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The Zach Lowe Show
Zach’s FA Preview! What to Watch for Ahead of the Start of NBA Free Agency.
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- [00:00]
Zach Lowe
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We're going to talk about Nas Reed and Sam Merrill, Davion Mitchell, going to talk about the Isaac Okoro Lonzo Ball trade between Cleveland and Chicago and just all the things I'm watching out for in free agency. It doesn't look like a particular free particularly, you know, starry free agency class. Not a ton of juicy storylines. There's always stuff. There's always stuff you got to keep your eye on. There's a whole bunch of guys who, if they decided to if their teams decided to instantly become the main characters of NBA free agency. It's always a whirlwind 72, 90, 96 hours kicks off on Monday. We're going to talk about almost every team kaminga all the Memphis situation, what the Hawks could do, the spurs, the Mavs, the Nuggets, the Lakers, the every Celtics, everybody. We're talking about everybody. It's free agency. It's the Zach Lowe show coming up soon. You're listening to the Zach Lowe show presented by FanDuel. The NBA Finals might be over, but you can still get in on the action with America's number one sportsbook. It's never too early to look ahead to next season with ton tons of futures and player specials all season long. If you want to keep betting on all the other excitement this summer, FanDuel has it all. From MLB to soccer, golf, the WNBA. Download the FanDuel app today to make every moment more the ringer is committed to responsible gaming. Please visit rg-help.com to learn more about the resources and helplines available and listen to the end of the episode for additional details. Must be 21 or over in President select states or 18 and over in President DC, Kentucky or Wyoming. Gambling problem. Call 1-800- GAMBLER or visit rg-help.com welcome to the Zach Lowe show on a Saturday afternoon. Obviously Saturday is not our normal day to publish Monday morning. Monday midday would be, but free agency starts Monday evening. Didn't see much point in releasing a free agency podcast preview just a few hours before free agency would begin properly. I'll be back Tuesday morning instead of instead the usual Monday morning to react to whatever madness occurs starting Monday. Some of the madness has already started. Nas Reed, Alonzo, Ball deal, Sam Merrill, we'll get to all that stuff in between. Bill will have his normal Sunday pod to set the stage the way he wants to set the stage. I just thought let's go rapid fire. What am I looking at? What is the league looking at? What is the league talking about? I've been on the phone constantly the last week trying to figure out what might happen, what's going to happen, what to watch for. I thought I would start with a little fun of who could become the main characters of this free agency cycle but are wildly unlikely to. Number one obviously got to start with Giannis at Centokounmpo. Have heard nothing to change the general consensus that he's just not asking for a trade during this transaction cycle. Obviously he's watching somewhere seeing what do the Bucks do? Can they bring more talent in? They don't have a ton of resources. They they could have the full mid level exception depending on a whole bunch of variables. Is that enough? Can I really contend even in this sort of just just vaporized Eastern Conference dame still injured, probably going to miss the whole year with the Achilles tear. Can they do enough? It's a big summer for the Bucks. Brook Lopez is free agent. Lakers I think are among the teams interested in him. We'll see if the Lakers have enough spending power to get him really even to have a shot. Pat Conderton opted in. Kevin Porter Jr. Is a free agent. I would bet on the Bucks striking a long term deal with him. Not at a huge annual salary or a huge amount of years, but something and then Bobby Portis. Bobby Portis has a four thirteen and a half million dollar player option. It's an interesting number. He could opt in. It's right around the mid level. He could opt out, sign a long term deal with the Bucks. He's still only like 30, 31 years old. Big part of their team. Obviously a cultural borderline icon. There's Giannis is watching. Giannis is watching. By the way, I just take note anytime a team acquires the rights to a Milwaukee Bucks draft pick. And the Hawks, amid all the awesome stuff they've done in the last week, did acquire the rights to a Milwaukee Bucks draft pick, a pick at least partially in 2026. Just something I keep an eye on. Main character potential number two. I'm gonna go Bradley Beal here only because you can, you can connect these two teams easily. Bradley Beal, two years, $110 million left on, has a no trade clause. Still a disaster in Phoenix. Everything in Phoenix is. Well, not everything. They've done some good, some good trades in the past week, I guess to dig themselves out of a hole, whatever hole they were in. There is no unilateral way. There is no realistic unilateral way the Suns can get Bradley Beal off of their roster, even waving and stretching him. And Fred Katz at the Athletic nailed this today. They can't do that because of an arcane cap rule that caps the number the amount of salary that you can have wave and waved and stretched at any given time. And his contract is so big that they literally