I Love That The Nets And 76er's Are Starting Bidding Wars That They Are Only Mildly Interested In Winning

Sources: 76ers force Spurs to more than triple their initial offer to re-sign Manu Ginobili. @WojVerticalNBA report. https://t.co/u3DhH8NW20

— The Vertical (@TheVertical) July 14, 2016

Look, I know it's ridiculous to think that the Nets and 76er's - two comically bad basketball teams - are just frivolously throwing out ludicrous offers just to force teams to overpay, but there's a reason the 'Three Strikes Law' exists. It may not for NBA free agency purposes but it might as well be, because it absolutely applies here. 

I was skeptical of the Nets intentions when they dedicated $125 million in offer sheets to two players have never even been starters, but at least they were young promising pieces that could hypothetically help them start to resemble something other than a D-League team. However, the 76er's "trying" to pry a 38 year old - that is far more useful to his current team than he would be to any other team - away from the Spurs has confirmed my suspicions. The Nets and the 76er's are the franchise equivalent of the guy standing near the table at the silent auction staring at you knowing you'll bid any amount and repetitively increasing his offer exponentially just to fuck with you. They hardly even wanted Tyler Johnson, Allen Crabbe, or Manu Ginobili. They just wanted to make the Heat, the Trail Blazers, and the Spurs sweat. They knew their July's were probably going to be pretty boring, so the decided to make them interesting by making other teams July's a living hell. Just driving the price up to find some fictitious sense of fulfillment. Sure, they didn't make their teams any better in free agency, but they potentially made some other teams worse off in the future. Might be the most microscopic of moral victories, but it's better than sitting on their thumbs idling in their irrelevance and loathing themselves for the entirety of the offseason. ​