Winners: Philadelphia 76ers and Toronto Raptors

Let’s start with the blockbusters. The depth of the Eastern Conference is going to be harrowing next season, and two teams have gotten meaningfully better in the past few days. One came completely out of nowhere. The 76ers were forgotten. Not only had they not been linked to Jaylen Brown before they acquired him from their rival, but they had also been widely regarded as perhaps the least interesting team of the offseason. They were basically stuck with the same roster core that got swept by New York in the second round — two of the most burdensome, seemingly untradeable contracts in the NBA (Joel Embiid and Paul George), and two of the most electrifying, untouchable young guards in the league (Tyrese Maxey and VJ Edgecombe). At both ends of the spectrum of trade potential, zero maneuverability.

Then the Celtics came along. They were floating Brown to anyone willing to listen (including Denver). — the 36-year-old George, two first-round picks and two second-rounders — was an astonishing package that revealed Boston’s desperation and Brown’s sparse market. It was understood that Philadelphia would need to attach at least one first-round pick, probably more, to get off George’s contract. If that accounts for the two first-rounders in the deal, then the 76ers essentially got Brown for nothing.

Whatever the analytics community thinks of his value as a supermax player, one thing Brown does is play. He’s been available for 82% of regular-season games in the past five years and hasn’t missed a playoff game during that time. The 76ers just got a durable Finals MVP who’s seven years younger than the aging star they sacrificed. They have a team that should win a lot of games next season, even if Embiid is in and out of the lineup.

Toronto’s trade to reunite with Kawhi Leonard was likewise an absolute home run. Leonard does have his injury demons, but he’s such a perfect fit with the Raptors’ current roster that he’s well worth the risk (Brandon Ingram, Gradey Dick, two firsts, two seconds). An emotionally satisfying trade for the city, and one with legitimate upside. Leonard and Scottie Barnes will be fun to watch.

Losers: Miami Heat and Milwaukee Bucks

The biggest trade of the offseason has turned out to be one of the most underwhelming. The Bucks were obviously going to be losers no matter what they got back for Giannis Antetokounmpo. Tough to feel excited about three first-round picks right after you’re forced to trade a franchise icon.

Miami, meanwhile, gave up a lot of young role players and walked away with a pretty stripped-down roster that … doesn’t seem that much better than the Milwaukee team Antetokounmpo is leaving?

Certainly, if LeBron James jumps on board, the 2026-27 iteration of the Heat will suddenly look more compelling. But this looks like an incomplete team right now, especially after losing free agent deadeye Norman Powell to Chicago. Pat Riley’s vision for the Giannis era probably involves multiple transaction cycles. Every trade deadline and offseason going forward is an opportunity to keep building out the supporting cast.

And even when that vision starts to come into everyone else’s view, there’s the question of whether Giannis and Bam Adebayo can fit together as a pair of non-shooting bigs in the modern game.

Miami can’t be called an outright loser after acquiring a top-five player in the league. But it’s not an immediate championship contender either.

Winner: The whiteboard and someone on it

Wearing a Wimbledon bucket hat, superagent Rich Paul went on his podcast Friday, rolled out a whiteboard and provided a literal illustration of his client LeBron James’ free agency options, including the perks of various potential destinations. (Steph Curry? Oil? Golf? Africa?)

As a piece of NBA content: 10 out of 10, no notes.

The whiteboard is an instant classic meme that will live on in the social media era of basketball fandom. And one of the 10 teams listed on it will eventually be rewarded with arguably the most valuable bargain in the history of NBA free agency. Depending on who you ask, James is still generally considered a top-20 or top-30 player in the league, even at 41 years old. He’s very likely to sign for less than $20 million (maybe even for the veteran minimum salary) to play with a contender.

From a basketball standpoint alone, it will be a staggeringly team-friendly deal. That’s before considering the merchandise and ticket sales, especially if James announces that his 24th season will be his last.

Someone will win big. In the meantime, James and Paul can relish being the center of attention in an NBA offseason, one last time, for old time’s sake.

Loser: Buyers being sellers

At the trade deadline in February, we wrote that one of the big winners was the trend of “sellers being buyers.” Tanking teams like Washington, Utah and Indiana collected win-now talent to stash for the next season. Now the Wizards can unleash Anthony Davis and Trae Young alongside No. 1 overall pick AJ Dybantsa and recent No. 2 pick Alex Sarr. The Jazz will play a starting lineup with Jaren Jackson Jr., Lauri Markkanen and newly drafted Darryn Peterson. The Pacers, even after losing their pick to lousy lottery luck, will add Ivica Zubac to a core that reached Game 7 of the Finals a year ago.

We’re seeing the inverse of that strategy from multiple would-be contenders this summer.

Boston’s decision to trade Brown was jarring in large part because it signaled a willingness to take a step back next season. Brown and Jayson Tatum never ended up getting a chance to play to the final buzzer of a season together after they won the championship. Tatum was out for the end of the 2025 New York series and the 2026 Philly one. Who’s to say they couldn’t have won the title in 2027 with Tatum fully recovered from his torn Achilles?

