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Knicks Summer League 2026: Roster, Schedule and Storylines in Las Vegas – New York Daily News
Recently waived Jonas Valanciunas among centers on Knicks’ radar – SNY
Jordan Clarkson to return to Knicks on 1-year minimum deal worth $3.9 million: Sources – The Athletic – The New York Times
SummerKnicks Game Preview: Knicks vs. Nets, July 10, 2026 – Posting & Toasting
Jordan Clarkson re-signing with Knicks on one-year deal – SNY
Friday Posted & Toasted Notes: Sin City Saints, Hart-Mitch undercooked beef, OAKAAK things – Posting & Toasting
The Run.down Knicks vs Nets Summer League Postgame Show – The Strickland
Knicks Vs Nets Summer League Post-Game – Knick of Time
Tyler Nickel is a SHARPSHOOTER! 🔥 – Knicks Fan TV
Knicks vs Nets – Recap & Reaction | SUMMER LEAGUE | Knicks Film School – Knicks Film School
NETS vs KNICKS | LAS VEGAS SUMMER LEAGUE | FULL GAME HIGHLIGHTS | July 10, 2026 – NBA
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77 replies on “Knicks Morning News (2026.07.11)”
I’m not sure I buy this. If they were under regular season rules he would have taken more actual free throws than four，and likely would have gotten as many points as four, so his efficiency would be about the same.
National Basketball Players Association executive director David Kelly criticized the NBA’s salary cap and luxury tax system on Friday, arguing that the newly implemented “second apron” must be “softened” or removed.
“We are not fans of the second apron,” Kelly said. “We did not propose the second apron. We should have done a better job of fighting back against the second apron. In the future, we will have a much more unified union, and we will do a better job of fighting back. … We’re seeing [the apron system] decimate teams and force decisions to be made that are not basketball decisions.”
https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/49329997/nbpa-players-carrying-burden-teams-due-second-apron
Not a great job by the players union to not realize the impact the aprons would have on them.
Meanwhile, I stuck to my word about not watching a second of Summer League. It sounds like the team pretty desperately needed a point guard. We’ll see if Kayil can provide some organization.
The players need to do a better job educating themselves*. Wemby just gave up $50M “to keep the team together” but really all he’s doing is saving Peter Holt luxury tax (the Spurs don’t need to aggregate salaries or trade their draft picks 7 years from now to keep this team together).
These owners are essentially transferring the luxury tax to their players.
* The media needs to do a better job, too, because none of them seem to understand the second apron at all — they just parrot people who say you can’t go over it.
The formula for TS% is (pts/2)/fga+FTA*.44.
He’d have a .524 TS% if took 7fts.
What I find interesting is that one of the criticisms of the second apron is that it benefitted the highest and lowest paid players and stuck it to the players in the middle. But it seems like with the highest end players taking (or being offered) less, the “below second apron” salary is starting to get spread around.
Seems like top players are recognizing that no one should be making 35% of the cap if they want their team to remain competitive.
I would guess that if the NBPA insists on a system that depends on wealthy owners paying less luxury tax, we’re in for a long lockout.
I would guess that the compromise involves players getting a marginally increased percentage of BRI which raises the cap/aprons a bit, plus some “exceptions” for the highest paid vets. Considering that the number of smaller-market teams, I doubt that the majority of owners will accept anything that decreases the “hard cap” effect.
My life ain’t perfect right now but watching the whole first knicks summer league game?
Unfortunately i did watched it even if a few hours after it ended..
Thankfully Nickel was worth it.
Rest of the players were between trash and garbage.
Strong Novak vibes
* They definitely need Kayil jacking up shots.
* Diawara had a lot of grenades. Everyone did. Still would have liked to see Diawara try to bully his way to the basket more often.
* Dadiet isn’t a go-to scorer. Everything is in the flow of the offense. He’d be great (if he could shoot and do other things cromulently) as a tertiary scorer who doesn’t need the ball. But in SL when they need someone to just go get a bucket, it’s not his game.
