All-NBA teams impact OKC
When the All-NBA team lists crossed email inboxes and Twitter feeds across the world Thursday, was there a joyous noise from the Thunder?
Of course there was — for the second consecutive season, Russell Westbrook was voted All-NBA First Team, joining James Harden, LeBron James, Kawhi Leonard and Anthony Davis on the illustrious list.
The intrigue of the AllNBA teams, however, falls farther down the lists. In the section listed “Other players receiving votes” are Indiana’s Paul
George and Utah’s Gordon Hayward, each players whose summers will be directly altered by not making any of the three teams.
The exclusions of George and Hayward from the All-NBA teams could cause ripples through the NBA, even in Oklahoma City.
With George not making the All-NBA team, he did not qualify for Indiana to offer him the Designated Veteran Player Exception, which could have netted him an estimated five-year, $207 million extension. As with Westbrook and the Thunder come July 6 (the end of the free agent moratorium), no team but the Pacers can offer that amount of money and that length of deal to George. Indiana could have another chance to offer the DPE if George makes All-NBA after the 2017-18 season.
But with the DPE out of the question this offseason, George is still a trade candidate if the Pacers don’t want to risk losing him for nothing (a la Kevin Durant) as an unrestricted free agent in 2018. It’s no secret George, a California native, has interest in the Los Angeles Lakers.
USA Today’s Sam Amick wrote that even if George had made All-NBA and had the massive DPE offered to him by Indiana “George still planned on taking the patient and prudent road.
“If he can’t win at the highest level in Indiana, then it’s off to Laker Land he’ll go,” Amick wrote. “... either via trade or free agency next summer.”
What George missing out on All-NBA does is strengthen the possibility of trade discussions.
Barring the Thunder breaking up its core, George isn’t coming to Oklahoma City this summer, if ever. In the event Indiana wanted to trade its All-Star forward, other teams (Boston, Los Angeles Lakers) have more to offer Indiana in order to land George as a centerpiece. But if the Pacers, Lakers or Celtics have eyes to get a deal done, a third team getting involved isn’t out of the question.
Maybe they pull in the Thunder or another of the 28 NBA teams. The Thunder has been a helper in a three-way trade as recent as 2015, taking Dion Waiters off Cleveland's hands in order to help the New York Knicks ship Iman Shumpert and J.R. Smith out.
Hayward is another case. He’s an unrestricted free agent July 1 if he expectedly opts out of his final guaranteed year at $16.7 million.
Again, the Thunder has no cap room to sign Hayward. But if Hayward signs a one year deal with a secondyear player option (a la Durant in Golden State last summer), he could be an unrestricted free agent next summer, too.
That would give Hayward another season to make All-NBA and earn DPE eligibility for Utah to sign him long term. It would also give other NBA teams (including the Thunder) an additional year to maneuver under the ever-rising salary cap in order to make a pitch to Hayward in 2018.
The Thunder’s salary cap figures to be occupied primarily by Westbrook, Steven Adams, and Victor Oladipo by then as well. They’ll make a combined $72 million this season.
But George and Hayward missing benchmarks now buys the rest of the NBA’s teams time to figure out how they can be a part of a deal that gets them elsewhere, or how they can make space to sign them outright.