
The safest and least costly route for Atlanta involves targeting Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, a Georgia product who has an $8.5 million player option for 2020-21. Atlanta should be ready to go up to $20 million per season if it wants to make the Kings blink. The combo guard could help avoid the catastrophe that arises whenever Trae Young rests and provide off-ball scoring when paired with the star guard.
Board kings free rolls 2020 free#
If the Hawks get indications that an Ingram offer sheet would be a waste of time, they should take a look at another restricted free agent, the Sacramento Kings' Bogdan Bogdanovic. Ingram is one of the only options who's young enough to fit with the Hawks' core of relative noobs and worth the hassle of tying up spending power while the New Orleans Pelicans decide whether to match-which they almost certainly will, unless they head this whole thing off at the pass by agreeing to a contract that keeps Ingram off the restricted market. That's why throwing a max offer sheet (for however many years he wants) at Brandon Ingram should be the Atlanta Hawks' top priority.

When you're projected to have more cap space than anyone else, one good way to put it to use is to make other teams sweat a little. This offseason, teams will still scour the market for outside help, but for many others, the focus will be on re-signing familiar faces. Most pertinently for our purposes, that means a mid-level exception of $9.2 million and a taxpayer mid-level exception of $5.7 million.īecause the 2020 free-agent class is much thinner than 2021's, and because so few teams had actual cap room to spend before the potential for a reduction entered the picture, talent retention will be a larger point of emphasis than you might expect. So for this exercise, we'll operate on the assumption that the 2020-21 cap and tax lines will be the same as they were in 2019-20.

To even begin laying out plans of action, we have to set parameters somehow.

So you'd better believe that even as all 30 NBA teams are still trying to complete the interrupted 2019-20 season, they're also looking ahead to 2020 free agency.Īmong the major complications: Teams don't even know how much they can spend because the salary-cap and luxury-tax thresholds depend on basketball-related income, which the COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically reduced. Even amid rampant uncertainty, failing to plan is planning to fail.
