Just a few weeks ago, it seemed as though the Oklahoma City Thunder would forgo extensions with their three eligible players—Victor Oladipo, Steven Adams and Andre Roberson—as part of a plan to position themselves as a free-agent player in 2017.
By late Monday evening, Adams and Oladipo had agreed to long-term deals through the 2020-21 season, according to Adrian Wojnarowski and Shams Charania of The Vertical, respectively. Less than 24 hours later, the Thunder traded forward Ersan Ilyasova to the Philadelphia 76ers for Jerami Grant, as Wojnarowski first reported.
What changed?
This spree gives clues as to what the Thunder will do going forward.
In early October, I wrote about a conceivable path for Oklahoma City to create maximum salary-cap space next summer. Under current salary-cap rules, the Thunder could have leveraged relatively low cap holds on their trio, offloaded other salary onto another under-the-cap team and potentially carved out at least $30 million in space. They could have then re-signed their players as restric ...
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Article written by Jon Hamm