The Portland Trail Blazers have issued a warning of sorts to other NBA teams about signing free agent and former Trail Blazers player Darius Miles. In a nutshell, if some other team signs Miles to a contract and has Miles appear in two games, it will wreck the Trail Blazers cap space situation and hamper the team's ability to sign free agents this summer.

The email authored by Trail Blazers President Larry Miller was obtained by Yahoo! Sports and made public yesterday. Its never a good thing when internal emails are made public, but the Trail Blazers had to know that a rival team would expose this information. Trail Blazers GM Kevin Pritchard is very good at what he does and has made several of his counterparts with other teams look pretty bad over the past few years. Pritchard has made a series of shrewd trades and there may be some NBA GM's who are still stinging from coming out on the losing end of those deals.

My guess would be that former Trail Blazers Assistant GM Mark Warkentein will try to stick it to Pritchard and the Trail Blazers by signing Miles and playing him for the 2 games required to ruin the Trail Blazers cap space for this summer. Warkentein is now with the Denver Nuggets and has carried a grudge for the Trail Blazers organization ever since he departed a few years back. And the Nuggets are one of the chief rivals of the Blazers now and reside in the same division so if they can cripple their opponent on the free agent market, they might think long and hard about signing Miles.

I am no lawyer, but I don't think the Trail Blazers have much of a case against other NBA teams that sign Miles. If he is cleared to play by another team and signed to a contract, there's not much the team can do. The NBA Players Association would likely file a grievance against the Trail Blazers if they made any attempt to stop Miles from playing.

And don't think that Darius Miles doesn't carry the same grudge that Warkentein does. Not only does Miles want his guaranteed money (which he will collect regardless of if he plays another NBA game), but he also wants to stick it to Pritchard and the Trail Blazers. So if he can suit up for 2 more games and ruin the Blazers cap flexibility for this summer, it will give him great satisfaction.

I'd be shocked not to see another team sign Miles and play him for 2 games at least. The only downside for a team who will sign Miles to a pro-rated minimum contract is that after tomorrow, any player signed to a contract will have the contract guaranteed for the remainder of the year. So a team won't be able to sign Miles to a 10-day contract, play him in 2 games and then release him.

But for a team like the Nuggets, I can see them taking the short term hit on Miles guaranteed contract in order to land a major blow against one of their division rivals.