His battles with Mike Batiste in the post will be legendary. I will be sure to tune in. At least his arrival at Olympiakos (my favorite GREEK team) will hopefully prevent V-Quit from winning the coveted "Ethniki A1" title this year - a coveted honor - among feta makers and such.
You might want to quit. Your friend is a little scary. From his Spurstalk identity: http://youtube.com/user/blacklab72653 Google that Youtube ID. Last hit, first page.
From a basketball point of view, I think this is a good thing. I want to see more competitions from the Euro-league and possibly from Asia in the future. Once the level of Euro-league gets close to NBA, I would like to see a something like Champion's League in soccer, setup between top 8 NBA teams and top 8 Euro teams. The NBA season could then be shortened like 56 regular season games + playoffs, sucky teams need to be punished with less games to make money from. The elites get to play international games, which could be a huge cash cow for the clubs involved. Also, the current NBA salary structure has no consideration of overseas leagues. In light of a slew of offers to NBA players from overseas this off season, NBA needs to adapt. Maybe it's time to increase MLE and salary cap.
I didn't read the entire thread so it's possible that I might have missed this point,does Atlanta have an MLE? If yes,they could have used it to get another player once they found out that Childress might sign up in Greece. It's too late now because nearly of the FA's are gone. The Josh Smith situation and more importantly the ongoing Atlanta Hawks ownership problems which was pointed out by emjohn, have compounded the situation greatly.
a question for this kind of scenario... hypothetically, say a restricted free agent doesn't like his current team and does not want them to match any offer out there. rather than taking a standard and small qualifying offer, he decides to take a similar contract as childress got, say 3 years for 20 mill, with a opportunity to leave the contract after each year. after that first year of the deal if over, is the player still considered a 'restricted' free agent if he decides to sign a new deal with an NBA team, or is he now an 'unrestricted' free agent? in other words, can a player take a one year hiatus to europe to avoid his restricted free agency and come back as an unrestricted free agent to the nba after one season? thanks for the info
No, as long as the team makes a qualifying offer each year than the player in question remains a restricted free agent.
For Childress, that qualifying offer is big and hurts their plans to pursue future free agents with cap space, so they will probably let him be unrestricted. For Carl Landry, if he were to do the same thing, his qualifying offer is much smaller and the Rockets don't plan to go under the cap until 2010 at the earliest, so he'd have to do at least 2 seasons overseas before he could even hope the Rockets would let the restriction lapse -- and even then, they might not since it is small.
Exactly. Sure, the Hawks ownership is among the worst in sports but you can't really fault them on this one. They made a fair offer and as hooroo pointed out the Hawks tried to negotiate a S&T too and that didn't work out either. I was under the impression they were focusing entirely on resigning Josh Smith before they made any effort to retain Childress. Apparently that wasn't the case and Childress probably already had his mind made up on bolting to Greece. My question is would Childress have ever left if the Hawks looked something like........ Chris Paul or Deron Williams instead of Marvin Williams Brandon Roy or Rudy Gay instead of Shelden Williams Don't even act like you can understand the torment that comes with following the Hawks.
I'd think Hawks would hold on to his rights even with the cap figure. Don't think they are at risk immediately for the tax. Frankly, the ownership don't have their stuff together enough to use any kind of cap space to chase free agents. I wonder if the Hawks can trade Childress' NBA rights while he's away.
