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[MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] What is up, everybody? Thank you all for joining me on the latest broadcast part of the CSG Network. And of course, you're a host, Jeff Morton. This is the final podcast of June. Been an interesting start to the summer so far. I'm going to briefly recap the draft, the salary dump of Reggie Jackson. And then I'm going to talk about the bad vibes surrounding the Denver Nuggets. And that's the first half and the second half. I'm going to talk to you about how basically the owners and players completely screwed themselves to this new CBA, and how the league office has people exactly where they want them at this point. But we'll get to that in a second. But first, I want to talk to you about bad online. 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OK, just let's get this out of the way, folks. The vibes around Nuggetsville are not good. People don't like Calvin Booth. I think I may have been semi-responsible for the poor outlook for the Denver Nuggets right now. What I want to kind of do in this podcast is reframe it not to alleviate people's fears because they're real, but to kind of give an indication that the Nuggets aren't the only team in this boat, and I'll be doing that in the second half. But first, the Nuggets traded some picks to move up from 28 to 22 to select the guy that they have been telling everyone under the sun that they wanted in Doron Homes. I have quibbles with the way Calvin Booth approached this. I do believe that the Nuggets could have used a little more subterfuge. I don't-- I think they overpaid because the sun's new exactly that the Nuggets loved Doron Homes so much, and they had the Nuggets over a barrel in order to get extract what they want, which was some second round picks from the Nuggets. So the Nuggets ended up trading the 28th pick and a couple of second round picks to move up to 22 to get to Doron Homes. Doron Homes, I have no nothing about him. I'm going to wait till I see him. Everyone knows that I'm not a draft expert. So I'm going to wait till I see him to see. People say that he's-- Calvin Booth said he's a four. I think people have envisioned him being a backup five, and I think that is a false subsumption. I think the Calvin Booth has a hard time lying as we learned in the post-draft press conference. So I don't anticipate the Nuggets playing or the intended use of Doron Homes being at the five spot. I do believe he is intended to be a power forward. And then the search for a backup center continues for the Denver Nuggets, even if it's in the cards for that sort of thing. Because DeAndre Jordan will be signed another one-year deal, and he's going to be coming here for three million bucks to basically sit on the bench. I don't know, folks. I don't know why the Nuggets keep doing that, but your guess is as good as mine. So that was the draft. And bad vibes really started after the end of the first round with Calvin Booth's rather-- why do you say it like this? Kind of a press conference where he's talking about a contiguous callable of pope, where he basically admitted he's pope's not coming back. And that's part of the bad vibes. I think people still were holding out hope. And part of this is that there are some realities here. And in the second half of the podcast, I'm going to talk about those realities, something I have written about, and I wish people would remake. Just like you know that I write for Stiffs, read what I write. Everyone's been saying exactly what I wrote two weeks ago. But I'll get to that in a second. My frustrations with people not understanding what I'm writing are right there. And that's not people on Twitter. It's just other media members. But I'll get to that later. So the Nuggets, bad vibes, ended up starting right then. And the Nuggets have not recovered. And everyone was excited for Duran Holmes, myself excluded who knows nothing about the draft. But it was a poor, poor, poor beginning to the business of the off season. And slowly it's been donning on people that the Nuggets, particularly after the very next day, dumped Regi Jackson to the Charlotte Hornets for nothing. It was a salary dump. They sent three second round picks in Regi Jackson to Charlotte. And I think people at that moment were like, what the hell? And it wasn't the salary dump. OK, people-- the Regi Jackson signing was a poor idea. It was a poor idea. And I said it over and over and over and over and over and over and over again last year. It was a poor idea. They gave him the taxpayer limit level when they didn't have to. The market for Regi Jackson was not exactly what you would call robust. The Nuggets did a make-good contract, promised him a taxpayer MLE. And they got bit in the ass for it because Regi Jackson ended up playing 82 games. And that wasn't necessarily the intent going in. And now, obviously, there's other factors going on there. And those other factors are the front office's view of things and Michael Malone's view of things and the player's view of things. And what I think Nuggets fans are feeling right now is the tension because Calvin Booth has an approach. Michael Malone has an approach. And the players have a different point of view, too. And I think the players on the roster are more aligned-- who are not on rookie deals-- are more aligned with Michael Malone when it comes to point of view about who should be