Equally fascinating is Charlotte’s decision to sell high on LaMelo Ball after the best season of his career — and his first with 50 or more games played since 2021-22. We’re not too far removed from Ball being perceived as a losing player with negative trade value. The Hornets jumped at an opportunity to get back a starter-level role player (Naz Reid), a first-rounder, three first-round swaps and three second-rounders for him. That could very well prove to be a shrewd if cold-hearted decision.

But for us neutrals, it’s a shame that nobody will ever know what would’ve happened had Charlotte decided to run it back with a starting lineup that posted a league-best 25.7 net rating from Jan. 1 through the end of last season. Ball was the engine of that offense, a brilliant playmaker with positional size and a talent for making his teammates better (when he wasn’t launching one-legged logo 3s early in the shot clock).

Just one scribe’s hunch: The Hornets will miss him. They have an abundance of shooting but not much shot creation, especially after flipping Miles Bridges for Royce O’Neale and Grayson Allen. That trade was another savvy bit of business by a front office that seems to know what it’s doing. Still, it indicates an organizational willingness to temporarily regress — and a belief that last season wasn’t real.

This approach could become more common. Trades and extensions are the new free agency in the current CBA landscape. When playoff teams get antsy under pressure to offer long-term max extensions to second-tier stars, they might simply opt to trade those players. Get something back while you can; make the contract negotiation someone else’s problem. The difference in the two situations this summer? One team sold high; another team miscalculated and thought it was.

Winner: Walker Kessler

The biggest individual winner of the offseason, and it’s not particularly close. Nothing about Kessler’s situation said “four years, $130 million, player option.” He was a restricted free agent coming off a season-ending injury. He played five games for Utah last year.

But the Lakers had cap space, and Luka Doncic wanted them to get him a shot-blocking, rim-running center to catch his alley-oops. That manufactured leverage for Kessler, who ended up in Hollywood via sign-and-trade. The Jazz made the most of it, getting back two first-round picks and two swaps — basically an added payment from Los Angeles to guarantee safe delivery of the asset, rather than dealing with the risk and suspense of an offer sheet.

Think about what those picks say: Kessler (at $32 million per year) was deemed more valuable than Jaylen Brown (at $60 million) this week. It’s an incredible career move for the 7-footer, who got paid handsomely — maybe even overpaid — and should automatically look good playing with Doncic.

An admittedly biased take from someone who covered Kessler in college: That contract isn’t as much of a reach as most NBA observers have labeled it. His job next to Luka will be simplified — roll, catch, finish — and he’s got a burgeoning jump shot that could diversify what the Lakers are able to do with him. Defensively, he’s already one of the best rim protectors in the game. (I should know. I’ve tried to score on him.)

The Lakers will attract a range of opinions for the next three months. They’ve used their cap space to overhaul their team around Doncic and Austin Reaves, despite the fact that they seemed content to move on from arguably the best player in this free agency class. Can the combination of Kessler, Quentin Grimes, Sandro Mamukelashvili and Collin Sexton raise this team’s ceiling? Or will Los Angeles remain a clear level below OKC and San Antonio?

Loser: Julius Randle (and Tim Connelly if this doesn’t work)

The way this turned out for Randle in Minnesota is pretty tough. Two years after the Knicks traded him for Karl-Anthony Towns, he watched his former team end a 53-year championship drought, then immediately got traded — not just traded, but salary-dumped — to the other team in New York that might as well not exist compared to the Knicks. He’ll get to experience the city’s joy during their victory lap next season. He just won’t get to take part in it.

Randle was excellent for the Timberwolves in the 2025 playoffs. Not so much in 2026. Getting rid of him was the means by which Minnesota acquired Ball. It was also Connelly’s way of admitting that he lost the KAT trade.

The Wolves had clearly reached their ceiling with a Randle-Rudy Gobert frontcourt, getting crushed in the Western Conference Finals two consecutive years. They felt like they had no choice but to pivot. Now they’re pretty much out of draft capital and out of methods to improve their roster around Anthony Edwards if the Ball experiment crashes and burns. No pressure.

Under-the-radar winner: Chicago Bulls. They’re under new front office management, and it shows. With a new lottery system that “relegates” the odds of the worst teams, they can’t be excessively bad next season. But they’re not trying to be a true playoff contender, either. Enter Norman Powell and Nic Claxton, two solid players on good contracts to help Chicago have an identity in the first year of Caleb Wilson’s career. Poaching coach Tiago Splitter from Portland was a nice touch. Nothing extravagant this summer, but smart moves and a sense of direction.

Under-the-radar loser: Detroit Pistons. Until further notice. Patience at the trade deadline last season was one thing. The No. 1 seed in the East was comfortable with the likelihood that its flaws would be exposed in the playoffs. They were. So now … still nothing. Running it back with Jalen Duren on a more expensive contract and swapping out Tobias Harris for John Collins isn’t going to cut it. The East will be too good. It’s time for the Pistons to go get a secondary scorer.

At least, that’s what Rich Paul’s visual aid suggests.

