"There's Going To Be Some BIG Deals Tonight" - Shams Essentially Put His Legacy On The Line By Promising We're Getting Chaos Once Free Agency Officially Opens Tonight

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For the last few months, all we heard about was how "crazy" things were going to be this summer in the NBA. Leading up to the Draft, we were told that was the night where the chaos would start, only for the exact opposite to happen. There were some surprise picks and trades, but I wouldn't exactly call it the "chaos" that we were promised.

Next up was free agency, which starts today at 6pm EST. We've started to see some announcements of players turning down free agency in favor of signing longer term extensions (Kyrie, Fred VanVleet, Naz Reid, James Harden, Jabari Smith Jr, Julius Randle etc), and a rather massive player "opt in" (LeBron) that certainly was a bit of a shock when that news broke yesterday.

But none of that is really "crazy", which is concerning because we were told this would be one of the craziest free agency periods/summers in recent memory. In terms of free agent signings, that dream is dead. There are some good value players available if you're goal is to build out your depth with quality talent, but the blue chip players did not hit the market. Honestly, that's probably the future of the NBA in this new CBA world, where it seems like players are preferring to extend with their current teams to load up on the money and then just demand a trade later.

So while things have been mostly a dud from the drama standpoint, Shams still won't give it up. 

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times? I don't know who to blame but I do know it would be extreme bullshit for Shams to keep pounding this idea of pending chaos and huge deals, only for it to result in mostly nothingburgers. The Draft and the start of free agency has been a dud, so you can't go out there throwing out "BIG deals" and then there not actually being BIG deals hitting our timelines.

Part of me doesn't want to take the bait, but also I'm pretty sure Shams has the tweet draft ready to roll in his phone, so I can't bring myself to truly ignore this statement. My question would be, what classifies as big?

A LeBron trade? Duh. That'd be pretty fucking massive. There are rumblings that's why he opted into his $52M player option and didn't sign a 1+1, but at that money, trading him in this new CBA world isn't exactly easy. Especially since any team you could think he might want to join is already over the 2nd apron and cannot combine salaries.

Outside of that, what would qualify? Something in Boston? Something that nobody has reported yet? Maybe a Ja trade? Who knows. 

I will say this though. Shams' legacy is essentially on the line with a statement like that. I don't know how it couldn't be, especially when this is how he was talking ahead of the Draft

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A whole lot of nothing happened the night of June 24th, or June 25th. 

These things are so fluid, I'm willing to give Shams a pass for that comment, but you cannot double dip with this type of speculation and then come up 0-2 in terms of crazy shit actually going down. I'm at the point where this needs to be, at the very minimum an All Star talent on the move. For example, the Rockets offering Dorian-Finney Smith the full non-taxpayer MLE of $14M to steal him from the Lakers would NOT qualify for me. Deandre Ayton signing for the minimum somewhere does NOT qualify.

I could see hyping up the idea that stuff was going down on Draft night as a way to get people to tune in, but that's not the case tonight. Nobody gives a shit about any sort of Free Agency show, plus it probably won't be on TV by the time a lot of this stuff goes down if Shams is suggesting it's bleeding into tonight. There's no reason to hype it up only to be full of shit, right?

So fine, if Shams wants me to believe him, I will. I'll give him another chance. But if nothing crazy happens and there isn't some sort of "big" trade? Then Shams is actually no different from the random anonymous Twitter accounts that pull this same move in an effort to gain followers and get that dopamine hit from Twitter engagements. For that reason, I hope he's telling the truth, but only if it does not involve my favorite team trading any of their core pieces.