LeBron James and Charles Barkley have some serious beef, and after Dwyane Wade had his former teammate’s back, J.R. Smith is following suit.
Barkley shredded James during a TNT segment last week. After James’ public statement on his teams’ need for playmakers last week, Barkley said the ordeal was “Whiny. Inappropriate. All the above.”
“I don’t want to put a precise timeline on it, but it’s inevitable at some point that we’ll start looking at the growth of franchises. That’s always been the case in this league, and Seattle will no doubt be on a short list of cities we’ll look at,” the NBA commissioner said.
Silver went on to say expansion is more a matter of “when” than “if” at this moment.
The NBA has not expanded since 1995 when the league added the Grizzlies and the Raptors (though the Pelicans are considered an expansion team now).
“I think it’s just a question of when the right time is to seriously start thinking about expansion,” Silver said.
Until that happens, Supersonics’ alums will continue to try to get a team back to their city just like Allen doing right now.
They’ve been connected to a few impact bats — that’s probably their biggest need, by a hair — but will Girsch’s first move as GM really be as big as trading for a Marlins outfielder? Both Marcel Ozuna and Christian Yelich would be available for the right price, but the pending sale of that franchise complicates things. Slugger Giancarlo Stanton would probably be available, too, but he’s owed approximately $2 billion over the rest of his contract, which really complicates any deal.
Let’s look back at DeWitt’s quote from earlier in this column, about investing. He specifically talks about turning a short-term asset into a long-term asset, and it doesn’t take an advanced degree in reading tea leaves to figure out that references guys ready to hit the free-agent market soon.