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Tuesday Bolts – 7.14.15

Tuesday Bolts – 7.14.15
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Ken Berger of CBSSports.com: “Most league execs informally polled here at Summer League expect Durant to stay in Oklahoma City when he hits the market next summer. There are only a handful of teams that can legitimately think they’re an option. The Lakers, the Mavs and the Wizards (in Durant’s hometown) are in the mix, for starters. The Knicks? I mean, I guess, in theory.”

Kevin Pelton of ESPN Insider: “Let’s start with the obvious: Kanter is not worth $70 million, even as the cap rises. As I wrote Friday, based in part on his poor rating in ESPN’s real plus-minus last season (-2.7, 58th among centers), I project Kanter’s value at $21 million over the next three seasons. He can exceed that by improving his atrocious defense in the Thunder’s scheme and maintaining the production he had on offense after the trade to Oklahoma City, but that’s a large gap to make up. It’s easy to see why the Thunder felt they had no choice but to match. They gave up a first-round pick for Kanter barely four months ago at the trade deadline, and choosing not to match wouldn’t really give the team much flexibility to replace him. Oklahoma City wouldn’t have created cap space by declining to match Kanter’s offer and would have simply had the non-taxpayer mid-level exception available.”

This impression of Russ is pretty decent.

Adam Silver on the moratorium: “I will say it’s an imperfect system, there’s no question about it. The question is, ‘Is there a better system?’ And that’s something that the league office, and in discussion with our owners, we’re always looking to do things better. It so happens we have an owners’ meeting here in Las Vegas on Tuesday, we have a competition committee [Monday]. And there’s no doubt we’ll spend time talking about it to see just that, if there’s a better way. And on top of that, it also is part of our collective bargaining agreement as well. So even if we say, ‘Yeah, here’s a better way of doing it,’ we can’t unilaterally change it. It has to be changed through a collective bargaining process.”

The Mark Cuban inbox is pretty funny.

Zach Lowe of Grantland on agent/owner relationships: “No team makes crucial team-building choices solely because of agency ties, and players who move into management justifiably want to stick with agents they trust. Friendships between agents and owners can drive player movement, but there is no rule preventing Mark Cuban and Dan Fegan, the agent for both DeAndre Jordan and Chandler Parsons, from developing a mutually beneficial relationship.”