Adrian Wojnarowski: ESPN Sources: The NBA has opened an investigation into the Philadelphia 76ers for possible tampering and early contact centered on franchise’s summer free agency class of James Harden, P.J. Tucker and Danuel House. Sixers have begun cooperating with league on probe. Story soon. – via Twitter wojespn
NBA is becoming embarrassing in this regard.
Fans and owners alike have been hounding stars for years about being too greedy and selfish. So when Harden takes a huge pay-cut to help his team improve, someone makes a formal complaint to the league office…what a joke.
We are not far removed from recent complaints regarding GSW ownership spending too much into the luxury tax.
You are upset if they get punished 76ers made an illegal deal with harden to circumvent the salary cap?
Harden is a max guy, how are the 76ers going to circumvent the cap if he was adamant on not losing any money?
The only way the NBA will investigate a contract is if another team owner files a grievance. This has nothing to do with ‘cheating’, this is about a salty team being upset the 76ers have improved or taken their free agent target. I would bet money this was Pat Riley being petty about losing P.J Tucker.
It’s like this. Harden opted out of his contract. Fine, he’s allowed to. He worked with the Sixers to take less this year. Also allowed to. What he and the Sixers are not allowed to do is agree that they’ll pay him the max next year since he did this. It doesn’t matter if another team was going to offer him the max or not next summer, because a side deal like this would be a direct circumvention of the CBA, which stipulates a maximum raise of 8% from year 1 to year 2 of a contract, and not the nearly 50% raise he’d get if he signs a max deal next year.
The two sides can agree to talk next year, but they can’t actually agree on a number or even a range of numbers, and that’s what the NBA is investigating. It could be Miami that complained, it could be Brooklyn that complained (they’re pretty ticked at Harden forcing his way to Philly last February), or it could have been a number of teams that were frustrated, because it’s looked like Harden and Morey have been cooking up some things together for awhile now.