can't do it unless he gives back money. And I'm not sure why he would give back money. They can't trade him without his permission. Obviously a favorite sort of fake trade floating around the NBA ether is Beal for Dame straight up who says no? The Bucs turn a player who's probably not going to play this year into a player who is going to play this year. The Suns turn Beal into Damian Lillard. Financially, it's a wash. They have almost the exact same contract. I'm not really sure what's in that for the Suns other than maybe you give me a couple seconds. I don't know if that's enough. Or maybe I just say, well, Dame's going to be better than Bradley Beal when he comes back in a year. Just I don't really see that happening. The Heat. Some people have to me around the league have suggested the Heat could turn like the Duncan Robinson plus Rozier plus whatever into be all the Heat have had chances to get Beal before and haven't done it. Is the price that low gonna entice them? I. I don't know. I just don't know what's going to happen here. The Suns in theory could could just wave him without stretching him, but that just doesn't do anything for them. They just have to pay him his full salary over the regular schedule. So I, I'd be interested to see if anything could actually happen here. Main Character Potential number three, but probably won't happen. Hey, LeBron James has a player option. That's all I'm saying. He's. I've said since he got to the Lakers he's probably going to finish his career with the Lakers. I think he wants to finish his career for the Lakers. You may have heard his son plays for the Lakers who have new ownership now. But as long as the option is out there, you just can't. Until the. Until either he opts in or signs a long term two year contract. One plus one, whatever, whatever he wants to do. You just have to monitor it. And the Lakers, by the way, couple pieces of business for them. Luka extension. We all know that's gotten a lot of attention. He, he sort of affirmatively stamped the, the new owners is like, okay, this looks cool. Rui Hachimura sneakily extension eligible and there are numbers that make sense for him. We'll see if anything happens there. Dorian Finney Smith is the guy that I would watch for. He has a $15 million player option for next year. I said on a previous podcast, boy, would I love to be Dorian Finney Smith's agent because I get to do some real agenting. It's like you traded real stuff for me. I'm a three and D wing. Luka likes me. Lucas played with me in Dallas. You need me on this team. I think that we're coming up against his player option deadline, I think in a couple of days. What I meant by that was it would be fun to sort of use the leverage that I thought I would have over the Lakers as his agent to get a nice long term deal at a decent rate for, to lock me in for the rest of my career, the rest of my prime, whatever. If I'm Dorian Finney Smith, I'm very interested to see what comes of this situation. Does he opt, does he just opt in and they can't reach a deal? Is that actually what the Lakers maybe want? Like maybe we don't want to pay $80 million over the next five years or whatever for Dorian Finney Smith. Maybe we want him to opt in and then we can sort of make a decision in a year one way or another. Does he dare to opt out and test a market that just isn't there with cap room other than Brooklyn basically, and maybe one other team. But we'll get to them and I don't think they'll actually have cap room. Just something, just something I'm watching for. Just something I'm watching for. Other main character potential. The Boston Celtics stars Jaylen Brown and Derrick White, obviously a lot of buzz. You know, Shams said the phones were ringing off the hook in Boston about both of those guys. I'm sure the phones were ringing. I got a little pushback. Like I said, that they were, like, just ringing off the hook, going crazy. I need four phone lines. There's a red phone, a black phone, two cell phones through the ears. But look, I mean, Boston knows the value of these guys. They've done enough due diligence since the Tatum injury to understand who, if anybody, would meet whatever price point would be necessary for them to move. Two guys that they love, two guys that I think they'd like to have on the team. Still, when Jayson Tatum returns from injury, whenever that is, let's realistically say the 26, 27 season, I think the market for Derrick White on his deal would be essentially the entire league. I think the market for Jaylen Brown on his gargantuan deal would be just a handful of teams, but one of them might pay a bigger price for Jaylen Brown than any of the teams would necessarily pay for Derrick White. Although I think they both have enormous value, I get the sense that there was real smoke, there was something. There was something going on that something maybe has subsided. I said last week that I would bet on if you force me to bet. I would bet on both of them being on the Celtics next year. But I'm just. I'm not slamming the door shut. I'm not slamming the door shut on some team. The Kings come to mind, being like, we'll offer you everything, all the swaps, all the picks, whatever you want for Jalen Brown, and at least making the Celtics think about it. I don't think that's going to happen. I think they'll both be on the team next year, but they instantly could become the main characters of free agency. Last