Slater: Draymond Expected to Opt In — What It Means for LeBron, Porzingis & the Warriors Cap Sheet

[00:00:00]Onto the Draymond opt-in talk, on our Discord, even in the free version. Now, these real-time feeds are our VIP section. Those are like Twitter, but better. If you sign up for the VIP, which is $5 a month, you get these. This one right here that you just saw stuff pop up, that's the Valkyries feed.

[00:00:21]Eventually, like next year or something, I'll throw that in as a paid element, but right now it's free. I don't have time to change it. But, one of the things that came through the wire today was, if I go look at the free section, if I go to the draft, summer league, and training camp section, and I scroll all the way down to today's news, look what you get here. You get Jake Fischer stuff. You get intel from Mike Scotto of HoopsHype. So, there's tons of stuff on our Discord that's all organized. You can all search this. That's the problem with Twitter. It doesn't act as a knowledge base. This article is everything we know about a pivotal Golden State Warriors off-season by Anthony Slater. So, we'll go through these one by one because the last thing he talked about was Draymond. So, first thing, LeBron James. The Warriors pitch, if the door cracks open, would be simple. They can clear room for the full $15 million non-taxpayer mid-level.

[00:01:22]That's not that easy, everybody. I did the math. I did all of the spreadsheet work. This tab has all of my spreadsheet work. We've done a lot of these. You can't just get under the tax that easy.

[00:01:35]I did a video on that, which is right here, the hidden problem on LeBron to the Warriors. Now, if the Lakers want to bring back LeBron, the only way we can match that salary, which is projected to be like 24 million, if it's more than that, then we probably can't afford it.

[00:01:51]I calculated that to be 24 million.

[00:01:54]Draymond would have to take a discount, which we'll talk about in a moment. One idea is to sign and trade Kristaps Porzingis for LeBron, and then you don't have to get under the tax. The other idea is if you trade for Kawhi Leonard, send out pods as extra salary. Jimmy Butler makes more actually than Kawhi by 6 million. You can get under the tax that way. When you do that, you can actually open up the non-taxpayer mid-level to either LeBron or maybe keep Melton, and you don't even have to pay as much for Melton for that. In any case, I've already done videos on this.

[00:02:33]I came up with this idea early last month, so this is old news, and I keep rehashing it, but that's fine. The more people that know this, the better. So, I was able to get under the tax with a trade for Kawhi. Now, it cost us two picks. Yeah, all those details are in the videos. If you just go to Let's Go Warriors home screen on our YouTube, go to playlist. If you sort by last video added, find one that is called Summer 2026 off-season, view full playlist, and it has a lot of off-season moves.

[00:03:05]Continuing on with the Slater article, as far as Kawhi is concerned, looks like Steve Ballmer has maintained a firm stance against a Leonard trade, preferring to build around his star.

[00:03:18]That can be debatable because Yossi Gozlan just today in a live stream with his co-host Sam when they speculated that this is just posturing because to them, from a salary cap sheet perspective, from a spreadsheet perspective, it does not make sense for the Clippers to retain Kawhi Leonard because the rest of the team is just totally in flux. Now, in some ways we're lucky. We have assets that are injured that are supposed to come back. Jimmy, Moses, you could consider Kristaps, maybe. In any case, I think our situation is a little bit better than the Clippers situation. All right, here's some draft stuff. One team source said the fit is so obvious, and that's the main reason why I would think Yaxel is under serious considerations. Also, Braden Burries, who is coming in for a workout alongside Le'Beron Philon and Hans Steinbach. Now, I said before, Hans Steinbach, I can see where he is being considered as a mobile big, a four-five that can potentially shoot it, has really good skills, but he's far from an athlete, led the country in rebounding, I think somebody said earlier, uses his length very well. It's just that I would rather have an athlete like Philon, who to me looks a lot like Tyrese Maxey in all of the highlights. Now, granted, those are highlights. Those are not lowlights or midlights. When Le'Beron looks his best, he resembles Tyrese Maxey.

[00:04:53]Which is nice, but again, go look at my Yaxel video, where I pick Yaxel at my pick because of the intangibles. Which I have no idea if Philon has those intangibles. It's one of those things where I have intel on one guy, but I don't on the other. That's the Warriors job to figure it out. Okay, the rest of these we will be talking ad nauseam this weekend. I just don't think we should go out and get a plodding center. It doesn't fit Steph to have the slow offensive guy, like back-to-the-basket guys. No, I'm not with the back-to-the-basket combination with Steph. Any case, we finally reached the point where we're talking about Draymond and Kristaps. The expectation is that Green will pick up his player option.