James is indeed considering the Nuggets as a potential free agency destination, his longtime friend and agent said on “,” a podcast that Paul hosts with Max Kellerman.

As a discussion guide for the show’s LeBron segment Friday, with James’ name at the center and 10 teams orbiting it. Five of those teams were scribbled on the outer edges of the board: New York, San Antonio, Dallas, Boston and Golden State, the last of which caused Kellerman to wonder aloud if Paul was trying to throw people off the scent. The Warriors have been widely considered one of the favorites to land James for his 24th season.

Then there were the five teams closest to James’ name, expressed as quartets — the projected starting lineups that LeBron would hypothetically be joining.

Cleveland, Philadelphia, Miami, Minnesota, Denver.

“Is Denver actually a legitimate destination?” Kellerman asked.

“It wouldn’t be on the board (if it wasn’t),” Paul replied.

The four players listed to represent Denver were Jamal Murray, Cam Johnson, Aaron Gordon and Nikola Jokic — a decision almost as curious as the one to relegate Golden State to the exterior. Notably absent was Peyton Watson, a restricted free agent who is also Paul’s client. The Nuggets entered this offseason prepared to trade at least one starter (with Johnson seen as the most likely candidate) to help them re-sign Watson, wanting to signal that he was their top priority.

No such trade has materialized two days into free agency, and no contract agreement has been reached with Watson yet.

That Denver has seemingly taken a step back on the trade front, at least for the moment, can ironically be interpreted as an aggressive stance. The Nuggets aren’t required by rule to clear out any salary to make room for a new Watson contract. They have Watson’s full Bird rights, having drafted and developed him over the last four years. They can spend as lavishly as they want to keep him — even into the second apron. It’s just that NBA owners, including the Kroenkes, have shown a tendency to treat the second apron as a self-imposed hard cap.

The Nuggets are projected to be a second apron team if they re-sign Watson and don’t cut any other salary. They would also be paying repeater tax penalties.

But in a crowded field of LeBron suitors, perhaps that’s the best way to stand out as a committed championship contender. For now, Paul’s omission of Watson on the whiteboard reads as a leverage play.

“They’ve got one big hurdle,” he said of the Nuggets’ offseason, referring to Watson.

The Denver Post first reported on Wednesday that the Nuggets had contacted James to show interest in the 41-year-old forward, who’s nearing the end of a legendary career. Paul’s whiteboard confirms that the interest is mutual, even if Denver isn’t the frontrunner. He has said that James is willing to sign a low-cost deal and that his decision will be based on “happiness.”

The superagent also wrote the name “Kroenke” on the board, referencing James’ friendship with Nuggets president Josh Kroenke, then taking note of owner Stan Kroenke’s recent track record of winning championships in various sports leagues.

The four players listed for Cleveland were Donovan Mitchell, James Harden, Evan Mobley and Jarrett Allen.

For Miami: Davion Mitchell, Andrew Wiggins, Giannis Antetokounmpo and Bam Adebayo.

For Philadelphia: Tyrese Maxey, VJ Edgecombe, newly acquired Jaylen Brown and Joel Embiid.

For Minnesota: Anthony Edwards, LaMelo Ball, Jaden McDaniels and Rudy Gobert.

So when it mattered most last season, he trusted Tyus Jones.

The Nuggets are re-signing the veteran point guard to a new one-year deal in NBA free agency, a league source told The Denver Post on Thursday afternoon.

They first acquired Jones off the buyout market in March. He played in only 11 regular season games for Denver, but when the team was facing elimination in the first round of the playoffs, Adelman turned to him for rotation minutes in Games 5 and 6 against Minnesota. Jones, whose claim to fame is his record assist-to-turnover ratio, was able to bring the ball up the floor safely against pressure and set up the Nuggets’ offense in those games.

He was a forgotten bright spot in their season-ending loss, a plus-five in 12 minutes.

“I just felt like we got Tyus for his ball-handling,” Adelman said during the series. “He’s a point guard. And I think in this series, with the pressure, he allowed Jamal (Murray) to get off the ball a little bit more.”

Like the acquisition of Marvin Bagley III, this will be a veteran minimum signing. Jones will carry a $2.45 million cap hit.

This will be his 12th season in the NBA. The Nuggets declined Jalen Pickett’s fourth-year team option earlier this week in a move that signaled where their trust resides on the point guard depth chart. Adelman and Denver’s lead executives have continued to emphasize the importance of adding ball-handlers to the roster this summer.

Jones, they hope, will be a dependable floor general off the bench, whether he ends up slotting in as a second- or third-string point guard.

He ended up in Denver by mistake. After getting traded from Orlando to Charlotte to Dallas in a matter of days before the mid-season trade deadline in February, he recovered from the whiplash and began to settle into a starting role with the Mavericks. They were a lottery team with more playing time available. He was “planning on sticking around and trying to make that work and figure it out,” he eventually told The Post.

Then the Mavericks changed their plans, waiving Jones so they could convert Ryan Nembhard from a two-way contract. That left Jones in search of a playoff contender to join. The Nuggets had been targeting forwards on the buyout market, but Jones’ reputation as a low-mistake, high-IQ ball-handler was appealing to them, according to league sources. His 5.47 assist-to-turnover ratio is the best in league history.

