Tag: nytimes.com

CHICAGO — Friday was meant to be Caleb Wilson’s routine introduction as a Chicago Bulls player. Say the lines, hoist the threads. Subtle, the way these things often go. If only such a word meant something in his lexicon. Instead, it felt like the emphatic staking of his claim in this Bulls rebuild. A continuation…

NBA free-agent market: Top 25 | shooting guards | small forwards | point guards The free agent power forward market looks pretty good, especially if you’re interested in a generational superstar in his early 40s. While the market drops off after LeBron James, this year’s crop still includes multiple starter candidates and several others who…

Center Isaiah Hartenstein intends to sign a three-year, $75 million contract extension with the Oklahoma City Thunder, a league source confirmed to The Athletic.  Approaching his third season with the organization, Hartenstein has become a fixture in Oklahoma City’s rotation. Over the past two seasons, he started 97 of his 104 regular-season appearances, as well…

The Detroit Pistons have agreed to trade two second-round picks to the Oklahoma City Thunder in exchange for shooting guard Isaiah Joe, a league source confirmed to The Athletic on Friday. Joe, who turns 27 on July 2, is a career 40.6 percent 3-point shooter on 4.8 attempts per game. He is coming off his…

The Bounce Newsletter  | This is The Athletic’s daily NBA newsletter. Sign up here to receive The Bounce directly in your inbox. We all consume a lot of media platforms in a lot of different ways. I’m definitely not someone who watches Twitch streams or live YouTube shows. It just isn’t in my rotation of platforms I frequent…

It was after 3 a.m. on Thursday when the bleary-eyed Minnesota Timberwolves front office staff believed they had landed on the structure of a deal that could get them the point guard they had been chasing for years. The Charlotte Hornets had finally expressed a willingness to engage in discussions for former All-Star LaMelo Ball,…

Handing out NBA Draft grades is guaranteed to make a writer look silly. And yet, I do them every year because you love and read them. And ultimately, even the best talent evaluators get things wrong regularly. Still, grades are a great way to reflect on how each team handled the draft and take a…

Throw caution to the wind. The second apron is not as daunting as some claim. And if the New York Knicks remain below it, as owner James Dolan said they would, they will enter next season as a worse basketball team. The second apron, a payroll threshold that projects to be $222 million in 2026-27,…

The thing about an NBA team going “all-in” by surrendering draft capital for win-now trades is that, once it starts down that road, it turns into its own vicious cycle. It’s difficult to escape the decision whirlpool where, at every turn, the best move is to lean further into churning future assets for present value…

All-NBA forward Jalen Duren was underwhelmed by the Detroit Pistons’ initial offer in restricted free agency and is planning to explore sign-and-trade scenarios when they are permitted on Tuesday, league sources told The Athletic. The negotiation between the 22-year-old and the Pistons was widely expected to be challenging, as he had an elite regular season…