playing and getting minutes. A no-player, especially if they feel that they're going to contend is going to say, let's develop some rookies. So what Calvin Booth has been trying to do is force the issue. And what people are feeling is the tension between the two. There's the logical realization that you can't win with a bunch of rookie contract. It's just not possible. They learned the wrong lesson from 2023. The lesson for 2023 is you can have a high floor rookie surrounded by veterans. And that's exactly what happened with Christian Brown. He was surrounded by veterans. And rather than learn that lesson and stick with that, the Nuggets went all in on old rookies. And they now have six contracts. After they signed Iran Homes, they're going to have six contracts that are rookie deals. And all six of these players have been drafted in the last three years. They have two guaranteed deals to second round picks they didn't have to give, which compounds the issue that they had last year, which they ended up trading up into the draft to get Julian Stradler. And this gave up more of their draft capital that they can use to trade. And now they're stuck with Zignology, basically. Now they could pull a miracle and try to trade Zeke. But the reality of the situation is they have three max contracts. And there's a giant second apron that everyone in the league sans a couple owners is treating as a heart cap. So it is a collision of circumstances that's making the Nuggets future be very uncertain. And then looming over the whole thing and something that I've been raising over and over and over again is whether the nuggets have asked Nicole Kitch about any of this. There seems to be this weird pissing match between Calvin Booth and Calvin Booth and Michael Malone in that played out over last year. Everyone knows it. Everyone saw it. I think we have come to the realization that we are at a nexus point with the Denver Nuggets. We are at a place where they need to shit or get off the pot. Calvin Booth is trying to force what his vision is on to Michael Malone. Michael Malone has been resisting said vision. And the players are not necessarily caught in the middle. The players are the ultimate ones who will decide. And here's why I say that. One of the reasons the Nuggets won 57 games is because the players, Nicole Yokech, leading the charge in that aspect, decided that they were going to put the pedal to the middle and win. And they went 21 and 6 down the stretch, after the all-star break. This is because-- and the Nuggets would not have won 57 games if the players themselves did not decide that. And by the players, I mean the veterans on the roster. So naturally, that means you are going to cut out players who need development. The Nuggets were on a 51-52 win track prior to that text message. And they overplayed. They basically went, pedal to the middle, got 57 wins. It should have been 58 if they hadn't lost to the Spurs. But one of the reasons they lost to the Spurs is because this team was clearly, even by the down the stretch of the regular season, running out of gas. But the players themselves made that decision. That wasn't Michael Malone. People forget Michael Malone was playing Julian Strathor before he got injured. So when Strathor came back, there was no opportunity for him to come back. Because the players themselves, the veterans, had decided that they were going to win. They decided that enough of this shit were going to win. What has been lost in this whole thing is that you can make all these decisions if you want. But if you signal to the players that we want you to devote and waste time developing rookies, they are going to reject it, even though they were rookies at one time themselves. So Michael Malone is just a conduit for the way the players feel. The nuggets would not have gone peddled to the middle if Nicole Yochich, Jamal Murray, Aaron Gordon, Michael Porter Jr., and Contavis Caldwell Pope had not had decided that that was what they were going to do. And I think we forget that. I know we've forgotten that. The players weren't helpless victims in this. They made that choice. And that's been the unaccounted for part of this discussion. The more rookies that Calvin Booth brings in, the more there's tension there. And the tension is going to be there. And this isn't even without losing Contavious Caldwell Pope, which I'm going to get to in the second half. I think the fans are picking up on the tension, and they're picking up on the vibe, which is the natural we want to win versus a front office that desperately wants these players to help in developing draft picks. And usually, this tension doesn't result in good things. And the nuggets need to resolve that tension. What fans are picking up on is what's going on in Denver, is what's going on at ballerina. Is this vast gulf in approach between Calvin Booth, between the players and Michael Malone. And they need to resolve that in order for the fans to feel better. And that is exactly what I'm telling you. All right. In the second half, I'm going to talk about the CBA. It's effect on everyone, excluding the nuggets, which everyone knows. And I'm going to talk about how the league office is probably the ones who are really liking the changes. We'll be getting that right after the break. If you're a facilities manager at a warehouse and your HVAC system goes down, it can turn up the heat, literally. But don't sweat it. Granger has