The NBA’s response misses the actual criticism.
Yes, most RFAs eventually signed contracts. That doesn’t mean they had a healthy market. The issue is whether teams have enough cap flexibility under the current CBA to legitimately compete for these players.
Jalen Duren is coming off an All-Star/All-NBA season and still hasn’t received an offer sheet. Bennedict Mathurin hasn’t either. Last summer, Giddey, Kuminga, Grimes and Cam Thomas all sat unsigned deep into the offseason. Thomas and Grimes ultimately took qualifying offers rather than accept depressed long-term deals.
And pointing to sign-and-trades doesn’t disprove the problem. In some cases, they’re evidence of it: teams have to engineer complicated transactions because they don’t have the flexibility to simply make competitive offers.
The funniest part is the NBA bragging that two offer sheets is tied for the most since 2018.
If two teams making offer sheets is considered an unusually active RFA market, maybe that tells you something about the market.
The question isn’t whether RFAs eventually sign somewhere.
It’s whether they actually have multiple teams competing for their services.
Right now, for too many of them, they don’t.
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Biggest gap on tonight's board: Jameson Taillon. Book set 4.5 strikeouts. We project 7.4.
Still only our fourth-ranked arm — edge and confidence aren't the same thing.
These 4 are the top arms. Every hitter and pitcher on the slate is in the app.
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@AnthonyIrwinLA Rob doesn’t have the relationships around the league to pull off a multi team deal that gets them stuff and creates roster flexibility. He talked about getting good players from teams that are in the second apron get out of it through trade and instead he signed a bunch of FA’s