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"FacebookPinterest\n\n NBA free agency is a time for players to get paid, but it's also when teams make moves that dictate, or shed light on, their plans for the future. It's not a series of a business deals regarding the payment of talented individuals; it's one of those exhilaratingly panic-driven moments when the open market operates like rows of falling dominos. Each contract signed impacts not only the player and his new home, but the team he left, and all the teams planning to face off against him in the coming season. This year, the action will be faster and more frantic than ever, since it'll be shoehorned into the thin sliver of time\u2014starting Thursday, Dec. 8\u2014that separates the lockout's resolution from the start of training camps. The faster it moves, the harder it will be to ignore the big picture. What follows is a (semi-serious) effort to anticipate a league-wide chain of events that might already be in motion by the time you read this. Except for the part about Andris Biedrins and his dream of a biodynamic winery\u2014that probably won't happen.\n\n Step 1: Tyson Chandler Signs With Golden State Warriors. \n\n Dallas Mavericks veteran Tyson Chandler may not bounce around the gym like he did in his New Orleans days. Back then, Chandler and Chris Paul were one of the most formidable, and creative, alley-oop connections ever seen. The backboard was like a canvas, or a second floor. But these days, Tyson Chandler's not a bombastic defensive presence like Dwight Howard. Still, after Howard, ain't no one better at protecting the paint (and, by extension, the rim\u2014that's a breakthrough that only comes with age and bunches of injuries). He was a large part of the Mavericks championship run, perhaps the only part besides Dirk Nowitzki that made much sense.\n\n The Warriors, all high-speed mayhem and garbled synapse, are looking to change their identity under self-proclaimed Authority Figure Mark Jackson. Chandler is the epitome of old head basketball, or maybe just a dude for Mark to bond with over old Spinners records.\n\n State of the League: Prized big man goes to team on the rise. Defending champs left scrambling for a fix.\n\n Step 2a: Dallas Mavericks Sign Chuck Hayes. \n\n Win a title, go for another one. Never has a team been crowned king, and then felt content to let the rest of the league walk all over them. You wear the proverbial target and either stumble on their victory lap or, if we're talking about an unlikely champion like Dallas, you're out to back up that banner. Dallas losing Chandler means they need defense, but they can't break the bank on any choice free agents; there are limits to how much even Mark Cuban will pay in luxury tax. So hello, Chuck Hayes, font of mystery, undersized interior defender who very much fits the Mavs WTF ethos. His bafflingly effective turn as a hustle-hard 6-foot-6 center for the Houston Rockets last season included what may have been the most improbable triple-double in NBA history, and made him the frontcourt equivalent of a stud mixtape rapper who's got the Internet going nuts. After building momentum on the blogosphere and in Houston's eccentric hoops laboratory, Hayes is ready to sign with a major. (Note: this all makes more sense if you pretend that record labels are still a thing.)\n\n State of the League: Mavericks reload on a budget. Welcome to the new reality.\n\n Step 2b: Warriors Amnesty Andris Biedrins. \n\n The Warriors immediately and with perhaps unseemly giddiness use their amnesty rights to lop from their roster the lanky pomade aficionado Andris Biedrins and his $27 million salary cap figure. Teams are interested in the Latvian center, who led the NBA in field-goal percentage back when Lehman Brothers was still in business. The problem is that Biedrins isn't interested. He takes his money, quits basketball, buys 100 acres in Mendocino County, and opens a biodynamic winery called Gangle Vineyards. In 2013, his petit syrah\u2014whimsically entitled Gangle Grand Cru Cut\u2014receives a 92 from Wine Spectator.\n\n State of the League: We bid farewell to a champion, but some things are bigger than basketball. Meanwhile, Marc Gasol and Nene are still on the table. Chandler is the thinking man's pick; these two are the studs.\n\n Step 3: Marc Gasol re-signs with the Memphis Grizzlies. \n\n The understated big man was a perfect fit with the Grizz during their surprising 2010-11 season, and the mini-max contract he signs with the team makes perfect sense\u2014so perfect, in fact, that despite virtually every NBA team coveting a slick-passing, team-first, effortlessly bi-lingual 7-footer, there were virtually no rumors that Gasol would do anything but stay in Memphis. League reaction is muted. On the third day after Gasol signs, he gets a text from teammate Tony Allen reading only \"How U.\" A day later, Allen texts again: \"My bad!?! Welcome back Pau!\"\n\n State of the League: Grizzlies still on track to move up in the West. Tony Allen remains God's gift to social media.