There are certain things you can count on in San Antonio: The guacamole is going to be terrific; the food at the restaurants along the Riverwalk will likelier than not make you sick; the railroad that passes through the south side of town will take out your transmission if you cross it too fast and the total number of people flying Spurs flags in their yards will outnumber the folks flying Lone State State flags.
When it comes to the Spurs, you can count on these things: A class-act organization that does everything by the book, and wins; a head coach with one of the sharpest minds to ever step on the hardwood; a savvy GM; an owner that understands his role and draft picks that are likely to be diamonds in the rough.
One more thing about the Spurs: They have a culture surrounding themselves that the entire NBA attempts to emulate. That’s why front offices and coaching staffs everywhere are filled with Spurs alumni.
Here’s another thing that we have touched on before: Gregg Popovich does not suffer fools, and if you are foolish enough to cross him, he will let you know in one way or another.
Well, far be it for me to call Dennis Robertson a fool, because people I have spoken to some who have spoken to him and they describe him as a more intelligent person than one might expect, given that he has some 219 million reasons to mend fences with Pop and sign a supermax extension.
But Mr. Robertson is holding the Spurs and the rest of the NBA hostage by telling anyone who will listen that Kawhi Leonard is ultimately going to end up in Los Angeles, and as a result, Spurs culture is suffering.
Tony Parker is gone, off to Charlotte to play for Michael Jordan. Kyle Anderson is almost gone, having signed a four-year, $37 million offer sheet with the Memphis Grizzlies that San Antonio is unlikely to match for luxury tax and hard cap reasons. Tim Duncan is long gone, and in January he agreed to a deal that may or may not allow him to recoup $7.5 million of the $20 million he claimed former financial advisor Charles Banks IV swindled from him. Manu Ginobili is still around, but his hair is long gone. R.C. Buford is still running the show, but he is as elusive as determining Woj’s next euphemism.
And so an offseason that could have reaped a windfall for San Antonio has turned into a summer of temporary disgust, Spurs fans watching their team undergo a transformation that remains incomplete and will remain that way until the Leonard standoff is resolved. Insert your own Alamo joke here.
From Mike Finger of the San Antonio Express-News: “For 17 years in San Antonio, Parker always knew exactly where his place was in history, in his organization, and in this town. He cared about such things, deeply, not because he was jealous or insecure but because he wanted to be great, and as he leaves the Spurs now, that is exactly how he will be remembered. Parker was the most prideful man ever to set his ego aside, over and over and over again, and willingly play third fiddle. Deep in his heart he knew fans loved Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobili just a little bit more than they loved him, but this did not leave him embittered, because deep in his heart he knew he made Duncan and Ginobili better than they ever could have been without him.”
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He is gone now, having reached agreement with the Hornets on a two-year, $10 million pact, reportedly communicating with owner Michael Jordan exclusively via text message.
Several teams remain in the mix for Leonard, and the Celtics and Sixers are not going to bite unless there is an assurance that Leonard will not be a rental. I’ve told you that Pop wants to trade him to the East, and there are plenty of teams that would welcome Leonard as a rental before rerouting him to Los Angeles next February at the trade deadline. A guy I know and trust told me that at the end of the day, Pop will likely take care of Sixers coach/GM Brett Brown on this one. But again, it bears repeating that Pat Riley should not be counted out of the mix.
What is what is slowly starting to come into focus, something we learned late last night with the news out of Las Vegas that Zach LaVine had signed an offer sheet with Sacramento that the Chicago Bulls are planning to match, is that we may go into a four-day holding pattern while the Kings’ cap space is held up by the LaVine offer sheet.
The Kings and Bulls were two of the three teams (Atlanta is the other) looking to act as dumping grounds for bad contracts as a way to facilitate trades and stockpile future draft picks, and the Kings’ move is serving as a mechanism to take the Bulls out of that mix. Sacramento’s cap room will remain tied up until LaVine re-signs with the Bulls, but after that …. we may see Vlade Divac, Peja Stojakovic and Vivek Ranadive end up being the conduit through which a Leonard deal gets done.
Sacramento went into the offseason with one priority aside from stockpiling picks: Get a small forward, a good one, and keep him around for a few years as their rebuild takes place. They thought they had their man in Mario Hezonja, but when he said he was unwilling to do a three-year deal because he wants to re-enter free agency next summer, the Knicks became his landing zone.
When the medical reports on Michael Porter came back too negative, they, too, passed on the University of Missouri product and went instead for Marvin Bagley III and nobody else (they dealt the rights to their second-round pick, Gary Trent Jr., to Portland for a pair of future second-rounders). But the Kings remain without a first-round pick in 2019 (it will go to Boston or Philadelphia as a result of the Nik Stauskas dump that Divac made when he been on the job for only a few weeks), and acquiring a first-rounder for next June, along with a small forward, remain priorities.
Enter Popovich, and his alumni.
But first, know this about Pop: He and Vlade are so tight than when Divac made a farewell tour across Serbia, Pop accompanied him. They are friends first and competitors second, and the same can be said of Popovich and one of his former assistants, Brown, who is now running the front office in Philly until Bryan Colangelo’s replacement is hired.
Brown is trying to move a package that includes Robert Covington, Dario Saric, draft picks and any number of other players in an effort to get Leonard. Nobody aside from Brown and Pop know exactly what Philly has put on the table, but the one thing (aside from Robertson’s acquiescence) that might get the deal done would be the unprotected 2021 pick from Miami that the Sixers acquired on draft night. They also have a stockpile of nine future No. 2 picks.
If Covington — whose contract I am told is undesirable to the Spurs — can be sent to Sacramento in a three-way deal that also gets some of Philly’s extra picks into the hands of Vlade, then we enter Monty Hall territory. But for now, the pieces of this jigsaw puzzle only fit together perfectly in the abstract.
The cap space clocks for the Kings and Bulls have stopped because of the LaVine offer sheet, and every other NBA team knows this and will try to fill the broker role in the meantime. But only the Hawks and Sixers (and Brooklyn, to a lesser degree) retain enough cap space to be major players who can made the deal happen with relative ease — the term relative being especially relevant because Robertson is the uncle of Leonard. More specifically, he is the brother of Leonard’s mother (Leonard’s father was killed in a car wash robbery in Compton, Calif. that Leonard witnessed as a teenager.)
Until Robertson blinks, everyone else squints.
Meantime, the Spurs remain +7000 to win the title next season, and that line ain’t moving until the Leonard situation is resolved. Meantime, Pop remains as patient as Spurs fans remain impatient.
We shall see who is bluffing. And who is not.
https://www.getmoresports.com/sheridan-next-destination-kawhi-leonard-handicapping-field/