one. Lowry, Markkanen. Does he really fit what the Jazz are doing? Does he want to. Does he want to live through another year of this? Do the Jazz care if he fits what they're doing? And if he wants to live through another year of this, he's got a bunch of years left on a contract that is pretty big. And after missing a lot of last season, I think he probably needs to play his trade value back up to where Utah would need it to be to move off of him, because they love Lori Markin Lowry market. And they. They. They got him in the Mitchell trade. He's become the gem of that trade. And shooting bigs just make life so much easier for Young ball dominant guards, young ball dominant. Ace Bailey is whatever Ace Bailey is going to be. And I think Ace Bailey is going to report to the Jazz this weekend, by the way, and snuff all this sort of drama out. And so I don't think that's a transaction for now. But I, I don't know if Larry Markin is going to be on the Jazz in a year. We'll see. Okay, let's get to the stuff. Those are the main characters that are probably not going to be the main characters. Nas Reed, early main character in free agency according to Sham Strane of ESPN. Signed a 5 year or intends to sign a 5 year 125 million dollar deal to go back to the Wolves. And that's a good deal for both sides. Nas Reed is awesome. He's. People love him in Minnesota. They name their cats after him. They have towels that just say Nas Reed. People just shout Nas Reed at random strangers in the street. He's an awesome player. I thought he was actually a little underrated in the sixth man of the year race last year. Can start in a pinch. Can play next to any of the bigs that are there or could be there in the future in Minnesota. Awesome player, good contract, good deal, good amount, fair value. Both sides would seem to. If you do the math and just add up a 20 plus million dollar starting salary for NAS Reed plus whatever Julius Randle gets, whether it's his player option which is 31 million or a long term deal starting at that amount, there's just not money left for Nikhil Alexander Walker in Minnesota. There is plenty of money left for Nikhil Alexander Walker around the league. I think he's going to walk into a floor of full mid level exception offers deals that start at the 14 and a half million or whatever the full mid level is, he's going to have a robust, robust market for a very good player. And that's why you get Rob Dillingham and and and pieces like that is to just the churn of just we get really expensive. We got to replace. We got to replace guys. That's what happens. By the way, a rod. Can you just apologize to Bronson Arroyo, please? That's all I'm going to say on that. We also had a trade today, Isaac Okoro from Cleveland to Chicago for Lonzo ball. Contractually it's two guaranteed years for a Coral at about 11 apiece. Lonzo has a one plus team option at about 10 apiece. Everyone likes seems to like to straight for the Cavs. I get it Lonzo is a very. Is a good player when healthy, a better player than a Coro, certainly a better shooter than a Coro and a better playmaker by a country mile. And still a very good defensive player. Insurance against Ty Jerome leaving, which we will get to, which appears to be a certainty now after the Cavs use whatever wiggle room they can wiggle around the second Abraham, which is none, they're over it. To resign Sam Merrill to a four year, $38 million deal. That's a fine deal. It's good value. Kind of reminds me of the Peyton Pritchard deal. He'll never be as good as Peyton Pritchard, but the number is similar under an even higher cap environment. Just, it's just fine money for a good rotation player. Donovan Mitchell loves Sam Merrill. Loves playing with Sam Merrill. Done. Check it off. Don't really know what's in this for the Bulls. They get a little younger. Okoro seems to have the same year every year where he makes some progress in the regular season. He's a very good defensive player. He's a great transition player. Every season he's like, oh my God, he's making 40% of his corner threes and getting a little more explosive. Going to the rim, a little more artful. Full attack and closeouts and it gets to the playoffs and it's like, can't play him. So I guess he's younger. Seems like also kind of a vote of no confidence in the Dale and Terry Julian Phillips, Pat Williams, poo poo platter of wings that they've drafted there over the years. Go Bulls. Okay, Ty Jerome now becomes an even more interesting free agent who might get Ty Jerome. Let's go through some teams. Ty Jerome, by the way, just missed another floater. I think Orlando, that was the much rumored Tide Jerome destination all year. Money got a lot tighter for them in the wake of the Desmond Bain trade. Clippers, Clippers. Just watch the Clippers. That's all I'm saying. They're going to have the full mid level exception. They have a lot of tradable contracts. They have some picks back in the quiver, the trade quiver. I think they could use a player like Ty Jerome. I like the idea of Ty Jerome on their team, particularly in the minutes when James Harden is on the bench. Oh, by the way, James Harden has a 30 something million dollars player option. 