 | Rights: None | Last Sal.: $.00M |
| Agent: Supe | Exp: 7-9 years | |
| FA Tier: 1 | Age: 41 | |
| FBPPG: | Inj: No Injury | |
| Desired Salary: Between $1.54M and $28.26M | ||
| Contract Status: UFA - Unclaimed Free Agent | ||
| ‹6/30 | 7/1 | 7/2› |
| Rnk | Sal | Earn | Stats | Sched | News |
| Game ET | Latest Player News... | |||||||
| No current news. | ||||||||
| Trans. Sep 12 11:54 ET The Big3 is becoming an entertaining home for former NBA players. Maybe also a proving ground for those players to return to the top pro league. Former Hawks wing Josh Childress, who famously left the NBA in his prime for a lucrative contract in Greece The Scoop: None. Sep 12 11:54 ET |
| Trans. Jul 16 3:31 ET The next NBA lockout is two years away. As a result some very smart people are going to do some very dumb things for the reason many smart people usually do dumb things – preserving their financial interests. This is where the rhetoric and posturing comes in. [ Follow Dunks Don't Lie on Tumblr: The best slams from all of basketball ] On Tuesday evening, NBA commissioner Adam Silver (a very smart man) did well by his constituency (30 NBA owners) to say some dumb things that only dumb people would believe. “ A significant amount of NBA teams ” are losing money, he swears, and something needs to be done about it when the NBA Players Association opts out of the current collective bargaining agreement in December 2016. NBPA chief Michele Roberts, a very smart person, decided to say some very smart things in response on Thursday afternoon. From a statement: “All of the data we have access to indicates that our business is thriving and will continue to do so in the near future. We agreed not to debate some of the finer points of negotiation in public, and aren’t going to change that approach now in response to some remarks from the Commissioner on Tuesday. We are, however, going to take him up on his offer to share the audited financials with the union. We also want to ensure that everyone understands the facts of this business: "Under the CBA, we do not have a gross compensation system. The players' 50% share is calculated net of a substantial amount of expenses and deductions. "New and renovated arenas around the league have proven to be revenue drivers, profit centers, and franchise valuation boosters. That has been the case over the past few years in Orlando, Brooklyn, and New York, to name a few. In some instances, owners receive arena revenues that are not included in BRI. Many teams also receive generous arena subsidies, loans and other incentives from state and local governments as part of their arena deals. "Virtually every business metric demonstrates that our business is healthy. Gate receipts, merchandise sales and TV ratings are all at an all-time high. Franchise values have risen exponentially in recent years, and the NBA has enjoyed high single digit revenue growth since 2010-11." Our Dan Devine already did brilliant work in breaking this down on Wednesday . The owners are pushing their commissioner, hot off the heels of dismissing Donald Sterling and bringing the joy that is Riley Curry to your attention, into this. He’s spouting nonsense, as his job entails. And, as a lawyer, he is doing so without reflex. You get a gig like this, you want a job like this, and you have to check your soul at the door. What you need to do is remember this stuff two years from now, when your uncle or favorite radio station host or dumb boyfriend is talking up the NBA “strike.” (Which, if this were feasible in any way, is what the players actually should do.) The NBA owners destroyed the players in the last round of negotiations. They moved the needle closer to the middle of the distribution ranks, mindful of the anticipation that the league was growing in influence, that live TV ratings were only going to improve and that owners could flip over franchises for great profit with absolutely none of the turnover cash heading into the players’ pockets. The (allegedly) corrupt then-NBPA leadership took it on the chin, safe in the knowledge that their checks would eventually clear, hoping for the escrow payments to help right things in the long run, happy to get some games on the docket in order to allow NBA owners to start paying players the cash that the legally-binding contracts they signed years earlier forced them to pay. NBA owners have spent billions of dollars on free-agent contracts in just the last week alone, and to many this reminds of the sort of buyer’s remorse you saw in the 2009 and 2010 offseasons. Those offseasons were marked by terrible moves by bad owners and bad general managers, though, handing out massive deals to uninsurable types like Amar’e Stoudemire and needless overpayments for people like Josh Childress and Joe Johnson. You haven’t gotten much of that so far this summer, save for new’ish owners and new’ish personnel chiefs getting needlessly giddy about paying Reggie Jackson way too much. This time around, most teams and GMs have spent in figures commensurate with the possible $19 million jump in the soft salary cap ceiling for the offseason of 2016. Which makes it all the more infuriating that Silver’s constituency is pretending like Khris Middleton and a team’s new practice facility will become some sort of millstone in the coming years. There are still, even in 2015 with all