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OT: The Official Toronto Raptors Thread

Big props to the Raps Org for rehabbing BI's rep enough to be THE main piece to get Kawhi.

Before last year, BI was looked at as an oft-injured, overpaid, could-have-been. Raps made him an all-star.
 
MyNameIsJonas said:
Ballmer is emarrassed and furious, and probably hates Kawhi, you were never getting a 1 back, but you might piss him off to the point where he goes pissy rogue billionaire.
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Clippers reddit were calling that a real likelihood just a few days ago, that people close to the team had been making comments like that, etc.

We hear about every deal that happens. What we don't hear about is how many deals don't happen, and I bet it's more than we think.
 
LeafOfFaith said:
I agree with all that. If I were the Raps though, I would have made an attempt to bend them over and dare them to try to back out after all this, because I doubt they would want to keep a disgruntled Kawhi just as a fuck you to him and us. I think they saw the writing on the wall that it was game over for that roster and time to rebuild. And hey, maybe the Raps tried, I don't know. Like I said, I'm not in any way advocating that the deal still wasn't worth making, just that fuck the Clipps and them getting the same package that was set before all this came out.
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Bingo , the Clipps were not going to void the deal if Webster said fuck it I want some draft capital back

The unprotected picks could bite us in the ass , way too far down the road to say they are low picks

KL only has a few good years left , its finals or bust
 
GEEMAN said:
Bingo , the Clipps were not going to void the deal if Webster said fuck it I want some draft capital back
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Why not? They would actually be more motivated to get as much draft capital back as possible than when they first made the deal. When they first made the deal, they owned 5 of their own 1sts in upcoming drafts, today not so much. Pushing them here is a really good way for them to say fuck it and open this up to other bidders (at some point, a single season of Kawhi to someone else becomes worth more than what we're offering). Training camp starts in 2 weeks, if we want Kawhi, there is at least some time pressure on us to get the deal done as well (and avoid returning Ingram and Dick after what would have been a fucking debacle).
 
Just purely, purely from a logical standpoint there is a minimum amount the Clippers would have been okay with to pull the trigger on the deal. I've already posted what other teams have received for similar superstar players in their mid 30's, and Kawhi's return is pretty pedestrian compared to those returns....why are some people here so sure that there was anything more to squeeze out of this when you look at what other teams have paid for players, who other than Giannis, Kawhi is better than.
 
MindzEye said:
and you've gone back to a deal already negotiated and agreed, but not finalized, to renegotiate it because the other party was in some sort of legal trouble?

I don't want to discount your professional experience entirely here, but I don't think it's as cleanly transferable to these type of deal as you might think. This is more like taking your competency, but now including the talent acquisition side of the business into each deal where a studio wants the same actor as another studio for a project, or an actor is competing against multiple other actors for a role, etc. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but you're involved in the process more or less once the smoke clears and the execs and agents have already made decisions but now it just needs to be on paper, right?
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Actually, it is sort of like that, and similar to this. On the actor deals, the agency will field/make the call to get things going and negotiate only the most major terms, with zero discussion on anything else. Then it comes to me and legal on the other side, and that's where the gray areas come into play, where we'll say, hey of course we were expecting X on that issue and not Y, and they'll say no that wasn't part of our calculus in agreeing to the major terms, and we'll say the same - and then you start the grind. And part of the grind is, if say they won't give us x, y, z for whatever reason (budget, studio policy), which, by the way, we will almost certainly not kill the deal over, then I start to revisit the main terms and improve them. Okay, so 10% more on the fee, or a few extra points on the backend, if he's not getting whatever it is they're refusing to give. And often it results in more, and sometimes there's no extra movement. There's always the threat of pulling the offer, recasting the role, etc., just as we say we will take another project instead that will pay more, be better for the career, etc.