Teams started out trying to mimic stars + scrubs, so we saw the middle get cut, but are now seemingly shifting their roster building strategy.
Teams chase trends of champions, and everyone saw what happened when Brunson took a discount and we were able to build a kickass starting five, and still have enough room for a good bench.
Thankfully Diawara has already shown that he can play in the Nba.
The Question is How Motivated is to work hard and get paid.
Dadiet is still like a big puppy playing carelessly. He needs to “die” in the gym and “bleed” in D before he convince me he can be useful.
I also think that flattening the lottery odds with the relegation effect for the very worst teams is going to have a positive impact going forward. That, combined with the hard cap effect of the second apron, is going to make it easier for longtime bottom feeders to become competitive, or at least relevant. One would think that the players as a whole would like that.
Caleb Wilson had as many threes last night as he did in his entire college career
“Teams chase trends of champions, and everyone saw what happened when Brunson took a discount and we were able to build a kickass starting five, and still have enough room for a good bench.”
And this is surely what Adam Silver hoped for. Having players choose to take less rather than forcing them to by lowering max salaries is ideal for ownership. It is probably having an unspoken “collusion effect” as well. Some players might be willing to take less because they know that opposing teams will not be able to outbid their current teams for their services. Take KAT, for example. What team is going to be able to offer more than, say, 25% of the salary cap for him, that is a team he’d want to play for? Seems like that would make his willingness to compromise and stay put while at the same time keeping his team as competitive as possible is a direct result of this virtual hard cap.
That’s not really what happened, Alan. Brunson actually got a raise last year. He was set to make $26M in the last year of his original contract, instead he made $35M in the first year of his new max.
What’s happening is the young stars in small markets coming off rookie contracts (Wemby, Chet, J-Williams) are being asked to take less money, and (remarkably) they’re obliging.
So the two small market teams that shoved the aprons down everyone’s throat to gain an advantage are now convincing the stars that they tanked for to take less money to give them an even bigger advantage.
It’s like watching Game of Thrones — Presti and Holt are Cersei Lannister and Peter Baylish, the other owners & players are collectively Ned Stark.
To his credit, Dolan has been raging against this the whole time. But the rest of the owners are (understandably) too focused on their skyrocketing franchise valuations to actually fight against it. If the upcoming era of small market hegemony materializes as it looks like it will, maybe then things will start to get addressed.
To my simple mind, it looks like increasing FTA from 4 to 7 would not ncreae the value. What am I missing? Are there supposed to be parentheses like this ?
(Pts/2)/(fga + FTA *0.44)
If this is the formula, then increased free-throw attempts would make the value go down.
But I didn’t really think Dadiet was great, just that he was competent in the way that a second or third year player should be in Summer league. So whatever the numbers are we both agree he wasn’t great. But he was ok, which is more than I can sat for most of the rest of the team.
On the subject of maxes there just shouldn’t be a 35% max. And why should players maximum possible salary go up when they have more than ten years of service and their skills are usually getting worse?
Yeah, this is correct.
His TS% goes down if you give him 7 FTA instead of the 4 he took in the boxscore. He had an inefficient scoring game.
Without a 35% max, though, the teams with the best players would be unstoppable.
We’re about to see the impact of that with Wemby agreeing to 25%.
And we’ve already seen it with OKC. The biggest advantage they have isn’t their stockpile of picks, it’s that they have the best player in the world making 25% of the cap instead of 35%.
Apart from OKC & San Antonio, what other small market clubs are running roughshod over the NBA?
If the 2nd apron was designed to give a hard time to Contenders with a slim chance of making the league more competitive then i guess it’s working.
Willie Mays to the Mets!
I think I clearly described it as a future probability, not a current endemic.