[00:05:40]I'm sure Rich Paul has a lot of spreadsheets like I do. The first spreadsheet I did was the one that keeps Porzingis, keeps Draymond. If Draymond opts in, he could choose to take a 25% pay cut, let's say, but it doesn't really change a whole lot. If he did do that and extended with a new contract that gave us a discount for this year, he could take like a roughly $6 million taxpayer mid-level amount. So, that's doable. But, if he opts in, which is kind of like the worst-case scenario in terms of optionality. In other words, if he opts in, there's not a lot of options, right? At that point, we can pay Kristaps 25 million, or we could pay him 19 million and go out and get a free agent at the taxpayer for 6 million.

[00:06:29]Sure would be nice to get the non-taxpayer mid-level, which is 15 million. And I did a whole spreadsheet on that and a whole video on that. But, the other problem with this model is that it only has one draft pick. So, this is the most conservative spreadsheet, but I have mocked this already. I have one here where we got the 12th pick, which is the most expensive one that we'd probably get. I think we need to keep the 11th pick because that's as high as we can get.

[00:06:55]Let's go get the most talented guy that we think at 11, and then maybe get another pick. Because as I said in the comments, it's going to be hard to entice some of these teams that have two picks to whittle theirs down to one just to move up to 11. We're not even top 10.

[00:07:12]I've already done the spreadsheet work on this, and there it is. Here is the most conservative cap sheet that has Draymond opting in. We don't have any more picks. We don't have the taxpayer mid-level. We're up against the second apron. You can pay Kristaps 25 million.

[00:07:31]That is the follow-up domino. If you wanted to use the taxpayer mid-level, then maybe you could pay Kristaps 19 million. If you go and trade for another pick, then this salary becomes bigger and then you can only pay Kristaps 22.5 million with Draymond opting in at 27.

[00:07:51]7. So, the first indication is going to be on draft night if we get another first-round pick. If we get another first-round pick, that will give us some clues as to what we can pay Kristaps if Draymond opts in. There's a lot of variables, but the variables start to get get checked off one by one as events happen. That is June 23rd and that involves first-round picks. So, that is a very important day for obviously building the roster. The other important day is the option deadline of June 29th.

[00:08:27]That's when we know Draymond's number for sure. If it goes down to like 20 million, like this a 25% pay cut, which is the norm, which I learned from Yossi Gozlan, he told me this on our Warriors cap sheet video, then we can utilize the taxpayer mid-level exception and get a free agent for 6 million. Now, De'Anthony Melton, can we get him at a taxpayer mid-level? Depends on the market. I tend to think that he can find something in the 8 9 10 11 million-dollar range. Yossi Gozlan seems to think so. He's high on De'Anthony.

[00:09:04]The one thing going for Melton is he's got good numbers. We know that he turned the ball over a little bit too much.

[00:09:11]However, he does put up numbers. Now, Kristaps, yeah, a lot is going to depend on Draymond first. Then we can figure out what the number is for Kristaps. I'm sure he knows this and I'm sure that there isn't that much of a market for Porzingis given his injury history, especially the rather mysterious illness that he seemed to have. So, that's what I got for you as far as basic cap sheet stuff. The last and possibly most important aspect of Draymond opting in or opting out. Now, if he opts out, that means he can extend with the Warriors for longer years and bring his salary down a little bit in order to make room for, say, LeBron. So, we need to talk about possibly adding LeBron and all of those rumors. Now, I've already done a video on how all the talk of getting LeBron on the non-taxpayer mid-level exception, I just think reporters are tossing that around a little too easily.

[00:10:14]As you can see right here, to utilize the non-taxpayer mid-level exception, which is 15 million, to go sign LeBron as a free agent, you've got to shed 20 million dollars here. I'm not going to get into that too much in terms of the video that I already did on this, but what I'd like to do here is try and figure out a way where Draymond opts out and we're still able to get LeBron. Now, this example here keeps Porzingis on the team. You could just straight-up sign-and-trade Porzingis to the Lakers.

