The Gary Trent Jr. Investigation Could DESTROY the Franchise

I gotta be honest, and I'm almost embarrassed that this story kind of fell off my radar over the last couple of months because we are still kind of picking up the pieces from the historic punishment that the NBA handed down to the LA Clippers for cap circumvention, but they are not the only cap circumvention investigation.

That the NBA is conducting.

Uh, the situation involving Gary Trent Jr.

is still very much a front burner issue, uh, for the NBA.

If you remember, Gary Trent Junior had a couple of kind of middling seasons with Milwaukee, uh, one bad one a year ago, uh, and the Bucks turned around and gave him a 4-year, $64 million dollar contract, which was crazy cause they did it late, I think in the cycle and To my knowledge, there's really no market for Gary Trent and the, you know, the the, the supposition that people are going with is that , hey, Gary Trent took short-term contracts from the Bucks, cheaper, signed there, play with Giannis, play with Dame, and this is him being rewarded on the back end.

A very Joe Smithian type of uh situation, potentially developing.

In Milwaukee.

It was, I gotta wanna credit Brian Winters kind of brought it back to the surface saying that he expects the penalty to be severe for the Milwaukee Bucks.

You worked in front offices, you know how this, this goes .

Um, you know, the NBA kind of put the, laid the blueprint here for what the penalties can be for cap circumvention.

How likely do you think it is that the, the Bucks get hit with something similar for what happened with Gary Trent?

So I'm gonna reference the executives I speak to on this one, because they're the ones with the most knowledge right now, and they're expecting, I mean, to them, this is one of the most obvious cap circumvention sample examples of practically all time.

Uh there was no potential way for the, I'm speaking from the executives I've spoken to.

There's no way that you could possibly explain or justify that contract.

It, it just.

And I, and you can go through every reason, the, the apron system that they're in, who else was getting deals, and then just the players themselves, like, I, it just, and then on top of that, they're not even playing him this year, he's, he's not playing.

To me, that starts wondering in my head, is that like, If they were gonna force him to play, I wonder if, like, at some point, Taylor Jenkin's like, I don't want to be part of this, you know, type thing, like, I don't want to be complicit in in playing him now or being part of this just because, like, I'm playing the the the guys that should be playing.

Um, no, it's bad, it's, it's really bad.

So my question to you would be, if we're talking similar.

At what point do you say the player themselves, and the impact of this player, and the deceit that went into it matters?

Because like, the aspiration situation was so deceitful.

And we're talking about Kawhi Leonard and the, the things that they had to do to make it work and, and just the level elaborate, that was elaborate.

It was elaborate more conventional cap circle, yeah, and it was almost like they almost, not so bad, they almost kind of made a mockery of the, of the, like, once it once it kind of got public, like the Clippers were fighting so hard back about it, whatever.

This one is just so surface level and it's about Gary Trent.

I I.

I doubt it's, maybe this is me just assuming, if a punishment were to come, I doubt it's gonna be the same level of the Clippers, because I think the Clippers needed to be like a a real example of like, come on.

At the same token.

If they do punish the Milwaukee Bucks, it's gonna be one of the more, like, there's the evidence is so strong that there's just no way around it, because people were still kind of wondering about the the Kawhi situation, there's some question marks, who was involved, who knew, blah blah blah.

This one.

Yeah, you know, it's kind of straight up.

So, they only have so many assets.

Milwaukee's given away their assets.

They're kind of similar to the Clippers in that vein.

Um, so it's the 2030, 20931, 2932, that's the area you're looking again.

It's just, it's, it's, it's kind of hard to really think about how bad it could get in Milwaukee for the state that they're in, plus taking away assets.

It's, it's terrifying.

See, and, and I don't have any, any particular um insight into what the NBA is gonna do.

But I've also talked to people that have said to me, and I'm guessing you probably heard the same, it's like, hey, if it's good for the goose, good for the gander.

Like if it's, if you did this to the Minnesota Timberwolves two decades ago, and you did this to the LA Clippers two months ago.

Um, how are you going to let the Bucks off the hook if you've got them dead to rights, and it sure seems like unless there's some explanation I don't know about that they've got them dead to rights here.

I mean, Gary Trent is not worth $16 million per year.

He was not when this deal was signed, uh, back in July.

So Chris, the people just, just once like.

If he had gone to a 1 year $16 million dollar deal, people would have thought cap circumvention.

That that's how bad it is.

They gave 4 years.

If it was a 1 year $16 million people would have been like, all right, something's up, we need to investigate.

So please go on.

No, it, I, I just, I, I, I feel like people believe, or at least that they think it should, this is how it should play out, that if you're gonna do, you can't like.

You can't separate like level of player or you can't separate um layers of deceit, you know, elaborate deceitfulness.

Um, if it's cap circumvention, and this is a, this is more like Joe Smith as we talked about.

Joe Smith signs short-term contracts in Minnesota, winds up signing, um, or, I don't know how, I forget how it all kind of played up.

He was gonna sign a, a long-term deal there to make more money, to circumvent the cap.

This is kind of like that.

There's no aspiration here.

There's no You know, uh, sponsorship deals he didn't do, uh, but it's traditional cap circumvention.

