Ruzious wrote:One of the major goals for the organization should be developing Bryant. But... I doubt that it will be one of the major goals of the organization. Not that he's a great prospect, but they have his rights for 2 seasons at a cheap price - he can be a useful player that takes over the minutes of Mahinmi - not right away - but hopefully sooner than later. Of course, they could have done the same thing with Christian Wood, but that's another discussion. At least they actually made the effort to acquire Bryant. It wasn't a "major acquisition", but small good moves can make a big difference, and you need to make them when you have 3 max contracts on your roster.
Clarification. We have him for one year at a cheap price. We have the option of extending a very cheap qualifying offer for next year, but he's still a restricted free agent. If he goes out and finds a team who will sign him to a hefty contract, we would have to match that hefty contract to keep him. So technically, the 2nd year may not be all that cheap.
My guess is that Bryant won't play much, at least early on in the season. But if one of Howard or Mahinmi gets hurt, he'll get some burn as our 2nd string center. In a best-case scenario, he does well and proves that he's a legit NBA player and we end up resigning him to a new (and hopefully not too expensive) contract. If that happens, it would open up the possibility of us stretching Mahinmi's final year of his contract, turning a $15.4M cap hit into a $5.1M cap hit.
With Mahinmi's salary reduced, our cap hit would be $98M for Wall, Beal, Porter, Brown and Mahinmi's phantom salary. Let's assume Oubre, Bryant and Sato cost a combined $20M and our 2019 picks costs $2M. With a luxtax threshold expected to be around $133M, we would still have $13M to resign a few vets to round out the following roster:
PG Wall/Sato
SG Beal/Sato
SF Oubre/Brown
PF Porter/2019 pick
C Bryant
Given the number of free agents in the offseason, there are bound to be a few guys who get overlooked and we can sign for cheap.