2FOR18: If they amnesty Calderon then they will make a godfather offer to Lin and we’ll be screwed.

Re: JR, he is a bargain talent wise at 2.8 mil, but I’m tired of having knuckleheads on this team.I’d like to see them try for Nash, R Allen, Heinrich or Brandon Roy, in that order, with their MLE and have whoever they get take JR’s minutes.

Re: the draft, I like Marcus Denmon or Odom for their shooting.

If they amnesty Calderon to make an offer to Lin, then we’ll match and then sign Calderon to use against them. I have no problem with that! (although Calderon will almost certainly get picked up by some team under the cap).

Seriously – now that we don’t need to use our MLE to sign Lin, I don’t really care that much whether some team makes a godfather offer. We will be in the luxury tax the next 3 years whether we like it or not – the degree to which we are over the tax line doesn’t really matter to me even if we hit “repeat offender” territory. The one good thing about Dolan is that he can probably pay $100MM/year in salary+luxury tax and it’s like a rounding error for his profits.

For better or worse, we are going to war with the team we have + some mini-MLE guys and draft picks going forward. If Toronto makes him a huge offer then it’ll amount to us being over the luxury tax through 14-15 (we would’ve been anyway) and then we’ll be stuck with his big cap# in 15-16 after Amare/Melo/TC are off the cap. So really it is only 1 year that is at risk.

Re: the draft- not sure what happened to Denmon’s stock. He basically disappeared off all the mock draft boards. Question is whether either Denmon or Odom are anything more than TD 2.0? Undersized, pesky defender, not really PG. They both appear to be much better shooters than TD though. As 2nd round picks I think we could do much worse.

Frank:
Wow — this is terrible news – Larry Bird stepping down apparently due to health-related reasons.Hi Donnie.

http://www.sbnation.com/nba/2012/6/26/3118022/larry-bird-leaves-indiana-pacers-donnie-walsh

What’s terrible to me is knowing that Bird is 55. That makes me feel freaking old.

iserp: Well, many of those fans think that Nash made D’Antoni, so he should be able to do the same with Woodson, :P

Besides, Nash at the MLE is a bargain. He is scoring a bit less than his MVP seasons, and his defense is always suspect, but he has ungodly assist and shooting percentages; and right now, our most important need is a balanced offense.

Jason Kidd has fallen off a cliff a bit lately, and other PGs are nowhere near in terms of efficiency or assists. BTW, can we use our exceptions in case Calderon gets amnestied?

If they amnesty Calderon then they will make a godfather offer to Lin and we’ll be screwed.

Re: JR, he is a bargain talent wise at 2.8 mil, but I’m tired of having knuckleheads on this team. I’d like to see them try for Nash, R Allen, Heinrich or Brandon Roy, in that order, with their MLE and have whoever they get take JR’s minutes.

Re: the draft, I like Marcus Denmon or Odom for their shooting.

http://www.sbnation.com/nba/2012/6/26/3118022/larry-bird-leaves-indiana-pacers-donnie-walsh

BigBlueAL: I would never read Isola or anyone else in the Daily News, but I honestly could care less about a player using the term ‘faggot’ on Twitter, especially if they apologized after like Amare did.

i seriously wonder whether a lot of these guys know what they’re saying when they’re saying — not to excuse it, but when a word is thrown around like that as much as it is in some circles, it starts to lose its original meaning, and becomes just a name you call someone. One of my college roommates — seriously the LEAST prejudiced person I may ever have met — was from a small town in Ohio and he literally had basically never met a jewish person in his life before going to college — and for the 1st week he used to talk about how he was “jew-ed” by the taxi driver. He seriously had no idea that that word actually came from “Jew”. And I still hear all kinds of people saying they were “gypped” by someone, when that is a derogatory term that comes from “Gypsy”.

I dunno – maybe/definitely I’m being too easy on him, and all the episodes with other players (ie. Kobe) make it sort of inexcusable for any prominent NBA player, but Amare really doesn’t strike me as someone who is particularly racist/bigoted in any way.

I would never read Isola or anyone else in the Daily News, but I honestly could care less about a player using the term ‘faggot’ on Twitter, especially if they apologized after like Amare did. it’s a lot harder to forgive him for back to back self-inflicted playoff injuries, since that’s the time of year he’s theoretically getting paid huge bucks to show up big for.