The Truth About the NBA's Second Apron | RealGM Radio With Wes Goldberg

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Wes Goldberg** (0:30)
Welcome to RealGM Radio, a quick solo show for you today. We're gonna try to keep this one to 30 or so minutes, 30 or 40 minutes. I've got three things that I wanna talk to you about. I'm gonna tell you where the league is wrong about the second apron, the latest on LeBron and why I think a decision is taking so long. And then I did something fun where I rebuilt the NBA season based on the World Cup format. We're gonna see if that works. A reminder though, really quick, subscribe to RealGM Radio on YouTube. We're trying to get to 1,000 subscribers on our newly relaunched YouTube channel so that we can get monetized. So if you're watching, go ahead and subscribe right now. And if you're listening, please go check us out on YouTube and subscribe. It's also a great place to check out quick clips of the show. All of those subscriptions, all of it really does help. But right now, let's jump in.
All right, I want to start today's show talking about this trend of complaining about the second apron and some of the things that I think are being twisted by the online conversation about all of this. But I also think that this is the rare case where people in the league are more wrong than people online and are starting to drive some of the worst takes that I've heard about all of this second apron, CBA stuff. So I want to talk about this because two stories came out this morning at ESPN and over at The Athletic from insiders who talk to people in the league. First one is from Brian Windhorst over at ESPN. League source is telling Windhorst that salary dumping is becoming a yearly trend and it's something that we're seeing every single off season now. And then over at The Athletic, David Kelly, who runs the Players Association went to The Athletic to basically just complain about the second apron and make some claims about what the players will try to get when they renegotiate the CBA in three years. Both of these stories were set off, by the way, by the thunder trading Lou Dort, which Sam Presti called in his press conference a financially driven move, echoing a lot of frankly what Brad Stevens had to say when the Celtics traded away Jalen Brown and it's become this thing now where you've got general managers, general office guys, guys who are running these teams, when they have to answer to reporters about, hey, why did you trade this fan favorite, whether it's Jalen Brown or Lou Dort? It used to be the case where the last thing that these people would say is, hey, it was because of the money, right? They would blame basketball reasons or something off the court or avoid the question altogether. But because of this second apron, people in the league, people in Sam Presti and Brad Stevens' seat, they can now sit there and just be like, hey, don't blame me. We would love to keep your fan favorite player here, but it's the second aprons fault that we can't keep them here. And I'm not buying that for a lot of different reasons, right? I think when it comes to Jalen Brown and Lew Dort, there are basketball reasons as to why those players are no longer with their teams, why they got traded. We'll get to those here in a second. But you're seeing Lew Dort get traded by the Thunder. You saw Jalen Brown get traded by the Celtics. And in both of those instances, you had the people who were in charge of trading these players blame the second apron. So you're seeing a trend here. The Knicks also let Mitchell Robinson walk after they won the championship. And you saw the online conversation around Mitchell Robinson. All of the Knicks didn't answer questions about it, not surprisingly. But the online conversation around Mitchell Robinson and the Knicks was, how could you let this guy walk away despite the fact that he played, you know, yeah, he played 60 games last year, but couldn't play 20 minutes a night. And that was the most games he's played, the most minutes he's played total. Over the last half decade, this is a guy who's routinely unavailable. And so look, you get to now this trend of teams complaining and blaming the second apron for their inability to keep these players, which by the way is exactly how they organize this thing, right? The second apron, this thing that they want to stay out of, you know, you're already hearing it being called a hard cap by people inside the league for the first time, I think people outside the league, people like me, people in the media who do what I do have been calling this a hard cap for a couple of years now because it's pretty clear as to what it's designed to do. But I want to go back to this ESPN story because you've got a league source telling Brian Windhorst, quote, we're getting to the point where we can start comparing second apron teams salary dumping year over year. OKC got better deals in Boston last year. I'll give them that.