RealGM

Say a high profile player is about to hit restricted free agency. He's turns down a contract extension and has elected to play under the qualifying offer in order to choose his next team. Ignore, for a moment, that this has never happened. Speaking purely in the hypotheticals. If he wants to attain unrestricted Free Agency, when is his required report date to play under the tender(assuming that the tender will not be pulled) in order to attain this. Is it before Mar 1?

tl:dr-Say Kyrie really wants out of cleveland and he knows that they won't sign and trade him and that they will match any RFA offer he receives. Can he just get a deal for Europe with a Feb 28 opt out and show up before mar 1 in order to play 20ish games for the 2015-16 Cavs and become an unrestricted FA that summer? Does he need to play a full season or is simply accepting the tender before it expires Mar 1 good enough?

Harper4Ferry? wrote:Say a high profile player is about to hit restricted free agency. He's turns down a contract extension and has elected to play under the qualifying offer in order to choose his next team. Ignore, for a moment, that this has never happened.

Actually 14 players have signed qualifying offers, Michael Olowokandi, the first player in the 1998 draft, being the most prominent of them. You can find the list here:

http://www.hoopsrumors.com/2012/07/play ... ffers.html

To answer your question, Irving could go to Europe and then accept his pro-rated QO on March 1 from Cleveland. But from a practical point of view, why would he do that?. His QO will be $9,191,949. He's not going to get anywhere near that money playing in Europe. It would be much smarter for him to accept his QO in October and become a RFA the following July.

Harper4Ferry? wrote:Say a high profile player is about to hit restricted free agency. He's turns down a contract extension and has elected to play under the qualifying offer in order to choose his next team. Ignore, for a moment, that this has never happened. Speaking purely in the hypotheticals. If he wants to attain unrestricted Free Agency, when is his required report date to play under the tender(assuming that the tender will not be pulled) in order to attain this. Is it before Mar 1?

tl:dr-Say Kyrie really wants out of cleveland and he knows that they won't sign and trade him and that they will match any RFA offer he receives. Can he just get a deal for Europe with a Feb 28 opt out and show up before mar 1 in order to play 20ish games for the 2015-16 Cavs and become an unrestricted FA that summer? Does he need to play a full season or is simply accepting the tender before it expires Mar 1 good enough?

Any team who has a player they want to keep, will do whatever they can to use the RFA rules to their full advantage. Yet the scenario you paint has the Cavs doing everything they can to enable his RFA year to be as unobtrusive as possible, topped by paying him a full-year salary for 6 weeks of work.

Simply put, that will never happen.

If Kyrie hasn't signed anything by Oct 1, that QO will get yanked off the table. Then Kyrie will be given only two options by the Cavs: (a) sign a long-term deal with CLE, or (b) sit out the NBA for the remainder of the NBA year ending June 30 and be a RFA again the following summer.

Thanks, I missed a couple sentences about the Oct 1 deadline.