the mod cons available, poorly run NBA teams. Mikhail Prokhorov bought the Nets years ago, and after asking a bunch of Twitter snark-hounds who would be the best GM to spend his money Brewster-style , he settled on Billy King after Isiah Thomas was denied admission. The Lakers were the ones who decided they were to only be a family business and that Kobe Bryant had to be the NBA’s highest-paid player in 2015-16, and Detroit’s new owner is still working with a new toy. Oklahoma City’s owners are still working through some guilt about being caught on record as being duplicitous about the SuperSonics, so they’re paying for it this summer . Finally. Meanwhile, two dozen other NBA teams are working sensibly. They’re staffing their front offices with more than a handful of people who might, shockingly, have disparate backgrounds. They’re anticipating their opponents’ anticipation of the trend that leads to the trend that becomes the trend that leads to the win. They understand that, at the end of the fiscal year, you can’t binge-watch a Friday night Mavericks-Rockets game from ESPN two weeks later, and that this league will always be of the moment, and that this is where the currency comes from. J.J. Barea’s new contract will expire just four days after he turns 35 and it will pay him around $4 million that season – and that’s OK, because he’ll be a blip on the salary spectrum. The league is getting smarter, but the league’s owners will always play dumb on purpose in order to make more and more money. This is why we’ve had this back and forth this week. You didn’t see as much between David Stern and Billy Hunter in 2009, or David Stern and Billy Hunter in 1996 ( during the NBA’s most tumultuous and fascinating offseason in history ), and this is why Roberts and Silver’s back and forth is foreboding and worrying. There is always money to shift around in order to make things look bad. There are always sleeves to put on jerseys in order to afford Shaun Livingston. There are always phony-baloney jobs to protect. There are always going to be 30 NBA owners whining, in a lifetime of things going their way, about things not going their way. Michele Roberts is out to make sure things go her way. Even as she works on behalf of millionaires, hers is a cause worth supporting. - - - - - - - Kelly Dwyer is an editor for Ball Don't Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at KDonhoops@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @KDonhoops The Scoop: None. Jul 16 3:31 ET |
| Trans. Feb 17 1:49 ET Kobe Bryant, in his declining years, is easily the most overpaid player in the NBA. He played just 35 games this year before bowing out due to another season ending injury, making $23.5 million and he’ll make $25 million next year. However, Kobe Bryant, for just about the entirety of his career and even when he was making the absolute most money the NBA would allow him to make, was completely and utterly underpaid. Kobe has long been aware of this, since his teens even, and he’s completely correct in reminding us that the NBA’s owners have developed a collectively bargained system that does not reward its stars with payment commensurate with their contributions. What Kobe might be a little off on is including his beloved Lakers within the ranks of his moneyed martyrdom. In a typically-interesting and oftentimes odd interview with Chuck Klosterman at GQ , Bryant relayed that he thinks it was the Los Angeles Lakers that were the cause of the owners’ hardline stance during the 2011 NBA lockout. Despite the fact that the Lakers were swept in the second round of the playoffs prior to the work stoppage. When asked by Klosterman as to how the Lakers were going to attempt to build a championship-level team this summer, Bryant dropped this : But how could that possibly be done? Doesn’t the league’s financial system dictate certain limitations? Well, okay: Look at the [2011] lockout. That lockout was made to restrict the Lakers. It was. I don’t care what any other owner says. It was designed to restrict the Lakers and our marketability. The Lakers specifically, or teams like the Lakers? There is only one team like the Lakers. Everything that was done with that lockout was to restrict the Lakers’ ability to get players and to create a sense of parity, for the San Antonios of the world and the Sacramentos of the world. But a funny thing happened, coming out of that lockout: Even with those restrictions, the Lakers pulled off a trade [for Chris Paul] that immediately set us up for a championship, a run of championships later, and which saved money. Now, the NBA vetoed that trade. But the Lakers pulled that sh-t off, and no one would have thought it was even possible. The trade got vetoed, because they’d just staged the whole lockout to restrict the Lakers. Mitch got penalized for being smart. But if we could do that… Don’t flatter yourself, Kobe. Don’t flatter yourself, Lakers. If there was any style of team that the NBA’s owners set out to destroy, it was a top-heavy Miami Heat squad featuring three of the best players at their position and cast lower-salaried helpers. It is completely fair to suggest that a litany of NBA owners, angry at superstars deciding to control their own fate in sunny Miami, wanted to somehow level the playing field. To make the money in Minnesota count as much as the money in Miami. The