\n\n Step 4: Indiana Pacers sign Nene. \n\n Nene refuses to believe the Nuggets are the Nuggets with Kenyon Martin and J.R. Smith marooned in China. Smith has plans to build a casino in Macau shaped like all of his tattoos. Martin is experiencing serious culture shock, but confides in Nene that he might be convinced to stick around if that ambassadorship comes through. In Indianapolis, Nene fills out the middle, allowing Tyler Hansborough to reap the glory of a battle-ready interior even as the UNC product prefers to float and avoid rebounding.\n\n State of the League: Stealth team lands major free agent. The Nuggets, who have proven that anything is possible, face the ultimate test of their black magic.\n\n Step 5: Kings Sign Milwaukee's Luc Richard Mbah a Moute. \n\n The developing Kings had been searching for a defense-and-rebounding frontcourt player who wouldn't take shots away from DeMarcus Cousins, Tyreke Evans or Jimmer Fredette. Hayes had been their biggest crush, and they'd rolled out the full Sacramento Treatment\u2014Cake played a 45-minute show of its very similar-sounding hits outside the Courtyard by Marriott where Hayes stayed during his visit to town and Sacramento-based author William Vollmann quickly dashed off a 740-page novel about rebounding, team play and (at Vollmann's insistence) sex tourism. But a quick trip to the printer fis things lovely. The words \"Chuck Hayes\" are replaced in the book by \"Luc Richard Mbah a Moute,\" which swells the page count to 810, but does the trick. Three years, $13.5 million for the gangly UCLA product, and Evans has an athletic teammate that he won't even need to feel bad about not passing to.\n\n State of the League: Sacramento almost lost its franchise, but now they're back on board. Mbah a Moute, a longtime favorite of locker room polls, gets the recognition he deserves. The Bucks will miss him more than they realize, seeing as he accounts for a third of their defense.\n\n Step 6: DeAndre Jordan stays with the Los Angeles Clippers. \n\n Jordan blackmails Donald Sterling into a max deal. If Blake Griffin is the Tim Duncan of the future, then Jordan is the Future Version of every passable center paired with Duncan during the Spurs' shadow dynasty. Given Sterling's track record, and his general shamelessness, it's hard to imagine what kind of unexcavated dirt Jordan could have on him. Sources suggest that Sterling might be North Korea in human form.\n\n State of the League: If the Clippers are going to be the league's Next Big Thing, certain things can never see the light of day. Rest assured, Stern has a hand in this cover-up.\n\n Step 7: Chris Paul and Dwight Howard end up on the Los Angeles Lakers. \n\n With Andrew Bynum and Pau Gasol looking at the front door. Technically, this isn't a free agent signing, but it's a bigger move than anything else we'll get this fall, and it just might be the mightiest off-season coup ever. LeBron and Wade? There are perhaps no two players better-suited for each other than Paul and Howard, the sweet scientist of a point guard probing and dissecting at both ends, and the mighty leaper of a big man whose offensive repertoire gets deeper every year. Compared to this perfect union, Miami got two duplicate pieces and an ugly broken arm (the broken arm is Chris Bosh). Paul is the perfect point guard, and Kobe Bryant, the prototypical shooting guard, can age gracefully with teammates who can't help but make his life easier\u2014and practically force him to give up the ball. This could be the first NBA team to have all its games on national televised, maybe even its own network. \n\n State of the League: Would the Lakers have destroyed the league? Or would the league now be nothing but the Lakers?\n\n Step 8: Lakers amnesty Luke Walton\n\n While Paul adapts well enough to the Los Angeles way of life\u2014he swears that he and Zoe Saldana are \"just good friends\"\u2014Howard falls in with the wrong crowd. Brody Jenner and Avril Lavigne become fixtures at courtside during preseason games, and Howard is photographed hanging around with Tom Sizemore. The team downplays its dismay in public, but makes a panicky move, ercising its amnesty rights on the $11.5 million remaining on Luke Walton's contract and bringing 47-year-old former Dennis Rodman-wrangler Jack Haley out of retirement. The cost: two years, $5 million.\n\n State of the League: Bill Walton weeps, says it's for the guys who never made it. Networks arranges more Young and the Restless roles for Luke in order to calm Bill down.\n\n Step 9: New Jersey Nets Sign Jason Richardson and David West. \n\n The Nets, meanwhile, continue Mikhail Prokohorov's strategy of making sure they appear one step ahead, even if that step leads nowhere in particular. Scooping up Jason Richardson (totally devalued by his stretch in Orlando, where everyone backs up everyone else) and David West (who?) at a discount\u2014the entire NBA has stopped dead in its tracks with news of the Paul/Howard deal\u2014the Nets head to Brooklyn with a more-than-passable squad in place, led by a passably happy Deron Williams.\n\n State of the League: Brooklyn, you have a team. And they're almost certainly better than the Knicks. Jonathan Safran Foer fills the equivalent of Woody Allen's courtside seat, which is kind of an upgrade in its own right, too."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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