I don't see Jalen Smith becoming available. 22 years old. Intriguing talent. Desirable measurables. Posting good stats. Rookie contract.
That's exactly the type player a rebuilding team like Indy keeps. No way he is able to be traded for without really good stuff going back.
The problem is that he's probably not going to be able to stick around in Indy. Phoenix declined his rookie option, so Indy is limited to offering him the amount of that rookie option, I believe. From memory, it's roughly $4 million?
Meanwhile, the other 29 teams can offer him more by using their MLE. But you're correct, a trade won't make much sense, because I think Indy is limited to the rookie scale amount when sign and trading him, too.
Yeah, the most Indy can offer him is ~$4.7 million, whether he’s kept or traded. That said, I think people overrate him a bit on this site, and I don’t think there’s a team rushing to use the MLE on him.
I think he is probably overrated but....
He's 22 yrs old, long, and an UFA
We don't have a first round pick
IND can offer him ~4.7M
BOS can offer him up to ~6.4M on the TP-MLE
I don't see him getting offers of ~10.3M on the full MLE
Rookie scale for the 7th overall pick is ~ 1.2 x 4.9 = ~5.9M
The C's have limited assets to acquire talent. The whole TPE discussion revolves around one of these assets being ownership's willingness to spend into the tax.
The TP-MLE came into the discussion when Roy made the good point that ownership may not go as far as spending the 17M TPE (on two players 12M + 5M) I proposed using part of the TPE on a 12M player and 6.4ish on the TP-MLE.
For the TPE (either the big 17M or the smaller ones) we need to send something out. I don't want to touch the top 9 of our rotation without a clear upgrade, I don't want to trade any of our future firsts. I like both Richardson and Holiday, but are they available for at absolute most Neismith + 2nd?
I'm not married to Olynyk, his appeal for me is he's potentially available for nothing of value in a DET salary dump, his salary could be aggregated in a future trade and could have a role in a break glass in case of emergency.
After we exhaust the TPE and TP-MLE we are left with our 2nd and Vet-min contracts to fill out the roster.
And finally I've dismissed S&T as it would hard cap us. At the moment we have ~155M allocated for 14 players with a projected apron of about 155M. It would most likely require multiple deals to use anything close to the 17M TPE.