36. I think for next year. I think we're probably going to hear some news on that one way or another in the next 48 hours. Safe money. Safe money. Some sort of two year deal, similar annual salary with the Clippers given again the lack of cap space in this market just like everything else until it's signed, I don't know. And I still think Kawhi no one will ever do it because he's just injured all the time and he's this inscrutable mystery. I just think it would be so fun if a team like Detroit. I'm just making up Detroit. Detroit's already said publicly Trajan Langdon like we're not going to be aggressive. Just like made the Clippers a mega offer and made Steve Ballmer who wants to win now, keep the innuit dome filled, wants to fly everybody from the wall to road playoff games that they lose by a million points because James Harden has another bad game seven. So does Kawai, so does the whole team by the way. Just test his will. Just be like you're really going to turn this down. This, this lifeline to a new future. Detroit's got a lot of spending power this summer. They've got the Beasley Hardaway, Dennis Schroeder triumvirate, triumvirate going into free agency. They have Jaden Ivey's extension to deal with, Jalen Duran's extension to deal with. They're a sneaky team to watch wielding that full mid level exception and available minutes. And we'll see how many of those three guys I mentioned are still on the team next year. Just sneaky team the Nets. I mean they just drafted 17 point guards, point forwards and point centers from all over the world. So they probably don't need Ty Jerome to just take the reins of the offense and do stuff. They just need players. They're going to have somewhere between 30 and 60 million dollars in cap space after even after absorbing the Terrence man deal in there in the three team trade with Atlanta and Boston. That depends on cap holds for Cam Thomas, who I'm sure they'd like to keep Day Ron Sharp, who they'd probably like to keep Zaire Williams less convinced they want to keep him. Brooklyn has telegraphed we're just going to use our cap space as dumping ground. Give us picks we're going to take again. Maybe we'll take better slash worse, whatever definition you want to put on it this year and ride the lottery balls again baby. Ride the lottery roller coaster. I think Brooklyn's cap space is going to go fast. We'll see the Warriors. Steve Kerr reportedly loved Ty Jerome. Loved him during his brief sojourn with the warriors. They have about $17 million of wiggle room below the tax, $26 million below the first apron. Before, however, you account for Gary Payton II, Kavon Looney and another one of this summer's free agency main characters, Jonathan Kaminga. Boy, oh boy, is this going to be interesting. Anthony Slater reported today they tendered Kaminga the qualifying offer. That was a no duh kind of move for the warriors. And I have to say, until a couple cap experts alerted me to it, I kind of forgot about base year compensation. Base year compensation is just this little vixen of a cap minutia that pops up very rarely. But in this circumstance when you are resigning your own free agent for the purposes of trading him, if the warriors indeed sign a trade cominga and you're over the cap and you give the guy a raise, more than X amount of money and his salary is more than X amount. But Koinga salary will blow all those away. Some really funky cap rules come in. The funkiest is he counts for outgoing salary to the other team, the full amount, but for your team, only half the amount. And so you can only if you resign Kaminga to a deal, let's say it starts at $25 million. You can't take a $25 million guy back. Or you can't, you can't. It's just not that. It's very complicated. You can take half of that back and so you start making these deals, right? Oh my God, do I need a third team? Do I need a fourth team? Base year compensation. Curse you, Miami. I think that smoke is, is fairly real. Again, don't know mechanically how they do it. They just resigned Davion Mitchell to a two year, $24 million deal that temporarily takes them over the tax. Like that deal. Davion was awesome for them. Flamethrower in the play and my God, great deal for him. Great deal for them. Duncan Robinson has this funky partially guaranteed early termination option. I have no idea what his salary is going to be next year and where it's going to be. It could be in Miami, could be elsewhere. So there's a lot of, there's just a lot of moving parts with the Heat. By the way, the same agent, Aaron Turner represents Terra Roger and Jonathan Kaminga could come in handy. Chicago. I'm just all for the Bulls shaking it up with anybody interesting. I just don't know what the deal is with that with with Kaminga, like what the outgoing money would be. It's going to be interesting. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn. As a small business owner you don't have the luxury of clocking out earlier. Your business is on your mind 24 7. So when you're hiring, you need a partner that grinds just as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn Clock locks in. LinkedIn helps you write job descriptions fast and then get your post in front of the right people. With smart candidate insights. You can either post for free or promote it to get three times more qualified applicants. At the end of the day, the most important thing to your small business is the quality of candidates. And with LinkedIn you can feel confident that you're getting the best. In fact, 72% of small businesses say LinkedIn helps them find high quality talent. Post your job for free@LinkedIn.com responsible terms and conditions apply.