There are people I've talked to that are saying like, hey, if you did it for these guys, you gotta do the same thing for them.

If it does go that route, like, You asked like kind of how low it could get.

It's like Chernobyl.

Like Milwaukee becomes basketball Chernobyl.

Like who are they building around?

Like who are the young pieces on that team, Grant, that you're excited about?

Like they got some of the guys.

I like Braden Burry.

I actually am a big fan of Braden Burry's.

So is that, am I allowed to now, now you're, now your glass half, you're half full, half full right there.

OK, I like Brandon Burry's, but you got Tyler Hero who is on an expiring contract, Miles Turner, who nobody seems to want, um.

Yeah, because showing you she is a good potential prospect, um, you know , uh, Brian Rawlins, Brian Rollins, you got where and AJ Green I like as a, as a rotational piece, but yeah, I, I hear what you're saying for sure.

But it's Chernobyl.

It is basketball Chernobyl.

Like you lose a bunch of draft picks.

You have, you may presumably your GM, you know, suffers some kind of punishment as a result for it.

Um, I don't know what I mean, again, this is one of those things where I don't know what the blast radius would be like.

You know, before, like we were so locked in on the Clippers grant.

Like we were like, all right, it's, is it gonna be, uh, it's gonna be Lawrence Frank?

Is it gonna be Trent Redden?

Is like Lee Jenkins gonna get dragged into this?

Like we, we, we all, we were scrutinizing the minutia of the Clippers on a weekly basis.

This one is kind of like slid under the radar to the point where I don't know, like, is there, is there a Gillian Zucker in all this?

Like is there a, a president of business affairs or it's just gonna be the basketball ops kind of people that wind up taking a fall there.

This is This is interesting, and if it does go against the Bucks in the same way it went against the Clippers and Timberwolves, it might set the Bucks back longer than it's setting back the Clippers.

Cause at least the Clippers are kind of in LA, you know, and you've got opportunities there.

They've got a couple of young pieces there that you kinda like as part of that team.

The Bucks.

I mean, a decade, this could set them back a long, long time, man.

Like this, this to me feels like it could get worse than it does in LA.

Yeah, it, it's bad.

And, and the reason I haven't mentioned John Horst or those guys is because I, I don't want to put out there, like, John, those guys, they're, they're good people, they've done smart things over the years, and it's like.

I don't wanna say that like any of these people are the reason like why this happened.

It could, as you said, it could, we don't know.

It could have been ownership that just said like this has to happen and, and people are like, so we don't know, but that, that is a tough, that is a tough, like, you know, people know like, all right, I'm gonna give Gary Trent Junior 4 years and 64 million.

Yeah, so these, these are really smart guys like to your point, like they built a contender.

They kept Giannis happy in a small market year after year after year.

Like these are excellent basketball people.

Like they are, they're proven they won a championship.

They've got a ring to prove it.

It's not like, like, you know, everybody loved the Clippers for a long time, but the Clippers didn't have the hardware to back up that, um, those feelings.

The Bucks got the hardware.

The Bucks got a title, and I, I like those guys.

I don't know.

I've got to know them over the years in the front office.

They're, they're good, good dudes.

So again, I don't know.

I don't know where this goes, but like if we're ignoring the people behind this or any of that , like if you just look at the surface level.

And you can talk to literally any executive in the league about this.

That was one of the more ridiculous, blatant, weird contracts they've seen, and I don't, will it end up being cap circumvention?

Maybe there's something else going on that I don't know about that maybe it doesn't consider cap circumvention, but the, uh, right now, on the surface, that is one of the more obvious cap circumvention situations we've seen.

I, I would think too that.

I if it's not a real penalty or it's a small penalty, like the people within the Clippers would lose their minds.

Like they would lose their minds.

They say, you just set us back, you know, maybe a generation.

You sent our owner packing for a year.

You shut, you sat down our president of business operations, our general manager.

Um, and if you, if you don't hand out a penalty commensurate with that, Uh, I could see people within the Clippers getting upset about that, very upset about that, yeah, and, and one last piece is, when the for, for, I feel for walking this way is that they had Giannis for all these years trying to make him happy, whatever happens.

They have to move him , right?

And then they get stuck in a situation where Giannis only wants to go to one team, and this happens, and they try to appease him, but at the same time, he has this contract situation where he gets to kind of dictate where he goes a little bit because he'll only resign at certain places.

So they only got, listen, they got a good package back, but they could have gotten better if it was an open market, open season to moving him.

So you already have that, and that kind of set them back a little bit cause they could have done better, probably with the Giannis situation if they had done it at a different time.

And then this happens.

It's just such a bummer, because like, you have this moment in time, you're like, let's reset this franchise and go again, um, and has a chance to just be the repercussions could be awful.

Yeah, yeah, and then, I, like, that like, again, give credit to Bryant for kind of, you know, bringing this up again.

Um, I think there'll be a lot more interest now in people finding out where the NBA is at.

Like, as far as I know, there's no white-collar law firm investigating.

It's just the NBA kind of doing their thing on this one and um I'm sure Adam's so always gonna get some questions about that in the, uh, weeks and months uh that ahead.