It’s that time again: This weekend, players from all around the league will be returning to their respective teams and starting to get ready for a month-long preseason, culminating in the regular season tip-off on October 31.

Four teams are getting a head start. The Suns, Clippers, Spurs, and Sixers tomorrow will head to Europe for their training camps, spending a week overseas while playing preseason games in Italy, Spain, France, Russia, and Germany as part of Commissioner David Stern’s ongoing effort to market the NBA internationally.

With everything ready to roll, you’d think clubs would have the basic stuff settled — like, for instance, who is going to be on the roster. It’s shocking how many don’t. Just look at the two local teams, both of whom are juggling even as they prepare for camp.The Nets and Knicks are trying to jettison Jeff McInnis and Maurice Taylor, respectively, while each also has side issues to work out — Vince Carter’s extension for New Jersey, or acquiring another player to replace Taylor for the Knicks. Even the basic stuff isn’t done yet: The Nets didn’t sign second-round pick Hassan Adams until yesterday.

We’ll talk more about those clubs next week, but in the meantime the other 28 teams have plenty of unfinished business as well. As we get ready to open camp, let’s look at the top unanswered questions:

Where will Bonzi Wells end up? Wells went into the summer expecting to be a hot commodity after his stellar playoff performance for Sacramento. Wells thought so highly of his prospects that he turned down a five-year, $36 million offer from the Kings, only to find himself high and dry as teams around the league used their money on other players and the market for him dried up.

Wells now finds his options extremely limited. Returning to the Kings isn’t an option, because Sacramento is close to the luxury tax threshold. So, he has to either sign someplace else or arrange a sign-and-trade deal in which the Kings don’t take back any salary. Based upon the speed of this affair, I believe that’s where things may be headed (sign-and-trade deals are notoriously slow-moving).

If so, the key player here is Houston, which has a $4.2 million trade exception it can use to get Wells from the Kings without Sacramento taking on salary (they’d get a draft choice), and could ink him to a deal that’s more in line with his value. One presumes this deal would already have been made if the Rockets wanted Wells, which makes me think they’d rather get a power forward or point guard and are looking for a three-way trade to bring one or the other in. The idea would be to convey Wells to a third team that needs a shooting guard (perhaps Denver or Orlando) and send back a player the Rockets would find more useful (like, say, Joe Smith or Carlos Arroyo).

Wells has few other alternatives because almost nobody has the cap space to give him the deal he wants, although one option might be to ink a one-year deal with Charlotte. More on that in a minute.

What about the other quality free agents? Wells isn’t the only one without a contract for this year. A few other players who would certainly make many rotations are unsigned — Keith Van Horn, DerMarr Johnson, and Melvin Ely. The Nets have long been Ely admirers but he’s in limbo right now, as the Bobcats made a one-year tender to make him a restricted free agent but have done nothing further. A sign-and-trade deal with Phoenix fell through and it now appears that he may have to take the one-year deal and try again next summer.

Van Horn and Johnson have talked to Denver in fits and starts, but both cases have gone cold of late as the Nuggets near the luxury tax limit. Both are decent bench players who can shoot. Throw in Van Horn’s New Jersey connections and one might wonder why the Nets aren’t involved; the two-word answer is “luxury tax.” That’s effectively cut off about half the teams in the league for those two and Ely, which is why it’s taken them so long to find a roster spot.

Who will get extensions? The first-round draft picks from the epic draft class of 2003 are eligible for contract extensions this summer, and the four biggest names — LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Carmelo Anthony, and Chris Bosh — have already signed them, as have Phoenix’s Leandro Barbosa and Boston’s Kendrick Perkins. But between now and October 31, 17 other players from that class will have a chance to sign the dotted line — or become restricted free agents next summer.

Five players in particular present interesting cases: Dallas’s Josh Howard, Chicago’s Kirk Hinrich, Phoenix’s Boris Diaw, New Orleans/Oklahoma City’s David West, and the Clippers’s Chris Kaman. All five have established themselves as solid starters, but still fall well short of being the kind of All-Star caliber performers who could command extensions for the maximum.

Thus, all five face an interesting dilemma. They can take guaranteed money now for less than the max (say in the $8 million to $10 million a year range), or they can gamble on a big season heading into free agency and hope for greater riches there. Looking at how many big-name restricted free agents got crazy money the past couple years (Joe Johnson, Sam Dalembert, Eddy Curry, Tyson Chandler, and Nene, to name a few), the latter strategy is looking awfully enticing. That, in turn, probably explains why none of the five has signed an extension yet.

Will the Bobcats spend any money? I spend a lot of time talking about the salary cap, but this may be the first time I’ve brought up the salary floor. Charlotte’s payroll is so low right now that’s it’s actually several million dollars below the league’s minimum salary requirement of $39.88 million — by my count, they’re about $4 million short if they lose Ely.

This is bad news if you’re a Bobcats fan — nobody wants to root for a cheapskate — but it’s wonderful news if you’re Jake Voskuhl or Brevin Knight. The league rule on the salary floor says that if a team is below the minimum salary, the NBA collects the difference from that club and redistributes it to the players — about a half million in free money for everyone on the roster. What a country!

Here’s a better way for the Bobcats to spend the loot — offer Bonzi Wells a one-year deal for $4 million. The team badly needs a shooting guard, and the rest of the roster is solid enough that they’ll win quite a few games if they can add a decent wingman. Wells will play hard and behave if he knows he’s back on the market next summer, and then he can get a better contract. Basically, everybody wins. We’ll see how or if Charlotte decides to spend the remaining money, but this seems the most obvious solution.