Eric Gordon Trade Potential

NO WE WON'T. Dumping Ariza, Gordon, and the rest of the team and taking no salary back is just not possible. LBJ doesn't want to come to that team and we don't want him in that case. Cle will trade with us. The bigger question is how move Ryno. There are other options. Please pick a realistic one.

 

If I'm understanding your proposed moves, we would be getting rid of Anderson, Gordon, Nene, Onuaku and Qi and taking back no salary. That's Just over $40M in salary that you are trading away and taking nothing back. That's extremely optimistic.

Let's pretend that you can do that. So now you only have Harden, Capela, Tucker and Paul left on the roster.


Harden at $30.42M, Capela at $7M cap hold, Tucker at $7.92M and Paul at $35.35M Cap hold for a total of $80.69M. Since you don't have 12 players on the roster then you need to add an empty roster hold for each spot below 12. That's 8 empty roster holds at $830k each which is a total of an additional $6.64M. That brings our total salary to $80.69M + $6.64M = $87.33M.

That would leave you with just under $14M in cap space. That's not going to allow you to outright sign Lebron or PG13.


If you assume that Chris Paul is going to sign for less than his max then you'd be better off resigning CP3 first. Let's do that calculation.


You have Harden, Capela, Tucker and 8 empty roster spots for a total of $51.98M. That leaves you with $49.2M in cap space to sign both Lebron and CP3.

Less than $50M isn't likely to be enough to sign both Lebron and CP3 but let's say that it is. You're left with only Harden, Capela, Tucker, CP3, Lebron , a draft pick and have no exceptions. The remainder of your roster would be minimium salary players.

Even if you can convince yourself that we can dump over $40M and take back nothing and also get Lebron and CP3 to sign for less that a combined $50M, I don't think gutting the team to that extent would be an option.


As others have already pointed out. A sign and trade would be extremely difficult. Likewise, signing Lebron with capspace would force us to gut the roster. The only realistic option is an opt-in and trade.

 

To be fair I'll throw in a couple of possibilities with this scenario.

Paul has bird rights, can take a 1-year deal then sign for an overpay next offseason. So from that 50 million, Lebron can take 32 mill per 3 year deal, Paul 18 mill 1 year deal. Then, next offseason, we can re-sign Paul to a 40 mill per deal (with a max + bird raises) to make up for his 1-year pay cut (or really a 2-year pay cut including last season).

Also, I think it's a given we can re-sign Moute/Green/Wright for minimums.

So

Paul
Harden / Green
Tucker
James / Moute
Capela / Wright

+ a mid 1st for Ego, a couple of 2nds and ring chasing vets could fill out the roster well enough.

You are right that a S&T, or opt-in trade and is WAY more likely, but in the off chance the Cavs REFUSE to make a deal with us this would be a hail mary we should attempt.

 

First you have to dump $40m in salary without taking anything back. That would be almost impossible to do.

Would CP3 play for $18M? I also assume that he'd play for less, but almost 50%?

I don't think that you get Luc for the min this year. He was too good last year.

Green for the minimum is possible.


If I had to classify this deal, I'd say highly unrealistic.


BTW, I don't believe a SnT is realistic either. Being hardcapped would be a deal breaker.

 

Because teams value cap space. There's only so much cap space and every contract that teams take on in salary dumps reduces the amount available for them to spend on guys they actually want.

As far as Durant, he took a $9.5m paycut. Chris Paul already gave up $11m by opting in to enable a trade to Houston. Now he's going to take another paycut of an additional $17m? That's very different than what Durant did.

 

Gordon's contract is a good one. He came through in the Warriors series. He has his ups and downs but he came up big when it counted. Not many players to deal Gordon for, not worth really cleaning cap space. Only reason to deal Gordon is if someone takes Ryno and Gordon is the thing sweetens the pot.

 

You quoted my reply to ThatBoyNick. Nick had just stated "Lebron can take 32 mill per 3 year deal, Paul 18 mill 1 year deal. ". That's the statement that I was replying to. So in that context, yes, CP3 would be taking $17M less than he's eligible for.

Sure you can propose that Lebron takes a $10M paycut but that's very unlikely. If we signed Lebron outright then we don't have Bird Rights on him. That means that we wouldn't be able to pay him anything close to the max for 3 years. Under that scenario, Lebron is losing $10m per season which isn't likely. I'm assuming that's why Nick made CP3 take the majority of the cut because we have his Bird Rights and could max him out after a year.

The difference between what you're proposing and what Nick proposed is that in his scenario, both Paul and James get paid close to max money over the next few years. Under your scenario, Lebron is going to play for $10M below his max for every season that he's here. He could obviously afford that but will he? We have no way to know and there's nothing to indicate that he's willing to take a paycut of that size.

 

I don't like this trading EG for a pick. He worth a lot more than a pick to us.

However trading Ryno for a pick is a better idea.

 

won't happen, we would have to give away a pick for someone to take him