The Timberwolves are set to buy-out the contract of Juwan Howard by the Monday deadline. When this goes through, assuming Simien won't be here after the team told him not to come, the Wolves will be at the roster max 15 players

God I hope this doesnt happen!!!!!!

Howard would be awesome for them , some major experience, n a wonderful mentor to the pups...


Why cant they buyout McCants instead..

I'm pretty sure it has already happened. They said that it would be made final by the deadline on Monday...

www.startribune.com/blogs/wolves/?p=6

Very interesting. I had a feeling Howard wouldn't be here come the start of the season. Now I will get massive amounts of unintentional comedy watching Antoine Walker on the bench all season long!

As Tod Murphy said in the comments of this article on the main page of TWB, it will be interesting to see how much the Wolves are paying Howard. Basically it will be how much it cost us to buy out both Mike James and Justin Reed. Hmmm...

Is it just me, or is anyone else suprised that the Wolves are buying out Howard instead of trading him?

OK, if he had not been a part of those 2-for-1 deals we were hoping for all offseason, trading him for players would not have solved the roster issues, but I just can't believe that there is no team out there that would have given up one or two secound round picks (or even a low first rounder) for a proven veteran like Howard.

Now we pay him for going to another team? That seems so strange to me. I can just hope that we buy him out on a very low price, because actually, we do HIM a favor by doing so.

I just don't get it...

I know for a fact Denver was interested in him...I also know for a fact they would have traded for him too,.. sighs

Sanyarin wrote:

The problem is that we have NO leverage in this situation since we HAVE to cut at least 1 guy. If we were at 15 players (with Howard) we could just keep him and try to make a decent trade. But we can't and Howard knows it. My guess is that the buyout will be pretty low since it's obvious he wouldn't have picked up his option for next season. So, that brings his salary owed to 7M for just this year. I honestly believe the buyout was probably around half of that just because he wanted to be gone so badly. Not a bad move at all. Plus, the buyout will all count towards the cap this season, so he won't count against our cap for next year. That's great news.

College Wolf wrote:
That's a good point! Plus now he can go to a contender like he wanted...

We should have TONS of cap room to NOT give to Al Jefferson now...

whiskeydizzy wrote:

Haha that made me laugh and cringe at the same time!

I was kind of wondering why they were cutting Juwan instead of Doleac. I know it was a nice gesture on our part to let him go out of respect since that's what he wanted, however this is still a business. But if we're done with his contract after this season, it's a great move on our part. If we can somehow move Marko, McHale will have improbably cleaned up most of his contract mess.

Does the amount the buyout is for affect the Salary Cap? Are the wolves only on the hook for what they really end up paying Howard?

pants wrote:
YES, that is correct. The amount that gets listed for our salary cap is the buyout amount divided by the number of years remaining. Since we don't know how much they paid Howard, I don't know how many years it's getting prorated over. I know team options don't count towards the number of years when calculating the new buyout salary figure, but I'm not sure if it's the same with player options or not. If I knew how much they paid him I'd be able to tell you exactly how much counts against our cap for Howard and whether or not our salary cap is affected for the next one or two seasons.