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Bill Simmons
This episode is brought to you by Viori. Look, I'm not a big let's hype up workout clothes guy, but Viori, I gotta say, total game changer. Been wearing a lot. If you see me power walking around Los Angeles, probably gonna see me wearing some Viori Sunday performance joggers that they have. It's made with four way performance stretch fabric, one of the most comfortable things you own. You will wear them everywhere, I promise. All you have to do is go to viori.comsimmons and you get 20% off your first purchase with Vuori V U O R I.comsimmons. enjoy free shipping on all US orders over $75 plus free returns. Exclusions apply. Visit the website for full terms and conditions.
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Zach Lowe
All right, let's fly through some other teams. Atlanta, I've cacaoed already. They have the trade exception. They also need Caris Levert back. It's one or the other or you're in the tax. We'll see. Sacramento, I already said the other day all bets are off. All bets are off. Nothing would surprise me. I mean literally no, nothing would surprise me about the Kings. Demar Levine, Sabonis. Devin Carter. Yeah, who they just drafted. Is he even going to be on the team next year? Is he the sweetener to get off some of these deals? They have all their picks and swaps. They have to figure out the Jake Laravia situation. They won't as of now they won't have probably the full mid level. Depending on Laravia they might have the baby mid level. I just don't know where they're going. What's happening? Speaking of teams. No idea. The New Orleans Pelicans. What is this team? What's happening? I still can't get over the draft day trade with Atlanta, which I deemed reckless, like 17 times I said the word reckless. I've never used that word more often in my life. It actually reminds me. The deal I figured out that it reminds me of is 2015, when the Kings had to salary dump Jason Thompson. For some reason, I think Carl Landry might have been involved because they had all these grand free agency plans to sign, like Rajan Rondo and a couple other guys that didn't move the needle for them and they salary dumped them to the Sixers and they included like a pick swap, an unprotected pick that became like the gem of the league. It ended up being Romeo Langford. I think it ended up falling in the middle of the first round. That's probably what Joe Dumars is saying right now, actually. But like, see, like you, everyone laughed at that trade. It ended up being the 14th pick. Maybe in this muddled. You know, the Western Conference I talked about last week is a little fat in the middle. It's great at the top, but it's fat in the middle. Like some teams could slide down. There's maybe room for a miracle. Pelicans run if Zion can stay healthy. Stop laughing. But it. It, I. When that trade happened with Philly and Sacramento, I just thought, we'll never see a trade like this again. This is so crazy and so dumb. By the Kings. We'll never see a trade that rivals it again in its recklessness, in its process based recklessness. This trade actually reminds me of that. What they're going to do in free agency, I have no idea. There's still Trey Murphy, the third trade. Buzz, they could get a haul for him. I don't know to what end. That would. That would be for like, Trey Murphy's really good. He's on your team. Herb Jones is really good. He's on your team. Kind of the two most stable things you have going on your team. Plus or minus a Trey Murphy injury. We'll see what happens there. The Spurs, Chris Paul is a free agent. They have the Fox extension. Keldon Johnson and Jeremy Sohan also extension eligible. They have the full med level exception, which I would love them to use on a player who could help them win now because I love the needle that they're threading. You wanted us to get Durant. We didn't. We didn't do it. We're not ready. We maybe thought about going all in for Giannis. Maybe that's off the table now. It's Giannis. If it ever comes back on the table. We at least have to think about it. But right now we're threading this needle of we could be real interesting this coming season because we have Wemby, we have Fox, everybody loves our picks that we just made in Harper and Bryant. You give me one more guy in that mid level and the mid level is going to be real powerful this coming summer. I think that's a really interesting team. I don't know who they're going to get. I hope they use it, by the way, on Giannis. Just food for thought. All this has been framed as Giannis's decision and it is Giannis's