The 2024 NBA season is officially over and silly season is upon us. The draft is only 8 days away and teams can now start negotiating with their own free agents, with full free agency about two weeks away. Rumors are already flying about how some of the impending free agents are feeling and how likely they are to leave their previous teams.
There hasn’t been a lot of news on the Warriors front, with some chatter about Looney’s deal and CP3 potentially moving back his guarantee date, but most of the noise has been around Klay Thompson. The Warriors do seem to be in the driver’s seat if everything else is equal on a deal, but another team like the Magic could add more years or money than the Warriors are comfortable matching. At this point I think it’s likely he gets a three year deal from some team, though that third year could be only partially guaranteed.
I did want to call out that I made a mistake in my preview post with CP3 and how non-guaranteed contracts. The Warriors would need to guarantee the contract for as much as necessary to make a trade legal, which makes it tough to send him out in a 1 for 1. The most realistic trade situation for CP3 now might be using that functionality to essentially bump Moody’s contract for next year from $5.8M to something like $10M to better match another player before the other team waives the rest of CP3’s deal. If he’s moved in a deal where he’s the only outgoing player with an over the cap team, then it would likely be with draft compensation attached for a rotation level player who has more years on his deal than CP3.
If those scenarios sound like tough needles to thread, then our minds are in the same place. I think it will take something else changing in the NBA landscape to make trading CP3 more feasible than simply cutting him. Of course, there is the caveat that I might still have something wrong with the CBA and trades.
Other updates to my preview, mainly regarding the draft and free agency:
- Malique Lewis and Coleman Hawkins both withdrew from the draft
- Jonathan Mogbo, Isaiah Crawford, Pacome Dadiet, and Ajay Mitchell all seem likely to go higher than the Warriors’ pick. I would think the floor for Mogbo is the Kings at 45 - he’d be a wonderful fit in their offense and could potentially keep it humming whenever Sabonis is off the floor. Pelle Larsson and Harrison Ingram also seem unlikely to get to 52, but stranger things have happened.
- Xavier Tillman Sr apparently had over a dozen teams after him at the deadline, so it might be tough to snag him in free agency.
If you’re interested in coaching X’s and O’s, go follow bowser2bowser. His video breakdowns during the playoffs have been absolutely incredible. So helpful to see the game in more ways and put names to plays and actions.
For (free) draft content, the pickings are a bit slimmer in my opinion now than in the heyday of The Stepien, but The Swish Theory and No Ceilings have some good stuff. NBA Big Board is solid but most of the content requires a subscription.
I’m working on some basketball analyses, mainly focused on Ottoneu, that should be out soon. One will be repeating and building on my arbitration analysis from last season while another will focus on how players performed based on scheduling dimensions such as home or away. A non-Ottoneu update is moving the NBA Trades Constructor to use salary data for the 2024-25 season and updating it as we move through free agency.
I’m also planning to make my Ottobasket Values app more robust to any upstream failures and switching over to standings gain points for categories leagues.
A Beerku
India Pale Ale
Hops all the way down, West Coast
Or hazy Northeast
The books I’ve read recently continue two themes from the past few years with translated or international fiction and non-fiction that focuses on California and / or left wing politics. Most of the books I’ve read recently have also been “easy” reading, so I hope to challenge myself more soon.
With that said, Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas by Rebecca Solnit is a phenomenal book even as some of the maps have changed since its publication in 2010. It is so cool to look through the maps and see what is still here, what isn’t, and think back on how and why the city has changed over the years. It also challenges me to think about what my map of the city is and why it is that way. Where are the nodes of my graph? Which ones have faded in and out of my network during my time in the city? How am I impacting the map? This influenced me after I finished the book as I hosted a friend from college for a few days in the city and deciding what to show him in the city helped uncover some of the boundaries of my map since our interests, while similar, don’t overlap entirely. He wanted to see some things I don’t normally see and so I discovered some new things about the city. Not unrelated to all of this is that I take great joy in showing visiting friends around my neighborhood and the city at large, and Infinite City simply adds another layer to my knowledge. I’m sure I’ll revisit it again sometime.
Paprika by Yasutaka Tsutsui is another book I recently finished after a snafu where I bought the book at the store only to find there was a bookbinding error and the text inside the cover actually belonged to The Swimming-Pool Library. Once I finally got the correct book, I was enthralled by the ideas and characters of Paprika. It’s a mind-bending book that brings dreams and reality into conflict like nothing else except perhaps Inception. I’m looking forward to checking out the anime film based on the novel sometime soon.
Up now / next are Trafalgar by Angélica Gorodischer, Space and Place by Yi-Fu Tuan, and Moonbound by Robin Sloan. I’m almost done with Trafalgar (Gorodischer is amazing!) and really looking forward to Moonbound as it just came out and I’m a fan of Sloan’s novels and blog.
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