But there's a lot of power plays in the transactional world. After the labor strikes, the studios took full advantage. One producer client of mine, whose deal we closed, signed, cemented before the strikes, had the studio come back to us after the strikes (and to every other talent on the film) and say that they weren't going to greenlight the film if we didn't all take a 75% haircut (equivalent to $2.25M for him alone) on the guaranteed fee and agree to some very loose and unreliable bonus structure. We fought it for months, spat in their face that they were reneging and that we might sue, try to reclaim the project and go to another studio, talked to several different studio execs at different levels - nothing worked and they won that battle because the team wanted the picture to get made without further interruption. So I was on the receiving end of that one. But I've given much more of those than I've gotten over the years - basically anytime there's a change in circumstances, a light goes on that signals to me that I need to consider whether I can use it to reopen the deal for the client's benefit.

Ah, another one just came to me. An acting deal where I included some language that gave us approval rights over a director change. After all the actors signed, and reported for duty, they switched the director - to someone who had recently been cancelled and in the public eye in a very negative light. But the financier was friends with him and wanted to inject him into the project after the fact and didn't realize we had this right buried in our deal. I used it to reopen it and basically get them to pay us for the approval.

But this happens in my other deals outside entertainment (just some regular corporate legacy clients I've had for like 15+ years in various different businesses. We always do the same thing. Oftentimes the execs are the ones who are already ready to strike whenever there's any kind of change that can give them an excuse to reopen the negotiations once the other side is pregnant with the deal. I'm thinking of a couple of clients who go way further than I would even. It's all about leverage and being able to read the situation. They never kill the deal either, but they push the other side to find the breaking point and stop short of it.
 
LeafOfFaith said:
Actually, it is sort of like that, and similar to this. On the actor deals, the agency will field/make the call to get things going and negotiate only the most major terms, with zero discussion on anything else. Then it comes to me and legal on the other side, and that's where the gray areas come into play, where we'll say, hey of course we were expecting X on that issue and not Y, and they'll say no that wasn't part of our calculus in agreeing to the major terms, and we'll say the same - and then you start the grind. And part of the grind is, if say they won't give us x, y, z for whatever reason (budget, studio policy), which, by the way, we will almost certainly not kill the deal over, then I start to revisit the main terms and improve them. Okay, so 10% more on the fee, or a few extra points on the backend, if he's not getting whatever it is they're refusing to give. And often it results in more, and sometimes there's no extra movement. There's always the threat of pulling the offer, recasting the role, etc., just as we say we will take another project instead that will pay more, be better for the career, etc.
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Thanks for this. My main takeaway here though and how it would transfer to what we're discussing here specifically is that after the agent and studio have more or less hashed out the big items (Ingram, 2 1sts) you're coming in after and trying to get as much additional value as possible (We only want to give up 1 pick swap, not two, how about Alijah Martin instead of Grady Dick, how about you give us a 2nd rounder). Which yeah, if you have the time and ability to fuck about with, by all means. Maybe the tertiary piece you're trying to keep out of the trade turns into a valuable rotation piece, maybe you draft the next Jokic with that 2nd rounder, who knows.

What's kind of being suggested as what we should have done though, is literally rip the guts out of the actual value the Clippers are receiving for Kawhi. Ingram isn't value here, he's salary filler. The real value is the 2 1sts. Maybe there was a time that you got deal put in front of you were the Studio was offering 10 million, the agent agreed, and you turned it into 20...but I'd bet those are pretty fucking rare. We're talking about halving the value the Clippers were looking for here just to remove one 1st, on a deal where as I've already shown, we've done better on than any other recent contemporary.

So yeah, I get that everything is negotiable, but I think you're underestimating how much of the deal is the two assets we're actually parting with here. The deal is the 2 1sts, nothing else really matters and is either salary cap matching, or fluff.
 
MindzEye said:
Thanks for this. My main takeaway here though and how it would transfer to what we're discussing here specifically is that after the agent and studio have more or less hashed out the big items (Ingram, 2 1sts) you're coming in after and trying to get as much additional value as possible (We only want to give up 1 pick swap, not two, how about Alijah Martin instead of Grady Dick, how about you give us a 2nd rounder). Which yeah, if you have the time and ability to fuck about with, by all means. Maybe the tertiary piece you're trying to keep out of the trade turns into a valuable rotation piece, maybe you draft the next Jokic with that 2nd rounder, who knows.

