I don’t want to feel like I’m taking advantage of the Cavs for everything they’ve done for me, and I don’t want them to feel like I’m taking advantage of them.
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In a profile of Smith by Complex, the free agent shooting guard was asked abut when he will re-sign.
Smith, who declined his $5.3 million player option to test free agency, is in line for a considerable raise after he averaged 12.4 points on 41.5 percent shooting from the field and 40 percent shooting from three last season.
Smith is represented by the same agent – Rich Paul – who guided Tristan Thompson to a holdout past year that stretched through the entire preseason.
The Cavs hired Blatt in the summer of 2014 to lead what was expected to be a rebuilding young roster, but all that changed when LeBron James made a decision to come home. In it, Smith talks about what it felt like winning the title, how he came up with idea for the t-shirt of his torso and more. It might not make Blatt feel much better about the way things went down, but if nothing else, it ought to be a hell of a motivational tool for the guys at Darüsşafaka Doğuş.
Thanks to Rich Paul, the likelihood of JR Smith getting his $15 million deal is not impossible. There are some teams that still have the cap space to sign Smith, like the 76ers and Nets (Smith is from New Jersey, near both Philadelphia and Brooklyn), but none of the teams will be anywhere near competing for a championship this season.
While Dan Gilbert and company work on that, Smith and Paul are obviously going to wait. Team morale-wise, there are a few teams that I could see working. He was able to pull it off past year with Tristan Thompson, something that went as far as late October 2015. Cleveland, already over the salary cap with the 12 players it has under contract, would be limited to signing a player to a veteran’s minimum contract or facilitating a deal to use one of its trade exceptions in order to replace Smith should he sign with another team. But Smith has also shown little or no real interest in leaving James and the franchise that took him when he had a bad reputation across the league for his on- and off-court behavior.
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Translation: The two sides remain far apart financially.