This ain’t no picnic.
the aprons are very likely not affecting the players nearly has much as people think. the players did a great job finally getting $160 million in extra licensing revenue into bri in the 2023 cba, after owners spending years white knuckling it like a binky, and in return gave up a silly but largely unimportant rube goldberg apron machine and much more steeply progressive luxury tax. it is almost certainly the latter that’s the final boss here. in either case, neither affect what players as whole get paid.
the vast majority of nba teams have proven they don’t want to pay very high taxes. from the five years of 2016-17 to 2020-21 only twice did a team (okc in 18-19 and the cavs in 17-18) have a high enough payroll such that it would be above where the second apron would be had it existed. the total taxes paid in those years was $31m, $110m, $130m, $30m, $98m.
i think people are overly focused on a very unusual 3 year period in nba history (21-22 to 23-24) where a handful teams paid a lot of luxury taxes, and on average 4 teams went above the hypothetical second apron each year. there are a lot of reason to consider those three years more likely to be ephemeral than a permanent break from the nba status quo. what’s more, the steeper progressive luxury tax schedule in the 2023 cba would have driven those tax bills 30-40% higher than they actually were. that’s a big deal. you might notice that many more teams cluster just below the tax line than those that cluster just below the second apron.
it’s easy to forget that good teams have economized to mitigate taxes long before the aprons came along. james harden is the most infamous example. but there are so many. mike miller on the heat. trevor ariza on the rockets. malcolm brodgon or pj tucker on the bucks. alex caruso on the lakers. joe johnson and kurt thomas on the suns. tyson chandler on the mavs. continuity as measured by minutes played by returning players was down like 1% last year vs the historical norm and was actually up adjusted for injuries.
the second apron is a bit silly as implemented and definitely has some annoying side effects in particular cases, but the impact on players as a whole is almost surely overdone and a waste of they unions’ negotiating capital.
A coupla things:
Wemby’s Spurs haven’t won Jacques Merde yet. Not even the freakin’ NBA Cup. Bit premature to fret about them being unstoppable.
The two clubs cited as the poster children of the coming small market hegemony currently enjoy the services of the reigning MVP and a young player widely hailed as a “generational talent.” NBA teams with top-3 players have historically dominated the competition, regardless of whatever the prevailing cap rules at the time may be. Wemby could well go on to win multiple titles, just as former generational talents Jordan and LBJ once did before him. ‘twas ever thus.
On max salaries.
Now we’ve got them taking discounts.
There’s only been three instances of top 3 players on large discounts:
1. Curry’s discount – led to an extended period of Warriors dominance
2. SGA’s discount – currently fueling a pretty good run
3. Wemby’s discount – probably going to be impactful
This isn’t like Jalen Brunson. He makes the max.
This would be like if KAT agreed to 25% of the cap for his extension, which would lower his salary from $61M to $40M.
The Thunder have had the savviest executive in the business (at least since the colossal Harden blunder) making their decisions. Presti is a guy who has had a better handle on efficiencies and inefficiencies of whatever the cap/draft structure happened to be and has taken advantage to the point that OKC can be at the top of the food pyramid for ther next decade no matter what happens with the CBA. They are an outlier.
The Spurs lucked into the first pick when they had only a 14% chance of doing so. It happened to be in a year where a sure-fire multi-generational player was available. So long as he remains healthy, with any kind of managerial competence they will be at least a very good team for the next decade no matter what happens with the CBA. They are also an outlier.
Everything pt posted seems to suggest that the problems with the second apron are being exaggerated, especially from the POV of big market teams. But one only needs to look at is MLB, and how big market teams are in a ridiculously dominant position. Hopefully that never happens with NBA basketball.
Players can still make hundreds of millions in their career and rig the system in their favor, competition-wise. All it takes is a big 3 willing to sacrifice one or two of those hundreds of millions to band together. Seems like Wemby is on to that. Maybe he realizes that the additional exposure during deep playoff runs will ultimately translate into higher non-BRI earnings, both presently and post-career.