“I wanted to see if I could get somewhere else and try to make a run in the playoffs, try to play some meaningful basketball. … Playoff teams where I felt like I could make an impact and help, whatever area that they need me,” Jones told The Post after he first signed in Denver. “Whether it’s vocal in the locker room, or just being a connector. Whether it’s on the court, setting guys up, making plays, knocking shots down. Whatever the case may be, I’m ready to step into that role. If it changes night to night, I’m cool with that. I just want to help contribute to winning. … Nothing is set in stone. (My job is) just being a pro. Being ready to go on a night to night basis. Some nights your name’s gonna be called. Some nights, it’s not.”

The Nuggets are signing Marvin Bagley III to a one-year veteran minimum contract, league sources told The Denver Post late Wednesday night, in their first roster addition of the 2026 offseason.

Bagley, 27, will earn around $3.5 million but carry a $2.45 million cap hit. A player’s minimum salary increases with his service time in the league, but the amount of his salary that counts against the cap remains the same, as not to incentivize teams to overlook more experienced free agents.

This will be Bagley’s ninth year. He has changed teams at the trade deadline in three consecutive seasons and four of the last five, most recently going from Washington to Dallas in the Anthony Davis trade this February.

The 6-foot-10 big man is Denver’s newest backup center option, another soldier in the perennial fight for survival that is Nikola Jokic’s time on the bench. The Nuggets traded for Jonas Valanciunas last summer, trying an ambitious strategy by paying $10.4 million to a second-string center who had started for most of his career.

It worked smoothly for most of the regular season — Denver’s net rating without Jokic was minus-2.9, a marked improvement from minus-9.3 the previous year — but Valanciunas nonetheless faded mostly out of the rotation by the playoffs.

And so the Nuggets have seemingly decided to allocate less money toward the position next season, barring any other unexpected acquisitions. All signs point to Valanciunas not returning: He has $2 million guaranteed out of a $10 million expiring salary, and the Nuggets can avoid the other $8 million by trading or waiving him by July 9. The 34-year-old Lithuanian center has reportedly received EuroLeague interest for the second consecutive summer.

Bagley joins DaRon Holmes II, Zeke Nnaji and newly drafted Trevon Brazille as the biggest players on Denver’s bench. He could also provide depth at power forward, where Aaron Gordon seems to be a perpetual injury risk. Bagley averaged 10.5 points and 6.1 rebounds in 20 minutes per game last season, appearing in 60 games between the Wizards and Mavericks. He’s also played for Memphis, Detroit and Sacramento.

The Kings drafted him with the second overall pick in 2018, a decision that became notorious because Luka Doncic was taken with the next pick. Bagley has been widely viewed as a bust by comparison. But his athleticism, rim-running and paint scoring are traits that have persisted throughout a journeyman career. He was able to catch and finish efficiently around the basket late last season in Dallas, where he had four 20-point games and three double-doubles.

If the Nuggets want to play him alongside Jokic at all, he could slot in as an effective dunker spot option.

Whether Bagley can be a dependable playoff option in Denver is unclear. He has appeared in two playoff games for his career, both in 2025 for the Grizzlies. The former Duke star amassed 17 points on a perfect 8-for-8 shooting performance in one of those games; he went scoreless in 11 minutes in the other.

The Nuggets have made the most of their veteran minimum signings in recent years, though primarily in the backcourt with acquisitions such as Tim Hardaway Jr. and Russell Westbrook. DeAndre Jordan was their most recent backup big on a minimum deal.

Nuggets have contacted LeBron James in free agency, source says

— meaning a $100 bet would win $700 — that James will be playing his first regular-season minute in the 2026-27 season with the Nuggets. Denver has the fourth-best odds to land the league's all-time leading scorer.

As of Wednesday afternoon, the Warriors and Cavaliers are tied as the favorites at +140, just ahead of the Miami Heat at +450. The Nuggets are followed by the 76ers (+1,200), Timberwolves (+1,500), Lakers (+2,500) and Wizards (+3,000).

James, 41, averaged 20.9 points, 6.1 rebounds, and 7.2 assists for the Lakers last season. Over his 23-year career, he has been part of four championship teams, named to 22 all-star teams, and named league MVP four times.

ESPN’s Shams Charania reported on Tuesday that James will join a new team this offseason, ending an eight-year stint with the Lakers highlighted by a championship in 2020. The NBA’s free agency moratorium began Tuesday evening, with teams officially allowed to contact and negotiate with players.

Cleveland, Golden State, Miami and Minnesota are also among the teams reportedly showing interest in James, who’s entering his 24th season of professional basketball at 41 years old.

The Nuggets have tried to recruit him in free agency before. Team president Josh Kroenke mailed him a throwback Nuggets jersey in 2018 before James signed with the Lakers. He has described Kroenke as a “very dear friend.”

