Aaron Gordon On The Pacers Would Be Pretty Damn Fun But Probably Unlikely

With so much going on with the Lebron/Kawhi drama it’s easy to forget that there’s also restricted free agency that could play a roll in how things shake out across the league this summer. It’s not often that a team of a young promising player doesn’t match an offer sheet, but this nugget from Woj is pretty interesting. As one of the few teams with actual space to make some legit offer sheets, IND is in the drivers seat to be a player when it comes to a number of high profile RFAs whether it’s Aaron Gordon or Marcus Smart. Now if the Pacers are going to want to make this a tough decision for the Magic, they’re probably going to have to use close to all of their space for this offer. In term of fit, I like it for a number of reasons for the Pacers. First, if they end up losing Thad Young in free agency there will be a void at the 4 spot. In Gordon they get a similar athletic big who can stretch the floor (he made 2.0 3PM a game last year) who surprisingly is only 22 years old. You find a way to have a core of Oladipo/Myles Turner/Gordon/Bogdanovic that’s certainly a legit team in the East.

Now the Magic have been pretty vocal that they plan on matching whatever comes their way in regards to Gordon, and honestly they’d be silly not to. It’s not like players are lining up to play in Orlando, and given that you can go over the cap to keep your own players, I can’t think of a price that would be too much for Orlando to match. They may have a bit of a logjam in their front court with Isaac/Gordon/Bamba/Vucevic, but you don’t solve that by giving up your 22 year old franchise player. If it were me I’d flip Vucevic or something along those lines and focus on building and moving forward with their young talent. Even if they are forced to pay out the nose to keep him and he ends up being a disaster, we’ve seen that there is almost no contract that prevents someone from getting dealt. Look at what just happened to Blake Griffin.

So while Pacer fans would love to see it happen, unfortunately the reality of restricted free agency when it comes to this specific player will most likely prevent it from happening. That’s not the same for every RFA out there, so it would not shock me to see the Pacers pull something off before the start of next season.

As always, here’s your highlight video because who wants to work