decision in the end to decide whether he wants to be on the Bucks or not. I just throw this out. Should the Bucks want to trade Giannis, is it actually in their best interest to trade him even though he's still only 31 years old? I think that's a tough question, but interesting one worth asking. The Mavericks. I just want to say this. I don't want to hear Nico Harrison talking about how now fans are starting to see the vision. Because the vision was 2/4 against the Houston Rockets before Anthony Davis got hurt. My God, they're clinging to those two quarters. And now it's Cooper Flag and there is no vision. Unless he's an oracle of some kind. And then the whole NBA is in trouble because a supernatural being has entered the league. There's no vision. That includes, you know what we're going to do. We're going to lose in the play in and win the lottery in the Cooper Flag year. Not the Zachary Reissachet year, the Cooper Flag year with a 1.8% chance of doing it. And then the fans will see my vision. Then the fans will see. Just no more vision talk, that's all. The team is good. It's a good team. P.J. washington's extension eligible. That's a sneaky one to keep an eye on. They need a point guard, some point guard, any point guard. They're really only going to have the baby mid level exception to get it. Get that player. And that will take them further into the tax. So multiply whatever they spend by whatever the multiplication is for the tax. It's a lot of money. We bought an NBA team. We have to spend so much money. I don't think they're a title contender. Kyrie Irving's coming back from an ACL tear and you know, we might not see him at his best. We're gonna see him this year might seem at his best till 26, 27 but this is a very good team. Cool. I, I just wouldn't, I just wouldn't. I would just. Quiet on the vision talk. Speaking of the baby mid level exception, the Denver Nuggets have access to it and that may be the biggest tool that they have given their salary situation, barring some Michael Porter Jr. Trade that I can't see if they don't use every bit of that taxpayer mid level exception to get a real player and you can get a real player like a, like a guy who could have been on the court when they didn't trust anybody else to be on the court in the playoffs. They can get that guy, 12 minutes of a guy. If they don't get a real player with that, that's just going to be a giant blaring red flag because they have to do something, anything to improve this team because they showed even with Aaron Gordon on one leg and Michael Porter Jr. With one arm, they took the champs to seven games because they have the best guy in the world. And yeah, they can count on the Strother Picket, Duron Holmes coming back. All those guys. Peyton Watson extension eligible with Christian Brown by the way, getting better. And maybe that's just all they can count on. They've got to get. If they cheap out on the, on this mid level exception, they cheap out on it. Red flag. Toronto, speaking of teams that are right at the tax, should mention that Toronto parted ways with Messiah. Jiri, who had been the GM president of basketball operations there forever helped construct a championship team. It's been, it's been a little bit of a struggle since. It's a little bit of a mishmash of a team right now. It's hard, it's hard to build a team. It's hard to, to pivot from an aging championship team. And they were really good the year after when they went into the bubble with 50 something wins with Al Kawhi into, into a good team. But they have Scotty Barnes, they have a lot of interesting pieces. Just keep your eye on what happens to the Raptors in the next year or two. What is this ownership change with Rogers and Edward Rogers taking over for Larry Tannenbaum? Clearly it meant the end of Messiah Jiri, which was, there was had been buzz about that in their relationship being not awesome since 2021. Ejeri's last extension with the team that was signed then. It was contentious and clearly it was not good because Messiah is gone. What does it mean for luxury tax payments? What does it mean for running the team in the future? Staffing the team, all of it. Like, this is a seismic event for a team that was trying real hard over a long time to establish themselves as if not a marquee franchise. Because it's hard to get to that level in the NBA. Like Lakers, Celtics, Knicks level. Not a destination franchise because it's. It's just. It's hard to be a destination franchise when you're the only one that's not in the US and it's cold and all that. But, you know, like, look, Toronto is like my second NBA