When the Lakers visited Denver in January, James strayed from his team’s huddle to hug Nuggets center Nikola Jokic during a stoppage in play. Jokic was in street clothes, sidelined by a knee injury at the time. It’s the most recent example in a long history mutual admiration between the two superstars, who have seven combined MVP trophies. They’ve played three playoff series against each other this decade, including twice in the Western Conference Finals.

“It����ap the utmost respect,” James said after the game in January. “I mean, for the greats of the game, for the greats of today, the greats of the past, the greats that come after. Jokic is one of the greatest players to ever play this game.”

The connections between Denver and James don’t end there. Jokic’s Serbian agent, Misko Raznatovic, posted a photo to Instagram of him and LeBron on a boat last summer, captioned: “The summer of 2025 is the perfect time to make big plans for the fall of 2026!” Nuggets lead assistant coach Jared Dudley is a former teammate and noted confidant of James.

Still, the Nuggets could be fighting an uphill battle in the chase for an all-time great. His hometown Cavaliers are fresh off an Eastern Conference Finals run. Another one of his former teams, the Heat, recently acquired Giannis Antetokounmpo. And the Warriors can offer him an opportunity to team up with his longtime adversary and friend Steph Curry — they co-starred for Team USA two summers ago under coach Steve Kerr, who also coaches Golden State.

Even former Nuggets executive Tim Connelly, whose Timberwolves thwarted Denver in the playoffs, looms with an opening at power forward in an otherwise talented started lineup.

Wherever James ends up, his decision will driven by “happiness,” according to Charania, not money.

The Nuggets can make a compelling pitch. The championship pedigree of their core is well established — they’re a safe bet for anyone who wants to compete in the playoffs. James and Jokic are widely regarded as two of the smartest players in the history of the sport. Their chemistry would be compelling to watch and difficult to doubt. Denver plays a style of basketball that gets everybody on the floor involved, but with Jokic and Jamal Murray, James also wouldn’t be over-burdened with scoring responsibility. He is, after all, old enough to have a son in the NBA.

The Nuggets are currently projected as a second apron team with raises taking effect for Aaron Gordon and Christian Braun next season, which has led to rampant trade speculation about their starting lineup. (Kroenke’s comment that “everything is on the table” except for trading Jokic has certainly contributed to the rumor mill.)

Indeed, co-general managers Jon Wallace and Ben Tenzer have been active on the trade market so far this offseason. But 24 hours into free agency, no Nuggets transactions had been completed yet. Will James be more motivated to consider their advances if they decide to keep the band together and deal with the apron penalties? Or is Denver more likely to entice him with aggressive attempts to improve the roster via trade?

There’s also the unanswered question of Peyton Watson’s future. Nuggets team sources reiterated to The Post recently that re-signing the 23-year-old restricted free agent is their top offseason priority. Watson, coincidentally, changed representation last November as he prepared for contract negotiations. He’s now represented by Klutch Sports, the agency founded by LeBron’s agent and longtime friend Rich Paul.

Don’t get me wrong. Dream big or go home, right? King James and Nikola Jokic would destroy at least 60 rims during the regular season and break the Internet roughly 50 times a night. They could serve as the second and third estates to check/balance David Adelman’s executive branch. They’d eat up the first 17 minutes of any given “SportsCenter,” all by themselves. They’d be the best thing for Denver hoops and the worst thing for America’s “caps lock” buttons.

There’s just one problem with the idea of free agent LeBron James, one of the best three or four players ever, calling the Mile High City home at age 41.

The Nuggets probably can’t afford him.

They reportedly hit July sitting at about $12 million above the NBA’s first cap apron Which means if the King wants to sign a veteran minimum deal in order to play with Jokic, welcome aboard.

Frankly, it’s hard to see Nuggets boss Josh Kroenke pulling that kind of sales job off in this economy. For one thing, pegs LeBron to be If James plays more than 72 games, that estimate creeps into the $30-million-per-year ballpark.

That’s Peyton Watson-level money, allegedly. Which we’ll circle back to in a second.

The Russell Westbrook Experience was fun, or maddening, depending on which fan you ask. But Beastbrook agreed to a two-year contract worth an average of $3.39 million to live the Hard Nuggs Life. Hardaway Jr. took a $2.296 million flyer last summer on a one-year, here-for-the-ring fling.

Miami on Tuesday night basically tripled that number ($6.5 million), and the Nuggets let Tim and his career-high 224 3-pointers from last season walk out the door. Just like that. Meanwhile, Zeke Naji is slated to carry a $7.47-million cap hit next season. No wonder Nuggets faithful so often feel like walking to the nearest brick wall and bashing their foreheads against it for fun.

Nobody deserves those kinds of headaches, time and again. You’d hope Hardaway’s exit is the first sign that the Nuggets’ front office is ready to dig deep to match any offer for Denver’s restricted free agent wing, Peyton Watson, whose January scoring raised his market price and whose April absence raised some eyebrows.

Given Watson’s Los Angeles roots (Long Beach Polytechnic High School, then UCLA), it wasn’t a coincidence that SoCal’s two NBA franchises were the ones who kicked off the first few hours of free agency Tuesday by opening up oodles of cap space to shop with. The Clippers swapped Kawhi Leonard and his $50.3-million cap number to Toronto, while James announced that he was leaving the Lakers, reportedly opening up $51-52 million of cap room for the latter.