[00:10:49]They're going to be under the first apron, so they can receive a free agent in a sign-and-trade, but then also LeBron is technically a free agent as well, and so that would be a double sign-and-trade. Actually, we can't do that because if you just change this to LeBron, then that would be a sign-and-trade and you'd have to be under the first apron to receive a sign-and-trade player. So, on June 29th, if Draymond opts in, I just don't see a path to get LeBron other than utilize the taxpayer mid-level. Let's go and check real quick. What is the amount of the taxpayer mid-level. This amount is projected to rise to 6102. Hoops Rumors, that's a good resource. They do their homework. 6102 million. So, what we're going to have to do is pretend that this salary slot is going to be the taxpayer actually. Let's duplicate this sheet so that we have another worksheet and I'm going to call this Get Bron without non-taxpayer mid-level. We're going to sign Kristaps to something. We're going to solidify Draymond at 27 million. So, let's turn this into red so that we don't touch it for now. Let's say he opts in, can we still get LeBron?

[00:12:11]Taxpayer mid-level exception, again that was 6102 million. 6102 123. See, now we're over the second apron. We've got to get under the second apron. That means we would need to pay Kristaps no more than So, we've got to take about 3 million off of that. Let's pay him 22 and a half million. Just under the second apron there. So, 22 million, 22 and a half million. That's one way you can go and get LeBron. Obviously, the other way would be to just sign him to a veteran's minimum, but if you can afford him at the taxpayer mid-level, I'm sure he would prefer that obviously. Now, in this case, remember we lose De'Anthony Melton because he's probably going to get a contract that's more than a veteran's minimum, which is all we can afford in this structure here. Let's see if we can get under the tax and try to use that to get LeBron cuz I don't think we can do it. We'd have to shed 21 million dollars. So, that effectively gets rid of Kristaps right here. Again, I did the video of LeBron and the non-taxpayer mid-level exception or the lack thereof of a path to him that way in another video. So, go check that one out. I'll link it in the description and hopefully have a card for you on that.

[00:13:30]But yeah, if we just did a sign-and-trade, now we're going to get LeBron back in the sign-and-trade and the Lakers would do this because instead of LeBron walking from the Lakers, they're going to get Kristaps, which is better than nothing. So, let's try this.

[00:13:45]First of all, we need Draymond to take a discount, a 25% pay cut, which is pretty standard in the NBA. If I move over here, you can see that it's 20,758,928.

[00:13:58]So, let's give him a 25% discount. This is no longer red because now we're changing Draymond's salary. Okay, let's do this. Draymond popped in and then let's change this formula to three, so it's not dependent on that. Okay, now we can just go equals this one. So, we've changed Draymond to take a discount.

[00:14:19]We're still a 14 million away from the luxury tax line, so you could only pay Kristaps like 8 million and you're under the luxury tax. So, we could sign-and-trade Kristaps for LeBron at 8 million if Draymond takes that type of a discount. Actually, I need to change this. We're not using the taxpayer mid-level exception anymore, so we're changing this to the 13th slot again and we're making this a veteran's minimum, so we can pay actually Kristaps 12 million, I think, around 12 million. If Draymond takes a further discount to let's say 16 million, then we can add about 5 more million to here, so this can also be 16 million. Now we're under the luxury tax. Now we can go and get LeBron at the 15 million. However, here's the problem. I didn't really go through this specific exercise on the previous video, so I'm glad I'm doing it right now. Let's look up the non-taxpayer mid-level for 2026-27.

[00:15:20]It's going to be 15.1 million. So, let's put 15.1 million. So, now effectively we're doing this exercise with the non-taxpayer level.

[00:15:32]Probably should have made a new worksheet for that. I'll do that later for safekeeping. Okay, so we went through the exercise of getting under the tax by having Draymond take a massive discount. Kristaps is going to make 16 million as well as Draymond and LeBron's going to come in at 15.1 million, but the problem is we're over the first apron. When you use the non-taxpayer mid-level, you need to be under the first apron. We're about 3 million over the first apron. So, either that means LeBron simply cannot get paid more than that to fit under the first apron. So, we're getting under 12 million now, which is probably not that desirable by him. That's one way to do it. You could pay Kristaps the 11.5 million and give LeBron the full 15.1.

