Pillendreher wrote:On their latest podcast, the Thunder Buddies said that the Thunder would be willing to pay a huge luxury tax bill if it made the team better. Yet they also said that "you don't want them taking on bad long term contracts", so I wonder what kind of improvement they had in mind on that front.
I had been hoping this was a possibility. It makes things much more interesting. If the main goal was simply to reduce the tax bill, it felt like we were stuck giving up what few assets we have remaining to unload Melo’s contract for a smaller bad contract, or stretching Melo. If the owners are willing to go half way and save say 50% of what stretching Melo would save, we open up all kinds of options.
The simplest option is probably just to sell 2019 cap space for a useful player with 2 years left under contract in the neighborhood of 16-20m/year (Atlanta and Bazemore, NY and Lee, or Charlotte and MKG or Williams come to mind).
I kind of like the idea of flipping the script on everyone. Instead of paying someone to take Melo as everyone seems to think we will do, getting paid to take back a worse contract with 2 years remaining, but lower per year cap hits. There seems to be no shortage of negative value contracts with 2 years remaining.
Hoping Presti shocks us all with something brilliant this summer.