Welcome all! Thanks for coming out today. We'll get right into it. The time has finally arrived. We have paid off that pesky tax bill and here we are ready to finally compete. We've been waiting on this day for some time now, like 6 seasons. We had a plan in place coming into the off-season. We knew we were going to have cap space and finally be able to use it. But of course when you take into account the fact that we've been unable to compete due to the large tax bill, let's just say I probably have a bit of PTSD when it comes to the size of contracts handed out. AT the same time I didn't want to under shoot everything and miss out on every player. We first went after Josh Okogie in RFA. We offered a near max which we knew was a bit of an overpay but we were comfortable with the contract still. You won't get anyone in RFA if you don't overpay a bit and if I'm going to overpay it's going to be to someone I really like. And that was Josh Okogie. We had some negotiations with RPF but in the end we suspect the Nets GM was simply too enamored with Josh to part ways, and we don't blame him. We then had to focus on our next targets.
In UFA we offered a few maxes in Round 1 that you usually know you won't get. It's how you get creative with the rest of the contracts where you can hit it big and we did exactly that. During last season we did approach PaulyP with a solid offer for Judd. Pauly said as much but said he planned on resigning him in the off-season. He then decided later in the season to trade him to Conroy for Milburn. The Celtics then proceeded to lose Jaylen Brown and Judd Williams. Not sure what happened there but we hit the jackpot either way. We signed Judd to one of if not the best valued contract in the entire league. So we were ecstatic about that steal. As we looked around the league and what was left over in Round 2 we decided that we wouldn't have enough. Rich Paul simply wasn't quite there yet where he could give us significant bench minutes. We loved Rich and his superior athleticism but we just felt like we needed a more established player. Also, we had been searching for someone to play the point. DeAngelo is great with the ball in his hands sure but we would rather have a distributor so that D-Russ could float around a bit more and do his thing off ball at times. We then sought after Victor Newman who was in Washington. We offered them RP, who could be a younger version of Victor with a few points in training. The Wizards were also severely over the cap so knowing how scary that is for us we thought that would also be a nice aside for them. We then signed Beau Agustin in the 2nd round for another solid deal.
We are currently looking at a starting lineup of:
C: Timmy Pulley
PF: Judd Williams
SF: Grayson Allen
SG: DeAngelo Russell
PG: Victor Newman
6th men: Beau and Piazza
Any questions???