We love Ricky in CLE so whatever needs to happen for him to be happy will make us happy

at least he found a fall man

Isaiah Mobley dominated all summer, Sam showed he's 27 and Emoni grew game after game and showed he could fit in a system.

Let's go Cavs!

Why did he pick up his player option then? He could have gone to Houston for a max deal and no one could have stopped him.

Getting a second coaches challenge after winning the first seems like a no brainer. I would love for flops to be taken out of the game so I'll be cautiously optimistic about that change.

I would disagree with that. It's not really bizarre given leagues around the world do this to great success. Also I don't think the NBA is so single minded that they only worked on this in season tournament and nothing else to improve the game. I'm also not sure that very much time even needed to be spent on this idea given how it's already in place in other leagues and at the top level it's not very complex.

At the end of the day it was a pretty minor change to the existing infrastructure with respect to how much improvement it could impose. I see it as no negative with possible positive.

Why is everyone so actively negative about this? I get not caring at all, but there's clearly more than that. If you don't like this tournament...just pretend they're regular season games and nothing changes. If you already don't watch regular season games... keep not watching regular season games and nothing changes.

500k each for the winners all the way down to 50k for the 8th place team will no doubt bring out some good competition. That's some pretty nice dough even for the max contract guys. Who doesn't want an extra 50k of pocket change? Especially going forward when the 5th place team sees other guys getting hundreds of thousands more than them, that'll no doubt bring out the competitive spirit in a lot of guys.

East Group B is looking to be a bloodbath, same with West Group A.

I wonder if scheduling will cause any weird issues like playing a team 5 times or an intraconference team only twice. I suppose you could have games later in the season against team A or team B depending on who of your group went on to the knockout stage.

Maybe you can't with Max contracts due to the max cap % you can pay out and then the annual raise restrictions and all that, but you always could with sub max contracts. You can also just split up the contract evenly, like Jarrett Allen's deal. He gets 100 mil for 5 years and every year he gets 20 mil. Which is in practice a regressive contract where his % cap hit decreases year over year.

What you said is interesting in that it doesn't seem to happen that often, where you could butt up against the cap one year, get relief for future years with a regressive contract. Maybe it's just the belief in kicking the can down the road and counting on cap increases while maximizing current rosters.

The 'ole Ben Simmons Special

I'm definitely concerned that our biggest weakness is SF and we traded 2 rotation SF's for what appears to be a shooting guard (who is probably 3rd on the depth chart behind Donovan and Caris, unless he gets traded). Can Strus play the 3? And does he play defense? I definitely don't know much about him, so I'd love to have any incorrect assumptions pointed out.

I feel like this keeps the suns about the same but adds a couple years to the window. The shooting is going to be insane though. Booker KD and Beal are going to score 70 points a game.