you covered. Granger offers over a million industrial grade products for all your operations, including warehouse HVAC maintenance. And even better, they offer access to experts and fast delivery so you and your warehouse can both keep your cool. Call 1-800-GRANGER, click Granger.com, or just stop by. Granger, for the ones who get it done. It was about 2022. And I'm going to just, as I said, probably in the last podcast, the Booth approach began in 2022 when he drafted Peyton Watts and Christian Brown. That was-- and Colin Gillespie. That was the draft where Calvin Booth and the new front office were attempting to put their stamp on this team. Prior to then what was known was going to be happening in the CBA, all right? This is what Calvin's always wanted to do. This is Calvin's approach. This is not necessarily a CBA thing. However, as of 2023, when all this was coming down, is when you started to see things, and you started to see how this CBA was shaping up, and the utter panic that general managers in the front of us, not necessarily owners who knew what was going on, general managers are like, holy crap. You're seeing a ton of complaints right now, folks, from people who are talking about the CBA. The CBA screwed the players, and it screwed the team builders, the general managers, in a significant way. And it's hard to put into words just how, what a self-own this is by the NBA. But the league office doesn't care about that. The league office has a vision, and that vision is involved in season tournaments. That vision is involved in play internments, and that vision involves getting this new media deal coupled in with getting expansion. Getting 30 extra roster spots will help alleviate the glut. I've been saying for long and long, long, long time now, the league has a glut of players. There's too many. There's too many good players. And you'd say, Jeff, how could that possibly be? If you have too many good players, you start this weird attrition thing. And this has started before this new CBA. There's just too many good players in this league. And it's hard to translate to people what that means, because you always want this best possible players. Tim Connolly said to us on this podcast about, oh my god, eight years ago now, he was talking about when we were talking about, well, maybe, do you have too many good players? That was Nate Timmons' question. And Tim said to him, looked at him, he said, what am I supposed to do? Sign worse players? And that was like, to me, this is part of the issue. There's too many good players in the league. And the expansion is needed to alleviate this glut. It's been needed for, I say a decade, but some people will say five years, okay? But either way, it's been needed for a long, long time. The league wants this structure in place for when expansion comes in. All of these decisions are made with the eye towards what expansion will mean. The league will undoubtedly get worse when it expands. But the league learned its lesson from 1995. The '95 expansion, as I've talked about repeatedly on this podcast, the 1995 expansion almost ruined the league for about eight years. The style of play went to shit because it was too thin. There weren't enough good players. And it didn't recover until the 2003 draft. It really was the 2003 draft that replenished the league. And that was a period of eight years post-expansion. So you get to 2024. The league hasn't expanded since 1995 with two teams. They did a one-off expansion in 2003 when the Charlotte Bobcats came in and that was just a make good. That was a let's get the thing to 30. And by the way, we understand we've been screwing the city of Charlotte and you're gonna get a team because George Shin was an awful owner. Okay, I've talked about that a lot. But there hasn't been two team expansions since 1995. That was the Canadian expansion. And the league has been putting it off, putting it off, putting it off, putting it off because they wanted to get their ducks in a row. Part of this has to do with the financials landscape and part of it had to do with they needed to get a CBA in order to make this make sense to them. This was a priority for the league and it's been a priority for Adam Silver since 2014. Everyone knows probably who the teams are that the leagues are gonna expand into with the cities. None of that really at this point matters. What matters is basically the Adam Silver admitted during the finals that it's going to be happening and we will get there. But the league wanted this in place in order for this to be set the expansion. But the league office did. What happened, however, is that in the meantime, this is gonna get really bad for the NBA. And this is what thing that the league office did not consider. They are screwing teams basically who did everything right, built a team up, got them to a point where they could contend. It's always been a thing in the NBA that you can't play everyone. That's always been a thing. But it has also been a thing that they were allowed to grow. And now what's happening is because of this new salary cap structure in the penalties and the hard cap that's basically screwing all deals that are being made right now, is it's going to make the stars wealthy and everyone else will lose a large percentage of salary. What it is doing is trying to force an NFL style pay structure where the quarterbacks get all the money and everyone else gets substantially less. And