Watson can chase the highest bidder, but the Nuggets can match any offer. Is Watson worth $25 million per season if Christian Braun, who landed the extension last summer that P-Swat wanted, is worth $21.55 million to the Kroenkes? Sure. Is Watson worth $30 million, which puts him closer to Aaron Gordon’s ballpark ($31.97 million)? Probably not.

KSE’s first priority should be retaining Watson, who’s young, long, athletic, a rangy defender whose offensive game is finally matching the rest of his skill set. But should that fail, or the competing offers get absurd, then the second goal has to be making sure that Watson doesn’t walk out the door for nothing. The sign-and-trade option shouldn’t be a first resort, but it has to be somewhere within arm’s reach. The Clippers, however, reportedly own five over that same span.

Run it back and you’re The ill-fated Nuggets-Timberwolves series taught us that the franchise still had at least four more things under the hood that needed fixing:

• To get younger and more athletic.
• To get tougher. To find someone else to go after Jaden McDaniels.
• To play better defense.
• To have more adults on the bench who can counsel Adelman in the postseason.

King James ticks three of those four boxes, even as the legend’s 42nd birthday looms in December. Mind you, Gordon largely checks off the same ones, and he’s already on the payroll. For now.

Hardaway, 34, spent one season with the Nuggets on a veteran minimum deal. He averaged 13.5 points off the bench on 40.7% perimeter shooting, helping Denver lead the league in 3-point efficiency. The 6-foot-5 guard played 80 games and finished third place for NBA Sixth Man of the Year. He made the second-most 3s ever for a Nuggets player in a single season (224), trailing only Jamal Murray — who amassed 245 the same year.

The Nuggets had to Hardaway because they hadn’t rostered him for three seasons, limiting their ability to compete with other offers like Miami’s. The free agency moratorium began Tuesday evening (4 p.m. MT), with Hardaway at the top of the Heat’s priority list. Due to CBA restraints, the Nuggets will need to be largely dependent on veteran minimum signings this week as they fill out their roster.

“I think it����ap the best contract in the league right now,” Aaron Gordon said in April when discussing Hardaway’s vet minimum.

When asked about his rationale for signing with Denver at training camp last September, Hardaway told The Denver Post he hadn’t considered that players tend to get paid more after playing alongside Nikola Jokic.

“I didn’t even think about that until you asked me that question,” he told The Post at the time, laughing. “I wasn’t even thinking about that. I mean, I knew coming here and playing with Jok, Jamal (Murray) and AG (would be good for me). Being on an opposing team, you get tired of guarding that stuff. You get tired of guarding backdoors, back screens, slips. And then you’ve got a big like that who’s throwing the ball any type of way right on the numbers. That’s what I was looking at more so than making a bag.”

The Heat will be Hardaway’s sixth team. He becomes the first player to be teammates with Jokic, Luka Doncic and Giannis Antetokounmpo, three of the biggest stars of the 2020s. He has also crossed paths with Dirk Nowitzki, Carmelo Anthony, Dwight Howard, Jalen Brunson and Kyrie Irving over the course of his 13-year career.

By suiting up for Miami, Hardaway follows in his father’s footsteps. Tim Hardaway Sr. made three All-NBA teams with the Heat in the 1990s.

As of late Tuesday, the Nuggets had nine players under contract (not including their own free agents, such as Peyton Watson and Bruce Brown). They have at least $203.4 million in guaranteed salary committed to those nine players, making them a luxury tax-paying team already with six more open roster spots.

Hardaway joins Jalen Pickett, whose $2.4 million team option was declined on Monday, as players from the 2025-26 team who won’t return next season.

Former Nuggets general manager Calvin Booth drafted Pickett with the 32nd overall pick in 2023. The 6-foot-2 reserve combo guard has struggled to break into Denver’s everyday rotation throughout his first three years in the league.

His $2.41 million salary next season would’ve offered the Nuggets a sliver of cap relief, but they chose instead to move on from the former Penn State star, seeking a fresh slate of point guard depth. Monday was the deadline to make a decision on his option.

Pickett, 26, will be a free agent for the first time in his career. He averaged 5.2 points, 2.3 rebounds and 2.3 assists in 16.1 minutes per game last season. He appeared in 50 games, highlighted by a career-high 29-point, seven-assist performance in January to lead the Nuggets in an upset over Philadelphia without their entire starting lineup.

Pickett is shooting 38.7% from 3-point range on two attempts per game in his first three years. He also boasts a sturdy 3.63 career assist-to-turnover ratio.

But he’s remained a deep bench option under two different head coaches in Denver, from Michael Malone to David Adelman. Booth was fired in April 2025. Then, new co-general managers Jon Wallace and Ben Tenzer signed veteran point guard Tyus Jones off the buyout market late last season when the Nuggets wanted ball-handling depth. Jones received playoff minutes over Pickett during their first-round series against the Timberwolves.

