Good to see all of them staying leading. All 3 are important in our future. It'll be expensive but worth it to keep them all
So you're fine with no max signing in the future?
I would be fine if we didn't sign a max guy this summer, although that wouldn't be my plan A. Even if we do sign a max guy, I don't view it as a simple one must go proposition.
What is the objective of signing a max guy? It doesn't do anything for our internal development approach so the assumption is it's to take a leap forward into contention right? In which case might it make more sense to keep the guard rotation that is most likely to achieve that goal? In the situation where we get Fultz and a max FA, you aren't going to count on Fultz to provide meaningful minutes. He plays in a position which takes years to fully develop in the NBA. Say you then remove Bradley, aren't you taking a step backwards when you are really wanting to move forwards? It doesn't make sense. Better almost to keep Bradley and potentially lose him for nothing in the summer, but at least you'd gone all in on a championship that year.
There is a sense of jumping the gun here though. We haven't got Fultz, we haven't signed a max FA and the odds are stacked against us in both cases. In a fairly shallow FA class, the most likely thing to happen is we draft at 3/4, sign no max FA and look to do one of 2 things with the cap space;
1) Renegotiate IT, benefitting from the fact that his salary post 2018 will be a lot lower than if we wait another year
2) We do what we did in 2015, sign a lot of 1+1 guys and take a look at 2018, a more difficult approach
We'd still be extremely well positioned to make a trade for a guy like Butler if that was what we wanted, or continue the development that has seen our wins almost triple in 3 years