrote:Ghost of Kleine wrote:bwgood77 wrote:
I think we'd do Houston and Dallas. ITht's probably about it.
I'd be content with the Houston one. The Dallas one would be meh (IF Irving) only because it'd be swapping one major positional hole for another. But If we traded Ayton for Irving, then it'd become paramount for us to explore moving Paul (possibly Shamet too) in a deal for cap space so we could pursue another center in free agency? IF the flakers or Dallas lose out on their guards resigning with them, Would they become potential trade partners for Paul?
Trading Paul wouldn't give us cap space. We are WAY over the cap. You can forget cap space for awhile. Do you ever look at cap sheets? Might save you a lot of time. We are in the tax. You have to be like $30 million over the cap to even hit the tax, so we are over $30 million over the cap...with Book, KD and DA's contracts going up every year...and if we swapped DA for Kyrie, Kyrie would likely have a bigger contract.
Sure I understand what you're saying is right man! And I do look over the cap sheets sometimes, though admittedly my post stroke memory has occasional lapses at times so my apologies for forgetting specific details sometimes. But I will also point out that we're not just discussing trading Paul's salary alone in my posted premise. But we'd be looking at moving BOTH Paul and Ayton and perhaps even Shamet attached in one of those deals. IF possible, then we might be able to shed around 40-50 million or more in total depending on what we'd be taking back conceptually? And that conceptually would be a BIG JUMP in the right direction towards cleaning up our books and starting to work towards creating a modicum of increased cap flexibility to make roster alterations around or core. But with respect to your point about how far over the cap we're looking to be, what around 73 million over so far and climbing annually. So my point again is not in that we'd get fully clear under the cap, but that we begin working our way back to acquiring some flexibility to give us more options over Durant's next two years with us. But also even looking beyond that possibly to more long term sustainability overall. I'm just not sure what our better alternative would be considering the restrictive nature of our cap situation. I just feel we're in this situation because our overall salaries are top heavy and unbalanced.
Sure we have vet mins that are one one yr deals. But that's a catch 22 situation for us because IF we don't have any cap flexibility and they somehow overplay their deals, then we likely lose them to teams with more cap and more lucrative offers. And if they don't perform well or consistently, then they offer no trade value for us as fillers or sweeteners. Moving Paul for an unguaranteed contract or a cheaper expiring gives us a head start towards correcting our books. Moving Ayton for a lesser salary (even if a lesser value talent) would further that head start towards balancing our books and would somewhat offset those core escalations too. That's a good start! Then of course getting back players (for depth) on cheaper cost controlled contracts also helps that corrective strategy too. Finally, properly valuing and utilizing the draft sooner rather than later gives us low cost contractually controlled depth. BUT ALSO, It can give us premium young contractually controlled talent with perceivable upside that we could actually leverage in trades as opposed to our oft underperforming vet min bench cast offs that no team finds desirable. I'm only looking to try to give us some options.
