NBA News and Notes: Tracking Damian Lillard and James Harden, Plus Jeff Van Gundy’s Coaching Future

It’s been a busy offseason, with some of the league’s biggest names yet to secure a landing spot.

News, notes and observations while we wait for next year’s invitation to Michael Rubin’s White Party …

• Am I the only one who thinks the Celtics have had kind of a meh offseason? The agreed-upon sign-and-trade that will send Grant Williams to Dallas will net Boston a couple of second-round picks and keep the team below the dreaded second tax apron, but it leaves the Green perilously thin up front, dangerous when you consider Boston’s big men amount to two centers with injury histories (Robert Williams III, Kristaps Porziņģis) and 37-year old Al Horford.

Say what you want about Grant Williams—and based on my social media feeds a lot of Celtics fans were happy to see him go—but he’s a sturdy, versatile defender who shot 41.4% from three-point range before the All-Star break last season. He tailed off in the second half—some in Boston believe his looming free agency got in his head—and fell out of Joe Mazzulla’s rotation in the playoffs, but, at 24, Williams has plenty of upside and $13-ish million per season is not an overpay for a player with his skill set.

Brad Stevens may not be done dealing but right now Boston has shipped out Williams, Marcus Smart and Danilo Gallinari and brought in Porziņģis and a pot of primarily second-round picks. They need Malcolm Brogdon to stay healthy (that forearm injury is scary enough to make the playmaker-starved Clippers pass) to avoid overextending Payton Pritchard and Sam Hauser and Porziņģis to prove last season wasn’t a contract-year aberration. Stay tuned.

• Call it an informed opinion, but I’m not buying this “Miami-or-bust” stuff being reported about Damian Lillard. Does Lillard want to play in Miami? Absolutely. The Heat, according to a source with direct knowledge of Lillard’s thinking, are his first choice. But would Lillard balk if he was traded to Philadelphia, where he would join forces with Joel Embiid? Would he refuse to report to Boston, where he could play alongside Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown? I doubt it.

Lillard wants to win. He’s less than two weeks away from his 33rd birthday. He wants to compete for a championship while he’s still in his prime. He has four years and $200 million left on his contract so his leverage is limited. And if you know anything about Lillard, you know the idea that he would mope or give his new team less than 100% is wild. It goes without saying—or at least it should—that the Blazers should trade him for the best offer. And as long as he’s traded to a winner, I think Lillard will be fine with it. 

Rumors continue to swirl around Damian Lillard’s potential landing spot :: Eric Hartline/USA TODAY Sports

• Jeff Van Gundy, a cost-cutting casualty at ESPN last week, has been actively exploring a return to coaching, sources tell Sports Illustrated. Van Gundy, who last coached in the NBA in 2007, has been discussing assistant coaching jobs with several teams. Dallas and Boston discussed roles with Van Gundy before beefing up their coaching staffs. There’s some mutual interest in Washington, where the Wizards have room on Wes Unseld Jr.’s staff. Van Gundy, who won 57.5% of his games as a head coach in New York and Houston, won 52 games in his last season with the Rockets.
• There have been strong rumblings out of Philadelphia that if the Sixers don’t get the kind of offer they are looking for in a James Harden deal they are comfortable playing out next season with him on the roster. And why wouldn’t they be? This isn’t 2020. Harden isn’t a max contract player with options. If he was, he would have opted out last month. Harden may not be happy with the Sixers, but with a new contract on the line he will be productive. And if Philly can’t recoup young talent and/or draft capital in a Harden deal, they could do worse than riding out the season and just letting his contract fall off the books.
• Chris Finch says the Timberwolves could use a three-center lineup of Rudy Gobert, Karl-Anthony Towns and Naz Reid next season. Talk about zigging when everyone else is zagging.
• What’s the Summer League panic level on Brandon Miller?
• I’ve been hard on Houston the last couple of years but the Rockets had an outstanding offseason. Did they overpay Fred VanVleet? Probably, but the three-year, $130 million contract is really a two-year, $85-ish million with the third year a team option, per the Houston Chronicle. Did they need to pay $80 million over four years to Dillon Brooks? Who knows, but that’s not a staggering overpay for a durable wing defender who started 73 games for Memphis last season.

More importantly: VanVleet and Brooks are Ime Udoka’s kind of players. Both defend—a must for Udoka—and VanVleet will bring some badly needed professionalism to a young locker room. This feels like the kind of team that will have some ugly moments early but will come together in the second half of the season to make a play-in push. For the Rockets, who have looked rudderless the last few seasons, that would be a roaring success.

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• Chet Holmgren packed on 13 pounds since last summer and looked noticeably bigger during an early run at the Salt Lake City Summer League this week. Holmgren, who missed all of last season with a foot injury, had several eye-catching moments, from blocking Memphis’s David Roddy’s three-point attempt—and on the same possession swatting Roddy at the rim—to some aggressive offensive rebounding to some slick cutting on pick-and-rolls. Holmgren, 21, looks like he took advantage of his lost season, which is great news for Oklahoma City, which should be in the playoff mix this season.

“The foot feels great,” Holmgren said. “It’s like the injury never happened, other than everything I had to go through obviously. But at this point, if you erased my memory, I wouldn’t know that anything had happened to my foot other than the scars from surgery. … Not being able to play a game for a year, it’s really, really hard to test and see where you are.”