Qualifying offers

The Nuggets extended qualifying offers to Peyton Watson and Spencer Jones on Monday — a formality that ensures they’ll become restricted free agents on Tuesday.

Watson’s qualifying offer was $6.5 million. Jones’ offer was the minimum. Wallace and Tenzer have indicated that Denver is hopeful it can retain both players. The incumbent team will have the right to match any offer sheet a restricted free agent receives from an outside team.

Watson is regarded as one of the top free agents on the market, restricted or otherwise. The Lakers, Bulls and Nets were projected to be the three main cap space teams with the ability to throw a big offer at Watson coming into the offseason, but the Clippers have emerged now as another potential suitor. They’ve been shedding salary in recent days and clearing out cap space, including $16 million Monday when they declined Bogdan Bogdanovic’s team option. Bogdanovic, according to a league source, will be a Nuggets target in unrestricted free agency.

That would be Celtics wing Jaylen Brown, who has emerged as a trade candidate over the last week since Boston’s unsuccessful attempt to offer him to Milwaukee for Antetokounmpo. The Bucks ultimately chose Miami’s more robust package, leaving Boston with an awkward dilemma.

Brown led the Celtics to 56 wins and the No. 2 seed in the East while co-star Jayson Tatum was rehabbing from an Achilles injury last season, only for them to lose in the first round of the playoffs to seventh-seeded Philadelphia. The disappointing result had already sparked a wave of uncertainty about the future of Boston’s core — a situation reminiscent of the Nuggets’ crossroads after their own shocking first-round exit.

Both teams rode their star duos to championships this decade, and both have regressed in the years since.

The Nuggets have registered mild interest in Brown, having internally discussed whether they would have a realistic chance to acquire the All-NBA swingman if they were to actively pursue him, as NBA insiders Marc Stein and Jake Fischer first reported over the weekend.

But all indications, for now at least, are that no such pursuit is likely to occur. Multiple team sources relayed early this week that their reported interest in Brown has been overstated. And two other league sources who spoke to The Denver Post were highly skeptical that the Nuggets would be able to complete a deal for the 2024 Finals MVP. Boston reportedly wants up to four first-round draft picks for Brown. While that’s widely viewed as an unreasonable asking price — Milwaukee got three back in the Antetokounmpo deal — the Nuggets don’t have first-rounders available to trade.

Lead executives Jon Wallace and Ben Tenzer made it a priority to replenish their depleted asset pool when they traded out of the first round of the NBA Draft last week. Where does that leave them? With three second-round picks once the new league year begins in July, plus .

That’s all to say that Brown’s market would need to continue to dry up, or Boston’s priorities would need to shift away from a picks-based package, for the Nuggets to truly have a chance to pounce. Even then, there’s no certainty they would make an aggressive push.

What would a trade look like?

Even if nothing comes of the recent smoke, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that Denver has contemplated a player of Brown’s pedigree. When a sixth-place MVP finisher becomes available, it’s due diligence. Kevin Durant was discussed internally last year before Phoenix traded him to Houston, team sources told The Post at the time.

So what would a Nuggets package look like? And would Brown meaningfully improve their roster? If these questions are worth exploring inside the front office, then they certainly are outside the walls of Ball Arena as well, as Brown represents the most dramatic roster-building avenue hypothetically available to the Nuggets at this point.

As The Post reported in April, Cam Johnson has long been considered the most likely Nuggets starter to be traded this offseason due to his expiring contract, though multiple key players could be on the move this week. Johnson and Christian Braun have been the front office’s primary focus amid efforts to reconfigure Nikola Jokic’s supporting cast — and shed enough salary to ward off Peyton Watson’s suitors in restricted free agency.

The Nuggets have been far more reluctant to include franchise cornerstones Aaron Gordon and Jamal Murray in trade conversations, league and team sources have told The Post — ready to listen, not so much to shop them, . But there have also been plenty of murmurs around the league speculating about Denver’s willingness to consider a large-scale roster overhaul.

Brown is on a supermax contract, with a $57.1 million cap hit next season that makes him the seventh-highest-paid player in the league. The Nuggets could aggregate several smaller contracts to match salary in theory, but if they acquired Brown without including Jamal Murray in the outgoing package, they would have three players occupying 100.7% of the salary cap — $166.2 million in combined 2026-27 salary.

Just one month ago, team president Josh Kroenke was reflecting on Denver’s rationale for trading Michael Porter Jr. when he said: “We had to take a hard look at where we had committed ourselves from a salary standpoint, and understanding that having three max players was probably not something that was gonna be continuous for us going forward. … That was something we felt the organization needed to do to maintain a roster going forward, to establish more depth.”

Consider it unlikely, then, that Denver would trade for Brown without Murray’s $50.1 million salary going the other direction. Building out a deep rotation would become immensely challenging, even if Wallace and Tenzer get a green light from ownership to spend over the $199 million luxury tax line.