When did Curry take a discount? I thought one of keys to GS dominance was that his ankle injuries made him sign a “below market” contract given that they then disappeared and he blossomed.
Milo and I are saying the same thing: the apron is a red herring. It’s the luxury tax.
And now owners are using the apron to convince players to take less money, essentially transferring the luxury tax from themselves to the players.
Sorry to just be so behind, but I was focusing on betting Saratoga yesterday.
I’m not sure this is correct in terms of what Dolan and Leon were actually thinking, but it is correct that there are longer term advantages to delaying going over the 2nd apron and doing it later instead.
The most obvious imprtant one to long term team building is related to draft picks, but the money also gets crazy.
“Presti is a guy who has had a better handle on efficiencies and inefficiencies of whatever the cap/draft structure happened to be and has taken advantage to the point that OKC can be at the top of the food pyramid for ther next decade no matter what happens with the CBA.”
I think Presti is the best in the business…but…he is in comfortable position because he always had the option of hard tanking, trading his star players, accumulating future assets at the expense of current production–all in the name of being a small market team that doesn’t have an option, and knowing the NBA will lend a sympathetic ear and never penalise his decisions in a new CBA because of parity.
The next time they do the CBA they should lock a dozen very bright informed fans in a room with a dozen white lined note pads, dozen #2 pencils (with an eraser), dozen bottles of Corsendonk Abbey Brown Ale, maybe some good weed or gummies, play some rock in the background and make sure no players, owners and especially lawyers are present. They should be tasked with coming up with a CBA that’s no longer than 10 pages, that anyone with a high school equivalency can understand and that “generally” meets some basic goals of the league, owners and players. 😉
IMO primary goals should be give players fexibility to move if they want, put incentives in place for players to stay with the team they are already on and limit the advantages of the richest owners.
There is an imbalance in those incentives.
Owners and managements feel that the punishments for going over the 2nd apron (financial AND others for repeaters) are too severe to keep the team together unless you are a super strong contender to win it all. In the Knicks case Dolan refused even though we ARE the 3rd contender or so.
The balance has to be tweaked and IMO simplified.
There’s no way the punishment for going over the 2nd apron should be so severe than a guy as rich as Dolan doesn’t want to keep a home grown player like Robinson that the team already had. What you want to do is prevent him from using his monetary advantage to add to an already very good team.
but strat, it has been argued here that the penalties aren’t really all that severe, and that Dolan’s decision to not accept those penalties is totally irrational.
To illustrate the point clearly, look at our situation:
We won the chip & players expected to get paid.
Dolan goes on the radio and says the second apron is suicide.
The statement is a bold faced lie but the players, media, and fans don’t understand the second apron so they repeat the line like parrots until the position becomes accepted because everyone is saying it.
So now Landry Shamet has to take $6M instead of $8M under the guise of “staying under the SA”, but really it’s just so Dolan can avoid paying $15M in taxes on the extra $2M.
The end result is Dolan saves money on taxes and Landry earns less money, effectively transferring the burden of the luxury tax from Dolan to Landry.
Star players have plenty of bargaining leverage with teams. LeBron and Durant forced their way out of their small markets of their original teams getting nowhere near their value in return, and setting those franchises back dramatically. Patrick and Melo earned virtually every guaranteed dollar they could without regard to the implications for team-building. Giannis had management in a constant state of panic over losing him, “convincing” them to make moves like trading for Dame only to need to waive and stretch his enormous contract to make a last-ditch effort to keep him. Neither Tatum nor Brown cared how much it would hamstring their team to take 35% contracts (and it would have even with the prior CBA, as pt pointed out.)
“So now Landry Shamet has to take $6M instead of $8M under the guise of “staying under the SA”, but really it’s just so Dolan can avoid paying $15M in taxes on the extra $2M.”
This is disingenuous. Landry Shamet was a UFA. He didn’t “have to take” anything less than the most another team could/would offer him. He chose to stay in a situation he really loved, possibly at the cost of a theoretical higher offer from someone else.
