Talked to Happy Walters, one of Mickael Pietrus’ agents, Sunday afternoon and was told that MP is still in Paris and does not plan on attending today’s Media Day session at Warriors HQ.
This does NOT mean that Pietrus is staging a holdout; he can “sign” the Warriors’ one-year, $3.47 million qualifying offer by fax, if necessary. But it does cut things close in terms of making the start of training camp, which begins Tuesday at 10 a.m., Hawaii time.
Walters said he was “cautiously optimistic” something would be resolved for Pietrus in the next 24 hours, although he wouldn’t give any more details than that. One thing Walters ruled out was having Pietrus flee to play in Europe, a threat that was made last week in a Sporting News article by the agent for Cleveland Cavaliers guard Sasha Pavlovic, who’s stuck in the same restricted-free-agent vortex as Pietrus.
It’s still hard to see how this plays out as anything other than Pietrus signing the qualifying offer — after all, Chris Mullin has had months to OK a sign-and-trade, so why would he suddenly change his mind now? — but it appears discussions will go down to the absolute wire.

– Geoff Lepper