real reason for the lockout was money, in general, however. The NBA’s owners needed to wrest back a chunk of basketball-related income in order to cap themselves from spending outrageously – not on superstars, but for everyone else. From tossing too-long contracts at middling players, or getting too giddy in dealing draft picks during trade deadlines and (especially) offseasons that were featuring more and more outrageous transactions. Now, do you want to talk about a lockout that was about the Lakers? Look at the work stoppage that followed the 1997-98 season. Prior to the collective bargaining agreement that was signed in January of 1999, the NBA did not have a cap on individual player salaries or a luxury tax for teams that had strayed too far over the league’s artificial salary “cap.” This was why the Chicago Bulls were looking to spend some of the hundreds of millions of dollars they earned during the Michael Jordan years to toss unending amounts of cash at a new generation of players. This is why Jordan made over $31 million in his final season, and why the Lakers were able to clear cap space and outbid Orlando for Shaquille O’Neal’s services in 1996. Even with a salary cap in place, teams with space could choose to toss 90 percent of a team’s available cap space on one star, if they saw fit. Following this CBA change, however, players were given set salaries based on how long they had been in the NBA, and the idea of a “maximum contract” was established. Not only that, the new CBA incentivized re-signing with your incumbent team, which is why young stars like Kobe Bryant, Ray Allen, Allen Iverson, and Antoine Walker all quietly re-signed with their current squads just following the lockout. Even had a team like the Bulls offered any of those players the max, as the Bulls did, those young stars could make more by staying home. Despite the massive cap space and market advantage, the Bulls were forced into playing by everyone else’s rules, which led to the franchise’s decline. In a similar vein some 15 years later, the Lakers could not use the money earned from their massive local television contract to offer Carmelo Anthony or LeBron James $30 million a season to pair with Kobe. Not because of the 2011 NBA lockout, but because of the 1998-99 one. You may also recall that Kobe Bryant was one of five players to actually vote against the final version of the new CBA in 1999. Laker teammate Shaquille O’Neal had already gotten his massive contract in 1996 and he pushed to end the lockout sooner rather than later, taking on a cadre of agents and other superstars along the way. Bryant, with his second contract now likely cut from $100-something million to “just” $71 million in total, knew that this new deal would enhance the NBA’s middle class while just about underpaying even players earning “maximum” contracts. It was absolutely in his best interests to go against the grain in that instance, and an incredibly gutsy and intelligent move to make for someone at any age, much less 20-years old. It was the subsequent overpayment of the middle class players – your Josh Childresses or Drew Goodens – that led to the 2011 work stoppage. Not a fear of a big, bad Laker machine. That had already been taken care of. Did the NBA seemingly wrong the Lakers by overruling the trade that sent them Chris Paul, so soon after the 2011 lockout? Perhaps, but in the end the NBA-owned New Orleans club ended up making a better deal for Paul. Just nine months later, Laker fans were actually happy that the NBA overruled the Paul trade, as a lineup featuring Bryant, Steve Nash, Metta World Peace, Pau Gasol and Dwight Howard was seemingly superior to one featuring Paul, Bryant, MWP, Andrew Bynum and Josh McRoberts. That obviously didn’t work out, but it doesn’t mean the Lakers still weren’t able to put together two different super-teams under the new rules. On top of that, the Cleveland Cavaliers worked their way toward a fearsome super-team last summer, and there is always a chance the Lakers or Knicks could do the same this summer or next with scads of cap space and a big name already in place. Of course, that’s dependent on superstars choosing Laker or Knick-money over the money offered by their incumbent teams. Outfits in smaller markets such as Portland and Memphis don’t have to be fearful of the Laker or Knick television revenue as they cobble together maximum contracts that will actually out-bid the Los Angeles or New York offer, as outlined by a collective bargaining agreement that was preceded by a lockout. The 1998 one, Kobe. Not the 2011 one. - - - - - - - Kelly Dwyer is an editor for Ball Don't Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at KDonhoops@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @KDonhoops The Scoop: None. Feb 17 1:49 ET |
| Trans. Oct 28 11:22 ET MELBOURNE (Reuters) - Former NBA player Josh Childress of the United States has shut down his Twitter account after being subject to racial abuse for flooring an opponent during a local league match in Australia. The 31-year-old Childress, who plays for Sydney Kings in Australia's National Basketball League, was suspended for one game for unduly rough play after rushing at and striking Perth Wildcats forward Jesse Wagstaff with his forearm in an ugly incident during a game on Saturday. ... The Scoop: None. Oct 28 11:22 ET |