Same with Wemby. As pt pointed out, players have taken full max deals for many years before the apron era, knowing full well that either their frugal owner or the limits of the cap would adversely impact their ability to win a championship.
Shamet chose to stay. Mitch chose not to. Good for both of them!
mystic mac is back…
5 years since he’s fought, like 10 years since he was active…still, might just knock out max tonight…
at near 37 dude is rocking one of the best bods performance enhancing drugs can produce…
there’s been a couple of outstanding cards already this year, tonight may be another…
gabe stevenson finally premiers, looks like an even more powerful and athletic daniel cormier, who dominated everyone, but one…
paddy the baddy versus the god of war should be a blood bath, in a good sort of way…someone elses’ blood, for sport…
norway/england will be a nice warm up, will have to catch argentina/swizterland later on…
Agree with both hubert and pt. The penalties specific to the second apron are being exaggerated because, while the second apron is obviously not perfectly correlated with the tax threshold, it is right around the area where the progressive taxation regime really starts to kick into overdrive. This is obviously even more extreme in the case of repeaters.
If most fans were told the second apron specific penalties, especially for teams able to avoid the 3-in-5 year death sentence, the reaction would likely be “wait, that’s it?”
I don’t think this is a conspiracy wherein the media is carrying water for the owners. Most reporters genuinely don’t have an iron clad understanding of the CBA themselves, but are familiar with the idea that the second apron is quite punitive. So that gets discussed much more than the luxury tax, which has existed in some form for a very long time and is thus not as novel to muse on.
This dynamic allows for Dolan et al. to pretend that good ol’ fashioned money grubbing is actually deeply strategic planning in service of the fans who should really be very grateful for the masterminds at work.
oops, his name is actually gable (after dan gable, wrestling legend)…
sorry gabe…
The way I see it, the local press is actually doing a lot more calling out of Dolan than defending him. If anything, it’s probably not that interesting/enduring of a story to the typical fan, especially in the wake of the Giannis, Brown, LaMelo, etc. kinds of things.
I also doubt that money grubbing or anything akin to it is behind Dolan’s edict. And it is well known that he never considers the interests of fans when he meddles in FO decisions. There is likely something like spite or manipulation involved. And he’s far from alone among principal owners in that regard.
I think with Mitch in particular it stings bc we drafted him and he was the longest tenured Knick. On top of that we stuck with him for almost two seasons while he was hurt only to now lose him.
All of this could be avoided if Dolan had just paid up. But beyond that there needs to be a clause or exception for teams drafts players or if a player has played with a team for more than X amount of years.
Of the five diehard fans in my household, who are still watching videos chronicling the chip on a daily basis, I’m the only one who cares at all about losing Mitch or the reasons for it. You kind of have to be a KB type to be all that interested in this stuff on anything but a “damn, but whattayagonnado?” Level.
One bit of hypocrisy spouted by Brad Stevens is that he justified the Brown trade on the grounds of it being problematic to have 2 guys earning 70% of the cap with a similar percentage of usage, when he was just trying to trade Brown for a guy with the same salary and usage issues. And then the new owner said it wasn’t about the money at all.
The CBA is what it is and got us strike-free hoops during our ascendancy. Every team, probably every agent, and many players have their gripes. We won a championship but lost Mitch because (no, Dolan as the money man can decide) of it. Like that we have an FO always making moves cognisant of its implications.
Facts. I gave Brad Stevens E – for Effort. What was he supposed to say…owner made me do it?
It’s just weird that a guy purportedly as smart as Boy Genius would say something so obviously stupid. Maybe that’s why Brown thought he was the smartest guy in the room.
I’ve heard this idea bandied about but no, this needs to never happen. It would give an overwhelming advantage to teams who tank.
