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LAS VEGAS — “What are they doing?”

In talking with NBA execs and staffers during my eight-day stay in Vegas (a delightful place to visit in mid-July) for summer league, I was surprised how often this came up in relation to other teams, not to mention at least one prestigious white-shoe law firm.

Usually, front offices basically understand what their rivals are doing or trying to do, even if they don’t necessarily agree with the steps. This year, I felt there was more of a disconnect, with frequent expressions of bewilderment at what was taking place in other locales.

By far, the most common variety of this question came regarding the Kawhi Leonard-Aspiration case. With execs and agents waiting on the outcome just like everyone else, and at least some league business tied up contingent on the outcome, Vegas conversations inevitably included expressions of exasperation at the length of the investigation by the NBA’s chosen law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. This bewilderment had been building in the second half of the season as word leaked that the firm still hadn’t talked to some Clippers personnel. What could be taking them so long?

NBA commissioner Adam Silver partially addressed this in his news conference on Tuesday, saying: “I am not conducting the investigation, nor is the (NBA) office. That’s being conducted by the Wachtell law firm, independent of the league.”

While that is true, the hands-off party line only goes so far. The NBA is the one paying the firm and presumably is able to communicate its interest in concluding the investigation sometime before Leonard retires. On the streets of Vegas last week, wisecracks about Wachtell’s billable hours were as common as the smell of stale puke.

However, Silver’s most interesting news conference comment on this case largely escaped scrutiny when he said, “I’m hopeful that it will wrap up this summer.” That seems notable not only because there is a trade on hold until it does, but because there is a second step to the process that seems at least somewhat out of Silver’s hands.

Remember, the investigation isn’t the end of the process as much as the beginning of the next process. The NBA’s collective bargaining agreement specifies that a cap-circumvention case must be tried before a system arbitrator and then potentially go through an appeals process before any penalty can be handed down by the commissioner. Are we sure this is all getting done in two and a half months?

Seemingly, the only pathways to an expeditious resolution are if the investigation produces no evidence of wrongdoing — can you imagine if, after all this time, Wachtell comes back and says, “We got nothing?” — or if Steve Ballmer and the Clippers basically “plea bargain” to certain penalties and don’t go through the remaining steps of the process.

So how does this get resolved? And can the Clippers and Raptors get their Leonard trade to the finish line before the season starts? It certainly seems at least possible that we have a limbo situation where Brandon Ingram and Gradey Dick are still technically Raptors when training camp starts in October, and Leonard is still technically a Clipper.

Meanwhile, some of the potential penalties the league might impose on the Clippers are basically dying on the vine. Voiding Leonard’s contract seems like less of a penalty when there’s only one year left on it. It also would be hugely distorting to the rest of the league now that all the cap room is gone, in a way that wouldn’t have been had the decision been made in, say, May. The best Clippers asset that could have been stripped was the fifth pick in the 2026 draft, which has now been used on Keaton Wagler. Forfeiture of future Clipper draft picks (Indiana’s in 2029 and their own from 2030 to 2033) would remain on the table, obviously; Silver can still drop the hammer if he deems it appropriate.

What are the Raptors doing?

Speaking of which, the “What are they doing?” question applied to the Raptors as well. League execs knew that any penalty Leonard faced from this case wasn’t going to magically vanish because he got traded. This shouldn’t have been a surprise to the Raptors, especially since GM Bobby Webster was a lawyer in the league office before Masai Ujiri lured him up north.

Maybe it turns out fine, but what if Leonard comes out of this with a lengthy suspension, or his contract is voided, or some other wrinkle comes up? The Raptors agreed to this deal and took essentially any other offseason business off the table, and it sets up a potentially awkward reuniting with Ingram if the deal either falls through or can’t be completed by the fall.

What are the Bucks doing?

And while we’re on the topic of cap circumvention, the “What are the Bucks doing?” question was probably met with more eye rolls than any other topic. In what is seemingly a redux of the Joe Smith saga, Milwaukee signed reserve guard Gary Trent Jr. to a deal worth barely more than the minimum in the summer of 2025 — when it was all the Bucks could offer — and then came back with an announced agreement on a four-year, $64 million deal for Trent this July.

One problem: Trent had a horrible 2025-26 season and was likely looking at minimum deals or slightly better this summer. To have him sign such an outlier deal seems to be a glaring example of circumvention, because the only other explanation is that it’s the most hilarious contract in league annals. (Special shoutout to my colleague David Aldridge, who blurted out, “That’s Ian Mahinmi money!” when he heard about the deal.)

The league announced it will be investigating. As it only involves one team, one player and his agency, and no outside companies like Aspiration, this appears to be a much easier investigation for the league and (possibly) Wachtell than the Leonard case. They can probably wrap this up in a tidy 17 months or so.

Jokes aside, one key section of the CBA is likely to hurt the Bucks’ case: The league’s “if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck” section on circumvention in Article XIII, Section 2d:

“A violation of Section 2(a) or 2(b) above may be proven by direct or circumstantial evidence, including, but not limited to, evidence that a Player Contract or any term or provision thereof cannot rationally be explained in the absence of conduct violative of Section 2(a) or 2(b).”

Four years and $64 million for Gray Trent Jr. is the definition of “cannot rationally be explained.” My BORD$ valuation had him rated as a minimum.

Of course, the biggest penalty the league could impose is making the Bucks honor this contract. It would be doing Milwaukee a huge favor if it doesn’t decide to void the deal, essentially letting the Bucks get away with signing Trent to a minimum a year ago. If you’re wondering about other penalties, Milwaukee has traded most of its future draft picks but still possesses firsts in 2031, 2032 and 2033.