[00:16:23]So, you see how this works? Why I don't think the path to non-taxpayer mid-level really works all that well for the Warriors unless you go and trade for Kawhi, which I did here because Kawhi's salary is actually less than Jimmy and I traded Pods to get Kawhi and two other picks. So, that path of Kawhi is way better in my opinion. That's why I actually really am gung-ho for that, but obviously Steve Ballmer has to want to do that and we had that little tidbit in our Discord server. If you go down to the Dunleavy section, you can see Anthony Slater's article from Wednesday, June 17th talked about how Steve Ballmer has maintained a firm stance against a Leonard trade. So, once again, I've kind of disproved the LeBron non-taxpayer mid-level idea. However, I may have overlooked something, so apologies in advance if I did miss something big. So, if I correct all of these and we go back to trying to get LeBron without the non-taxpayer mid-level, again, this would be the taxpayer mid-level. It was 6 million 102, and in the scenario, you see how the machinations of being a luxury tax team versus not work. We would have to use the taxpayer mid-level for LeBron if we're between the first and second aprons. And with the Draymond here giving a discount of that much, it's just really hard to fit under the tax. So, again, going back to the original plan, I think ideally we'd at least want to use the taxpayer mid-level if we're under the second apron to bring some kind of a free agent in. In that case, Kristaps is going to have to make 22 million, 22 and 1/2 if Draymond opts in. Like I said, both Kristaps and Draymond would have to take massive discounts to get LeBron in at the non-taxpayer mid-level. And at that point, we wouldn't be able to even pay him all that much. It would be like 12 million of the 15 million that the non-taxpayer mid-level would allow you to. So, what's the floor of Kristaps and Draymond? Kristaps, I've got here about 16 million just for LeBron to make 12 million. So, I just don't think that's realistic. Could happen, but I'd be shocked. So, if Draymond opts in, I would expect Kristaps to come in at 22 and 1/2 million so that we can use the taxpayer mid-level and then beg LeBron to come over for the taxpayer mid-level because looking at this roster, he would be a good pickup to add to this roster.

[00:19:09]Again, I still like my overall Kawhi idea much better. So, go check out that strategy, which I already did a video on as well. A friendly reminder, if you go to our playlists and you click on sort by last video added and you look at this list of playlists, scroll down a little bit and you'll find a summer 2026 off season roster building. Be sure to click on view full playlist, otherwise it will only just show you the last video. And the last video was just a congratulations to Mike B, but there's other ones that you can see from the thumbnail have a lot to do with salary cap stuff. None of these are out of date yet. Once the draft happens, maybe it'll be out of date, but my main idea was to go out and get Kawhi and LeBron and get under the tax. However, as we talked about earlier, don't know if Kawhi can be got like that. So, we'll see. And because we kind of know what different options we have here, we kind of have a grand plan and we kind of have a very conservative, not much optionality plan, then we can set expectations and not be the typical grumpy, complaining Warriors Twitter thumb typing dude. Don't do that. Try to enjoy your team. Best way to do that, our Discord server. All of these free channels in here is what they're called, which is kind of like categories. And even if you just look at what's been happening with Steph lately, it's good to keep up. There's some more stuff coming down the pipeline because Steph made an appearance in Daly City today to promote Gentleman's Cut. So, we'll add that content here. Just a ton of variety on our Discord server. One thing that I barely ever talk about is this one, Classic Dubs. You go all the way down here and you click on Classic Dubs. All of these videos, we follow like 10 accounts and the beauty of this is that we can filter it by video so that we're only reposting their stuff when they post a video and 99 times out of 100 that video happens to be like some classic Dubs moment. Even in the off season the content of this Discord server why I call it a knowledge base, almost a library, a real time updated library for you. You can search on stuff from here. You can just search on videos. Have fun with the search function and you'll never go bored.

[00:21:38]You'll never have to doom scroll and read all the nasty comments about Joe Lacob, whoever picked your target of the day that got bullied. It's like we don't need to worry about that here because all we get fed is content and information that's not twisted, that's not looked upon with outrage. There's no reply function here. Now if you're a VIP you can do some commenting here with the VIP four rings commentary channel if you were so inclined to say something and thumb type something out here. We even have a high vibrational channel. The last thing that I put in this channel was Myckal Thompson saying that success is all about your resilience, not the results, right? And we reflect that here at Let's Go Warriors. So I'm really happy that you found us if you resonate with that. So we're kind of the antithesis of Elon's site, quite frankly. Even though that makes it hard to drive engagement which is part of every social media platform's algorithm.

[00:22:41]Yeah, whatever. It's okay as long as you have access to Warriors content that isn't adulterated. That's my goal. And just come back here to the YouTube channel cuz we're always talking about the Warriors in some high vibrational way. So thank you for joining. Yeah, the draft is a great time of year and I'd love to do some more highlights research with you guys. So, we'll try and do that on a live stream if it's not the Valkyries. And if it is the Valkyries, then we'll enjoy the Valkyries just like we did tonight. So, appreciate you all.

[00:23:13]With that, I wanted to just say just us 1 2 3 and brote. See you soon and right back here on this channel. Let's go Warriors.