that's the way the NBA is going. But the problem is you are still under previous structures. So all these players still have max contracts. All these players still have these deals that they signed under previous CBAs that are directly affecting teams ability to improve. And that goes directly to the Denver Nuggets. The Denver Nuggets biggest problem right now other than a philosophical difference of opinion from everyone involved at the team is the fact that they have three max deals and they are completely hampered by them. And unless they make a big deal and trade Michael Porter Jr. and do any of the things that they need to do to free up space, this is a team that is in financial hell. And this is something that the NBA, very much the league office did to everyone. Now, I always say that. I mean, I made fun of Josh Crocky for his quote during the post-season press conference where he was like, well, all these contracts were signed under previous collective bargaining agreement. And Josh, he's like, you were aware of the negotiations. You know what was going on. So I don't want to hear that from you. But in a sense that I have sympathy for all the general managers in the league or having to deal with this bullshit and the players in the middle of the NBA salary structure are getting screwed right now, screwed. And this is a weird financial landscape. You know, the Nuggets were the last team under the old CBA. They were the last championship. The new reality took place, took place this last year when the Boston Celtics won. And who knows if Calvin Booth will be vindicated with his old rookies approach. But what we've been seeing right now is the league is having the hardest time adjusting to this because all the deals that are signed under previous CBA's don't go away because you change CBA's. They're the same. Max contracts are linked to a percentage of the cap and the Nuggets have three and they're about to give Jamal an extension that was a max. So the Nuggets are at this weird nexus where they're in almost in a death by a thousand cuts thing. They can't have his Caldwell Pope. If they sign him to what he's going to get on the market, the Nuggets will be deep into the second apron and the league is treating the second apron as a hard cap. Owners, general managers, everyone is treating that as a hard cap and what that means is that Contabious Caldwell Pope will not be re-signing with the Denver Nuggets barring a miracle and free agency starts in two hours as of this recording. So what do you do? If you're a team, you're a team builder, what do you do? The Nuggets still have Nicole Yokoch and Jamal Murray and Michael Porter Jr. and Aaron Gordon, but pieces are going to start being lopped off, lopped off, lopped off. And unless you make a bold deal, which is what I've been advocating the Nuggets do all summer, you're just going to be stuck in this. You're just going to be death by a thousand cuts. Just little things are going to be kept being sliced, being sliced, being sliced and it's not just the Nuggets. Every team is going to be facing this same reality. The Oklahoma City Thunder have a day of reckoning coming. They're going to have to keep trading. These players, these precious players that same press D drafted, they're going to have to. They can't pay everyone. They have too much talent and that's where the expansion draft comes in and it can't get here quick enough. You're going to have, also you're going to have the cap go up by 10%. Okay, but with your like the Nuggets and you've got three max deals, then anything is not going to be affecting much. It's still got the still percentage of the cap taken up by these contracts. It's just, it's the NBA didn't do themselves any favors. They should have put in an amnesty clause when they got the new deal. I don't know why they didn't. They knew this was going to be the problem and I'm talking about the league office, knew this was going to be a problem. And the fact that they didn't put in an amnesty provision to relieve the glut and to help teams out is malpractice, absolute malpractice. The league knew this was going to happen. The people at the league office who drew this up, the eggheads down there knew exactly what was going to happen. They didn't put in an amnesty provision like it was in 2011 when there was this last dramatic change in the structure of the way people were paid. And that helped a lot. The Nuggets amnesty Birdman, okay? But the structure, the view, the landscape, has been foisted upon the general managers and the team builders in the NBA. Person people who benefited was the league because their vision is not the same as team building. And this will lay the groundwork for expansion. But until expansion gets here and until that TV deal hits, we are in hell. And at this point, every team in the NBA is just kind of waiting that out. And it sucks for the Nuggets because they got Nicole Oakich. And you got to maximize his time. Let's see. All right, thank you all for joining me in the latest more cast. I'm going to be back later the next week with a later this week, excuse me, with another episode. Come on. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]
The Denver Nuggets offseason, so far, has been weird and angsty. On the latest Mortcast Jeff talks about how the Nuggets internal issues are being felt by the fans and how almost every team in the league will be going through this. The cost of a terrible CBA.