home. I love Toronto. Everybody knows I love tdot. It just is what it is. But like, they were a serious franchise and they better stay a serious franchise. And you know, the Messiah era is the best era of that franchise history. Just tread carefully. That's all I'm saying. They're right at the tax. I don't know what they're gonna do. Their roster's almost full. Probably nothing. Memphis may be the most interesting team to watch in free agency in the next couple of days. They have a lot of work to do. They're under the cap. They have to get further under it to renegotiate and extend Jaren Jackson Jr. Which they kind of have to do after trading Bain. And I think Jaren Jackson Jr. Is on the books for 23 million next year. They've got to get that up to 33 billion to get to a point where you can extend off of that number and get to Jaren Jackson Jr. S max the next year in 26, 27. His agents may say, by the way, we'd like you to get a little higher than that. We'd like you to get a little higher than 33. Even if the extension is capped at the max. Why don't you give us more money now this year we might. We want more up front. Given the drama we've had to live through as the, you know, the only all NBA candidate on the team last year. They could wave and stretch Cole Anthony to open up more room. I don't think they want to throw another pick away to incentivize like the Nets to take on any dead money or any money they need to get rid of after using a pick to trade up for a Cedric Coward, not Colin Coward. Cedric Coward might have to move Conchar, but like I've been saying this all along, it's not a done deal until it's done. They have to earn this extension for Jaren Jackson Jr. And the other guy. They have to figure out, can we do that? And how how high does our payroll get? Are we going to go all the way into the tax? Are we willing to go all the way into the tax? Because Santi Aldama has full mid level deals, I think waiting for him. At least that's the scuttlebutt effort that he's, that he is sought after enough by a team like Detroit, for instance, with the full mid level. There's a lot of teams with the full mid level. He's an interesting kind of combination of skills and I think they're gonna have to pay to retain him. And when you have full mid level deals, if you do in the open market, your incumbent team might have to pay a little bit more than that using your bird rights to do it. And then they'd have the salary cap room exception on top of that. Just, I'm just keeping an eye on them. Indiana resign Miles Turner. Don't salary dump Ben Matheran. Don't do it. Don't salary dump Obi Toppin. I know Tyrese Halliburton is going to be out the whole year and it sucks and it's horrible. Don't let the, don't let the good times fade. The center carousel, as somebody put it to me. Click Capella. Brooke Lopez, Luke Cornett, Al Horford. Who, who's going to get more than the non tax mid level exception? I think at least a couple of those guys will. Where are they going to go? Does Horford want to finish his career in Boston or not? And I mentioned Detroit already. We'll see some signing trades. It's going to be not your typical free agency. Right. We don't have a marquee name that we're going to be tracking private jets and this guy's going to destroy one franchise by leaving and lift up another one by staying. But there's going to be stuff that happens. I just, I just mentioned a bunch of big names or bigish names, medium sized names. There'll be another thing that shakes loose that we don't see coming. Like they traded who to wear sign in trades. Signing trades are necessary. We traded, that guy got moved. There'll be stuff happening. But those I mentioned, the Kings is a wild card. Those are just some places that I have my eye on as we get set for free agency. That's it for now. Thank you to Jesse for hopping on on production on the weekend. I'll be back Tuesday morning. Assuming enough stuff interesting happens between now and then. Bill has you covered tomorrow. Probably with Rosillo, I'm guessing. Thank you for listening. To the Zach Low show on a weekend. Free agency, baby. It's always interesting. It's always interesting. Have fun. Must be 21 and over and present in select states. For Kansas in affiliation with Kansas Star Casino or 18 and over in President D.C. gambling problem called 100 Gambler or visit FanDuel.com RG call 188 78-97777 or is it ccpg.org chat in Connecticut, or is it mdgamblinghelp.org in Maryland? Hope is here. Visit gamblinghelplinema.org or call 800-327-5050 for 24. 7 support in Massachusetts or call 1-877-8-HOP E NY or text Hope NY in New York.