Adam Silver seems to have thrown his entire lot in on parity. He probably thinks that ideally, every team will have at least an opportunity to build a contender except in cases of repeated gross mismanagement (see: Knicks pre-Leon). I doubt if he cares that much about who actually wins or how often as much as he cares about the perception that most teams can compete and possibly win. But players still have lots of agency, if they are willing to pay for it by sacrificing a few tens of millions or even more. When Wemby hits his prime, if he can get a couple of other 35+% players to form a Big 3 with him, they might become as dynastic as the Curry Dubs, or LeBron Heat, or Duncan Spurs, or Kobe Lakers were. If Tatum and Brown both agreed to max out at $50M AAV, The Celts might have gone to the finals a bunch more times. What will Silver do if players start reconsidering how much championships and legacies are worth to them?
Great GTA story.
The Mets just made one of the worst first round picks in their history, up there with Ryan Jaroncyk and Eddie Kunz in terms of pure WTFery.
They drafted a college reliever who threw a whopping 14 innings in his entire college career. They don’t have a second round pick. Dude was barely projected as a top 100 pick.
Insanely bad pick.
lol did gary trent just get the joe smith deal?
He’s not worth $16M over 4 years let alone each of the next 4
Man, that is really a head-scratcher.
Nickel with the start
Bucks SB Nation article (before the signing: do we even want him back?) and comments from both before and after.
Joe Smith is invoked in the after-signing comments. The possibility of a handshake deal was mentioned in the before-signing comments.
https://www.brewhoop.com/bucks-news/68491/milwaukee-gary-trent-jr-nba-free-agency
The summer of 2016 was a fun time in my life, so I thank Gary Trent Jr. for reminding me of it, but that’s completely insane. There’s either some Joe Smith stuff going on or Landry Shamet should fire his agent into the sun.
My guess is Nickel is a lock to make the roster in some capacity and they’re just figuring out whether it should a two-way that inevitably gets converted or if he gets the rookie minimum from the start.
Gary Trent Jr was a guy I thought might be an intriguing buy low candidate with one of the vet min slots. Is Phil Jackson secretly running an NBA team?
I like when the World Cup gives us matchups like England v Norway that conjure up thousand-year old history. I feel like rewatching season 1 of vikings after this
I really want to root for Norway but England v Argentina in the semi final is too good to miss
Using VAR to take away goals in soccer is so shitty. Call it as it happens or let it go.
Is it too late to not give Diawara that contract?
Checked the score and that’s all I needed to see. Would have to pay me to watch it.
*Soccer game is on and it’s a good one
mo looks like he hasn’t stopped celebrating since the knicks won the finals…
thankfully tyler showed last year how unimportant it is to show up ready for summer league…
It’s better to sign him immediately because we get more years of control than we can by converting him from a 2-way or using the TP-MLE. If we try signing him with the minimum exception, he counts as a 2yr vet min salary for apron purposes.
If there’s a Knicks in the world cup it’s England. A final against France on US soil would be rich.
This Trevor Keels guy seems pretty good.
I watched some of today’s game and came to the stunning conclusion that you need a good number of recent draft picks to do well in summer league. Who knew?
Remember when some here were freaked out that another team would give Mo a big offer sheet?
I don’t know why, but Diawara has completely lost the ability to shoot.
I wouldn’t read to much into summer league . Diawara has to create to much on this roster . He just needs to be in a supporting role with better players he can play off. The shooting remains to be seen. Need a bigger sample size in NBA level games.
king green (san bernardino, age almost 40, 155 lbs) just did something incredible while facing a very formidable 31 year old opponent…
took a break from that to check in on argentina/switzerland to see a 39 year old, five foot seven, under 160 pounds player, take a corner kick and hit a teammates’ head just right to score a goal…
he very intentionally hit macallister in the head, with a bunch of other defenders standing right next to him, from the corner…
nobody should be that good at that age…
Nets player
22nd pick
Higher pick than anybody on this summer league roster. Diawara has company at least.
The Mets redeemed themselves with their third round pick, going overslot and selecting a first round caliber outfielder, so they ended up doing okay in overall talent.
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