This leads to the delicate dynamic of a trade rumor like this: Murray. He’s an all-time Denver sports great, a surly but selfless star who speaks lovingly of his basketball bond with Jokic. He helped the Nuggets win their first championship. They would never take the possibility of trading him lightly, and the last thing they want to do is make the same mistake Boston just made with Brown — alienating a longtime star by offering him in a trade and failing to complete the deal.

If the Nuggets ever have plans of escalating trade talks involving Murray, they must be careful not to misread the situation.

Would the Celtics bite at the opportunity to upgrade their backcourt with a newly minted All-NBA point guard? Keeping in mind that Denver ideally wants to shed salary, there would probably need to be supplementary pieces involved, likely hard-capping both teams at the second apron.

For example, Murray and Johnson for Brown and a cheap role player of the Nuggets’ choosing — let’s just say Baylor Scheierman — would be allowed under the league’s trade rules, netting a $13.3 million salary reduction for Denver. Murray and Gordon for Brown and Sam Hauser would result in a $14.2 million reduction.

Obviously, if this is a two-team hypothetical trade, Boston would have to be comfortable with eschewing first-round draft compensation in order to land a player of Murray’s caliber.

It would obviously be a bold move from both sides, a swap of home-grown stars signaling belief that both the Jokic-Murray and Tatum-Brown partnerships have gone stale.

Murray and Brown are a strangely fitting trade match, in many ways. They’re three months apart in age, so neither team would be disadvantaged in that regard. They were drafted four picks apart in 2016 — Brown third overall, Murray seventh. They’ve enjoyed arguably the two best pro careers in that class. They both have three years remaining on their current contracts, with no player or team options.

For Boston, it would be a different look for Tatum: a skilled guard who initiate the offense and create, who can play off the ball and hit 3s at a blistering rate, who’s unusually accustomed to screening for a bigger ball-handler in inverted pick-and-rolls. The Celtics love to play the math game. Murray was the most efficient high-volume 3-point shooter in the sport last season, 43.5% on 7.5 attempts per game.

Then again, there’s this recent quote from Celtics president of basketball ops Brad Stevens: “One of the things that we’ve gotta figure out is how to have more of an impact at the rim, and I think we do need to add to our team to do that.” That’s as much of a sign as any from Denver that this (hypothetical!) trade probably doesn’t have legs.

For the Nuggets, it would be a sacrifice of unparalleled pick-and-roll chemistry in exchange for a secondary star who can defend at a way higher level than Murray. (Brown proudly touts himself as the best two-way player in the league right now.) For years, the Nuggets have had to contend with opponents’ desire to put their two best players in every action. Jokic and Murray have dazzled offensively and stumbled around in the dark defensively. Brown was responsible for guarding Luka Doncic in the NBA Finals two years ago. He has switchable size and a chip on his shoulder to uphold his self-appointed label.

It would be a fascinating stylistic experiment. Brown’s playmaking ability has improved over the years, but his instinct is generally to use a ball screen to hunt a mismatch in isolation, as opposed to Murray’s bob-and-weave deployment of Jokic in the two-man game. The Nuggets would also desperately need to make other moves to find a new point guard; one league source doubted that a Jokic-Brown-Gordon frontcourt would mesh well without a table-setter.

Brown’s shot selection was more midrange-heavy than Murray’s last season, with 23.7% of his total field goal attempts classified as midrange by NBA tracking data. He’s a bona fide tough shot maker, but the burden of efficiency is heavy when taking what’s considered a low-percentage shot. Murray took 19.6% of his shots from that range last season, as the Nuggets were encouraged by his uptick in 3-point attempts.

Brown’s shot selection was also more paint-heavy — 50.1% of his attempts were in the lane and 22.4% were in the restricted area, compared to 39% and 17.1% for Murray. The Nuggets know they need more rim pressure off the dribble. Murray is a more skilled ball-handler than Brown, but Brown uses athleticism and physicality better to get downhill.

Jokic’s ability to draw double-teams — and his eagerness to pass out of them — would open up a lot of driving angles and attacking opportunities for Brown, who has a strong appetite for the ball. In Denver, he would be a clearer No. 2 on the roster hierarchy than he was before, but he’d be playing alongside a primary option whose first instinct would be to help him score a ton of points.

The list of pros and cons goes on from there. Brown gets to the foul line at a better frequency than Murray. Murray has a higher assist rate and lower turnover rate than Brown. Brown has proven he’s a winning player, given that his crowning achievement was a playoff trophy — but there’s also that whole pesky war on analytics that he’s been waging online. Should Denver be concerned that Boston routinely has a better net rating when he isn’t on the floor? Or that Brown has been so easily provoked by such an obviously silly discourse? (This all started with a quote that the entire basketball community knows is ridiculous, suggesting Brown is the seventh-best player on a team.)

In Murray, the Nuggets have a known entity on the court and a buy-in they trust behind the scenes. The risk factor in trading him would be considerable. The ripple effects on Denver’s roster and system would be substantial.

It would be an arrangement born of two teams in a similar predicament, trying to figure out which cards to play next in an era of parity that����ap threatening to leave them in the dust.

Or maybe this is nothing, and one of the longest-standing active tandems in the NBA will live to fight another day together. Even if Boston’s doesn’t.