Brian Winhurst in the hoop collective is presented by YouTube TV. Try it free today at youtube.com slash NBA 23 new users only terms apply cancel anytime.

Hey, welcome to this with productive podcast. We talk about the NBA what you're doing on Thursday evening. I apologize after my mic.

It's my fault. I'm sorry. My sound is bad. We're doing another podcast tomorrow night. It's gonna sound bad on that one too. So just get ready for my fault. Joining me from about 80 blocks up Manhattan is Tim Bontaps or partly how's your chair?

My chair is fine. Very average.

Bontaps was in Boston today for the Chris us for Zing this press conference. It was the most important thing that happened. I hope you enjoyed it.

We may talk about that in the next hour. We'll see.

So that's Texas.

Stan McMahon.

Howdy partners.

How's your theme song?

Got to negotiate that one. Got to negotiate that one.

Not a negotiate going on these days.

Gonna fire my Asian if we don't get it on the next pod.

All right. So we got ourselves a circus in the NBA. It seems like it happens every freeing the period and we got it James Harden opts into his contract with the Philadelphia 76ers which indicates as wages reported that he would like a train the.

We'll find out there's a haze out there from the different sides is where the thick of this right now.

We'll find out how much serious negotiating went on.

But at the end of the day what the 76ers were offering or willing to offer James Harden for opting out and entering into a new contract was obviously unpalatable to him.

Whether the offer was not long enough not high enough not complete enough whatever it was he didn't like it.

And you know the thing about it is is if he became a free agent and he opted out of his contract which a lot of us assumed.

I expected that he would do his options were really narrow because you could only sign with teams of cap space or you could engineer a sign and trade.

And you could apply pressure to the six years on a sign and trade but a lot of teams because of their salary cap position can't do a sign and trade.

If you opted into your contract and have that was a 36.5 million then you could go to any team as long as the teams could do a trade there's no you know some teams still have some cap issues but you know there's nobody who's going to be forbidden from doing it and nobody and I mean nobody demands trades like James Harden.

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