re: Trey Murphy injured meniscus

The tank for Cooper Flagg starts today

WOJ said on ESPN yesterday that it’s a slight tear and the Pels are debating on whether to snip it for a quicker recovery or do a full repair which will leave him out for months.

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Yeah I just thought from his post this morning maybe he took the longer recovery route. But who knows.

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He absolutely should. He's young. It sucks for us but it's better for him and us long term. Maybe this allows us to sign him to a team friendly extension this offseason

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I agree but if thats the case we need to offload Kira and find a shooter early in the season.

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You could probably find a "shooter" easy enough. Finding one with gravity that you can afford both salary and trade cost, that's probably not happening. Let's hope CJ's hand is back to normal and that Borrego finds ways to get BI taking more 3s. Borrego might be the biggest X factor for the season other than health.

Can we please just sign Garuba? I think he fits. He's definitely not Trey but he'd be serviceable as the backup 4 while Trey is out.

If it is a small tear then they should just do the meniscectomy. It is what they did with Zion, and as we all know, they are super cautious with him. The only benefit to the repair is if the tear is large enough that it could lead to early onset of degenerative issues in the knee. JJJ and Westbrook both had major tears of the meniscus that required the repair.

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Stay out of the tax and replace kira's spot with a young intriguing front court player

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I think there's some big issue with this, if my numbers are correct.

No team has cap space right now, except the Pacers, so they can't just absorb his contract. That means they would have to send us back a player. Even the Pacers would b/c they already have 15 on the roster. The issue with that is just about every team would have to send back at least $2.8M in salary to us to make the trade possible b/c of Kira's $5.7M salary. After that trade, we are still going to be about $100k into the tax. The only feasible trade is Kira to the Pacers for Isaiah Jackson, and that would leave us just under $100k from the tax.
That means we have to find someone with a TPE willing to take him in. There lies the problem that the only team that is going to want him is a team that doesn't care about winning at the moment and wants some asset for taking on salary. There lies another problem. We only have a Boston 2024 2nd and our 2030 second to send out.

Teams with enough of a TPE:
Brooklyn $18M
Brooklyn $20M
Brooklyn $6.8M
Portland $8.3M
Bulls $10.3M
Washington $12.3M
Washington $9.8M
Memphis $7.5M
Miami $9.4M
Miami $7.2M
ATL $23M
NYK $6.8M
Boston $6.2M

The only team on there that would consider absorbing him would be Washington, maybe Portland or NYK, and they'd want compensation, which we don't really have.



The other scenario would be to send Kira somewhere, take back a minimum contract, and have that team send another minimum player out to a 3rd team that has a small TPE to absorb that player, but this would also involve us giving up compensation i would assume.


and the most likely scenario would be sending Kira out with JV or with Larry so that the other team can take back a bit more than they send out, and we can stay under the tax. For instance, JV/Kira to the Knicks for Mitchell Robinson works and would save us basically all of Kira's salary, and leave us $2.5M under the tax so we can sign someone else.

You're right. At this point, the most important aspect to shooting better is actually implementing more actions for deliberate shots from deep. It starts with frequency. They need to design plays and actions to create these shots and encourage these guys to take them without hesitation. Outside of CJ, the make up of the roster doesn't have the mentality to let it fly.

Even though Green tried to encouraged them to shoot it more from deep, there's a clash in his philosophy where he want his guys pass up a good shot for a great shot. Hopefully Borrego is more purposeful with his play/action designs to set up shots from deep. BI and Z simply needs to take more threes. I'm not encouraged by BI's lack of aggressiveness shooting it in the world cup. I thought once he took a back seat as a ball handler and scorer, he would try to shoot more from deep.

We'll never be a strong 3 point shooting team if our core guys don't shoot and make me with frequency. It's just the make up our the roster right now.

Getting NBA level shooters doesn't mean much to me if they can't get on the floor enough to make a significant impact. At the end of the day, your core guys will be in the game during the most important stretch of the games and will play the majority of the games. I highly doubt you'll sit your core guys very often for NBA level shooting. You're going to play the best players the majority of the time.

It reminds me of Atlanta who have several great shooters but still ended up a poor shooting team. Yea, you can bring in shooters to help but you won't solve the shooting issue if your core guys won't shoot it.