What's kind of being suggested as what we should have done though, is literally rip the guts out of the actual value the Clippers are receiving for Kawhi. Ingram isn't value here, he's salary filler. The real value is the 2 1sts. Maybe there was a time that you got deal put in front of you were the Studio was offering 10 million, the agent agreed, and you turned it into 20...but I'd bet those are pretty fucking rare. We're talking about halving the value the Clippers were looking for here just to remove one 1st, on a deal where as I've already shown, we've done better on than any other recent contemporary.

So yeah, I get that everything is negotiable, but I think you're underestimating how much of the deal is the two assets we're actually parting with here. The deal is the 2 1sts, nothing else really matters and is either salary cap matching, or fluff.
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I think you're misunderstanding what I'm saying. I would've just explored trying to reclaim something back from them because of how things all played out. Kawhi going back there after all this was a near impossibility, which created some extra leverage to feel things out. If the Clipps were like no way, get out of here, etc., then you don't try to force the impossible. But if you know their management is in bad shape and needs the deal to go through because there's no going back anymore, then you'd pick up something in the tone of the conversations where you position it as your board is unhappy with things and wants you to get something back. If it works, great; if not, no big deal. All I'm saying is I hope they tried and failed, rather than just stuck to what they had from the start like good boys without even an attempt.
 
LeafOfFaith said:
Actually, it is sort of like that, and similar to this. On the actor deals, the agency will field/make the call to get things going and negotiate only the most major terms, with zero discussion on anything else. Then it comes to me and legal on the other side, and that's where the gray areas come into play, where we'll say, hey of course we were expecting X on that issue and not Y, and they'll say no that wasn't part of our calculus in agreeing to the major terms, and we'll say the same - and then you start the grind. And part of the grind is, if say they won't give us x, y, z for whatever reason (budget, studio policy), which, by the way, we will almost certainly not kill the deal over, then I start to revisit the main terms and improve them. Okay, so 10% more on the fee, or a few extra points on the backend, if he's not getting whatever it is they're refusing to give. And often it results in more, and sometimes there's no extra movement. There's always the threat of pulling the offer, recasting the role, etc., just as we say we will take another project instead that will pay more, be better for the career, etc.

But there's a lot of power plays in the transactional world. After the labor strikes, the studios took full advantage. One producer client of mine, whose deal we closed, signed, cemented before the strikes, had the studio come back to us after the strikes (and to every other talent on the film) and say that they weren't going to greenlight the film if we didn't all take a 75% haircut (equivalent to $2.25M for him alone) on the guaranteed fee and agree to some very loose and unreliable bonus structure. We fought it for months, spat in their face that they were reneging and that we might sue, try to reclaim the project and go to another studio, talked to several different studio execs at different levels - nothing worked and they won that battle because the team wanted the picture to get made without further interruption. So I was on the receiving end of that one. But I've given much more of those than I've gotten over the years - basically anytime there's a change in circumstances, a light goes on that signals to me that I need to consider whether I can use it to reopen the deal for the client's benefit.

Ah, another one just came to me. An acting deal where I included some language that gave us approval rights over a director change. After all the actors signed, and reported for duty, they switched the director - to someone who had recently been cancelled and in the public eye in a very negative light. But the financier was friends with him and wanted to inject him into the project after the fact and didn't realize we had this right buried in our deal. I used it to reopen it and basically get them to pay us for the approval.

But this happens in my other deals outside entertainment (just some regular corporate legacy clients I've had for like 15+ years in various different businesses. We always do the same thing. Oftentimes the execs are the ones who are already ready to strike whenever there's any kind of change that can give them an excuse to reopen the negotiations once the other side is pregnant with the deal. I'm thinking of a couple of clients who go way further than I would even. It's all about leverage and being able to read the situation. They never kill the deal either, but they push the other side to find the breaking point and stop short of it.
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With this latest info, I feel confident in reopening the cold case involving the person who keyed your car
 
zeke said:

View: https://x.com/TheSteinLine/status/2099663827688448061?s=20
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giphy.gif
 
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