In the meantime, this is another case where swiftness matters. Will Trent be on the Bucks’ roster on opening night?

What are the Pelicans doing?

The league’s most puzzling franchise continues to amaze onlookers. New Orleans held out second-year pros Jeremiah Fears and Derik Queen from summer league despite less-than-dominant rookie seasons. While the case can be made that they could use the break after playing more than 2,000 regular-season minutes during the 2025-26 season, other high-minutes rookies from their draft class played this summer, notably Utah’s Ace Bailey and Memphis’ Cedric Coward, who were picked in the same range as Fears and Queen.

But what really amazed people was not the Pelicans’ summer-league choices, but their roster moves … or lack thereof. New Orleans went 26-56 last season and only reached that lofty total because several of its rivals were blatantly tanking in the second half of the season. Despite that, the Pelicans have made no trades or free-agent signings this offseason and, as of today, would be running it back with 14 of the same 15 players who finished the season a year ago. Kevon Looney, who played 308 minutes, is the only departure, and the only new face is 59th pick Jaron Pierre Jr.

New Orleans even went to the trouble of bringing back soon-to-be 38-year-old center DeAndre Jordan on a two-year minimum deal, one that would cost it nearly double per season what he’d get on a one-year pact because of the discount on one-year vet minimum contracts. While Jordan commands respect in the locker room, he only played 12 games last season. It’s not clear why they felt the need to go that far to retain him.

More glaringly, the Pels still haven’t addressed their lack of a starting-caliber center and appear set to begin the season with what is, on paper, the league’s 30th-best collection of fives.

Perhaps a late-summer deal emerges. The Pels still have their exception money, an open roster spot and $8 million breathing room below the tax line. Chatter about a Trey Murphy trade, while lessened, hasn’t vanished and is one of many potential pieces of league business that could resurface once LeBron James’ next destination becomes clear.

At this point, however, I would be hard-pressed to name a worse-performing team in recent history that brought back the exact same roster from a year earlier.

What are the Lakers doing?

The Lakers’ contractual choices have also been a hot topic — one that seemingly underscores the pressure the front office feels to deliver for a new owner and to impress superstar guard Luka Dončić as he winds toward the end of his current contract. He can be a free agent in 2028.

In a summer where most role players, and even some starters, had to either take short deals or accept longer ones without full guarantees, the Lakers raised eyebrows by giving out fully guaranteed four-year deals with player options to three different players in free agency: Walker Kessler, Sandro Mamukelashvili and Quentin Grimes. They also gave a player option on Collin Sexton’s two-year deal for the room exception.

The trade of Deandre Ayton also raised eyebrows, as it generated just $2.1 million in extra cap room. While that money (about $1.4 million of it, technically) was needed to complete their free-agent deals on the terms that were agreed to, the wiggle room could have been created in other ways, such as by trading or stretching Dalton Knecht. The Lakers also resisted using the stretch provision on Jarred Vanderbilt, which I think was probably wise. He can be a salary match next summer.

L.A. also could have generated room by the “unlikely incentives” cap-room trick — essentially putting in terms for the contracts of Grimes and Kessler that contained about $700,000 worth of incentives deemed unlikely by the league for cap purposes but still were very attainable for the player. A 60-games-played incentive for Kessler would have worked, for instance (he played a combined 63 games the past two seasons), or a 35 percent 3-point shooting incentive for Grimes, whose 33.6 percent mark last year was an outlier on the low side.

It seems quite possible the Lakers wanted Ayton gone anyway, so perhaps the cap shenanigans I mentioned above weren’t needed. However, the loss of Ayton, in concert with a frothy backup-center market, also left the Lakers scraping the barrel in search of backup centers and ending up with Looney, who was all but unplayable for a 26-win Pelicans team last year. The Lakers are trying to assemble lob threats around Dončić’s pick-and-roll wizardry, but Looney had one dunk in 308 minutes last season.

What are the Blazers doing?

Portland’s new ownership under Tom Dundon has already raised eyebrows with his scorched-earth cost-cutting; you half-expected to see new coach Micah Nori loading basketballs and equipment into a minivan to drive players to their summer-league games. The Blazers, for what it’s worth, stayed at the high-brow Wynn hotel, although their traveling contingent was notably smaller than virtually every other squad’s.

However, it’s the Blazers’ face-off with the city of Portland over renovations to the 30-year-old Moda Center that recently became the much bigger story. It seemed to have even perplexed Silver.

“I was hoping more progress would have been made by now on that agreement,” Silver said Tuesday. “It seems to have gone off track in various ways.”

While we’ve seen this movie enough times to know that it likely ends with a resolution between team and city, there has been an underlying question of whether Dundon secretly (or maybe not-so-secretly, given his extremely lukewarm embrace of the city) would prefer to relocate from Portland to someplace else.

But within NBA circles, the obvious question has been to ask where, exactly, he would go. Surely the league wouldn’t let Dundon mess up a big expansion payday by grabbing turf in Seattle or Las Vegas. Some have suggested Austin or Nashville, but those two locales appear to be blocked off by the Spurs and Grizzlies, respectively, both of whom seem on track to play multiple “home-ish” games in those two cities in future seasons.

Others note that Dundon might access Lenovo Center in Raleigh, N.C., the home arena of the NHL’s Dundon-owned Carolina Hurricanes. However, having been in that building as recently as March, it surely would be an immediate contender for the NBA’s worst. It’s also the old-style “parking lot in the middle of nowhere” model. A recently begun $300 million remodel may improve things on the inside somewhat.

After that, the domestic pickings get slim. Kansas City? St. Louis? Bring the NBA back to Rochester or Tri-Cities? None of the places I’ve mentioned appear obviously better than Portland — and a few seem demonstrably worse.