Welcome to IP’s new column about the NBA. My hope is that you make this a regular stop on your weekly attempt to find all news and opinion relevant to the game of basketball. Like the big boys, at sites I can’t name, I too have a huge staff of researchers and an even “huge-er” staff of editors and people in general who have the sole responsibility of making me look good. It is not an easy job.
Join me won’t you as every week (or so) I take a look at the issues that players, coaches, fans, and us leaches in the media are talking about. I hope this entertains and I definitely hope this column informs even the most casual fan.
The first column will be a two-part bonanza. This week I’ll look at the 5 best moves of this offseason. I’ll put every move under the microscope and tell you which 5 are going to have the most positive impact this season.
Then next week, as you might have guessed, I will take a look at the 5 worst moves of this offseason….and I think I will have a few that might surprise you.
Shaq’s new team, Shaq’s old team, and teams that have nothing to do with Shaq at all. Let’s look at the 5 best moves of the NBA offseason.
The 5 Best Moves :
5) The Lakers re-hire Phil Jackson:
Rudy T is a very nice man. He gets socked in the melon so hard that he has to retire, and then he leads a gutsy group of players to two titles in a few Jordan-less years. Rudy, however, isn’t Phil Jackson.
It was reported that when Rudy first met Kobe Bryant he had with him a video tape of highlights. Each highlight had a clip of Kobe Bryant shooting the basketball. The message was clear: This team is yours….I am but a hired babysitter.
We all saw what Kobe did armed with that. He played well, but alienated his team and dominated the ball way too much, especially early on in the season. Rudy then quit because of “health” reasons. Now it could have been health, it also could have been because he smelled the train wreck a mile away and saw his coaching legacy being burnt up into the smoggy L.A. sky. Either way, exit stage left for Rudy…it was nice, but this was a job way above your skills.
Enter Phil Jackson. PJ should bring some discipline and some tenacity to a team that was so bad on defense last year that I think Rasho Nesterovic is still doing a lay-up drill in the Staples Center. And folks, Rasho sucks.
Phil should be able to get the team to play ball closer to the way it needs to be played for that team to win games. Is he going to turn Kobe Bryant into the most selfless player in history? No. But he will do just enough that the team will at least start to play basketball in a way that maximizes the impact of all of its weapons, not just the most highly paid one.
L.A., it appears, seems relevant again.
4) The Heat trade for Jason Williams, James Posey, and Antoine Walker.
You can say what you want about these three players, and God knows I think Antoine Walker is generally a waste of NBA air, but here is the deal: It almost never happens that a final 4 team resigns its best player, is almost capped out, and STILL adds this much raw talent to its roster. That alone makes this whole deal all the more impressive.
Are there some question marks here? Of course there are. What we do know is that Walker will be better off the bench than he was a starter. We do know that Jason Williams has improved almost two-fold over the player he was just 4 years ago. We do know that James Posey can lock people down even better than Eddie Jones at this stage in their respective careers.
When you consider that the Heat didn’t need to add much to get to the finals, and you realize they just added quite a bit in a situation where teams usually struggle adding the final piece to the puzzle, you see why this move rates high.
Finally, there is almost no risk here. If Walker busts they don’t lose a starter, PF is already manned by the improving Haslem. If Williams busts they don’t lose a starter because they will probably be resigning Damon Jones…or a Damon Jones-like gunner. The only risk is if Posey busts because they don’t have a great replacement for him AND he adds something that last year’s team needed: defense.
High reward/low risk. Sounds like a good deal.
3) The Cavs sign Larry Hughes:
Opinions of Larry Hughes vary. I’ve read many folks that claim that Hughes’ defense is overrated and that he is nothing more than a tweener who was in a system designed around him and Gil Arenas chucking the ball all over creation. I think the person that wrote that is an idiot….but we all have our opinions don’t we?
I think Larry Hughes is actually, or WAS actually, a pretty underrated defender and a player whose versatility was actually a huge strength as opposed to the weakness that it can be in some “tweeners”. I say was underrated because once you get the kind of money he got in the offseason, someone is rating something pretty damn high.
Hughes is going to help Lebron James in several ways.
First, he can set James up. The guy was just as valuable passing the ball last year as Arenas was, and in fact his play helped Arenas become a better player statistically than he would probably be on teams with les versatile SG’s.
Second, he can take the opposing team’s best offensive player because he is a quality defender with solid on-ball skills. This will allow James to always guard the lesser threat and save more energy for doing the things that he does best.
Lastly, he can take some of the scoring load off Z and Lebron. It seemed last year that only Drew Gooden could shoulder that load, and Gooden really isn’t reliable enough as a player or person to commit to being that 3rd cog in the Cav machine. Hughes is easily skilled enough to be relied on to be a teams 2nd best scorer, but on the Cavs he won’t even be needed for that. This should pose several problems for opposing teams and his addition should also free up Illgauskus even more to do Z-type things inside.
Taken in it’s totality I think this signing was actually even better and made more sense than most of the other SG’s who got huge money this year….even if it can be argued he isn’t the best of the bunch.
2) The Knicks hire Larry Brown:
If you know up front that he will screw you over in 3 years. If you know up front that he will alienate and not develop any young superstars; if you know that you will have to deal with his off-the-handle rantings about trading every player who isn’t hard-wired like Mark Jackson, then you will love having Larry Brown as your head coach.
Simply put the man gets teams to win. I don’t know why he finds it so appealing to take garbage teams and make them just above mediocre. I don’t know why he sabotages almost every team he has ever been involved with….I don’t understand that kind of mental disorder. What I do understand is that if your team is horrible, you want this man coaching it for at least 3 seasons.
The Knicks fit the bill on almost every level for Brown. They are an underachieving lot who require a coach who understands defense and effort. They have a GM who tries hard to get players that the team feels can help it win. The owner is an NBA moron with VERY deep pockets. The media will let him be the headline-whore that he loves to be.
But here is the thing: Find me one serious analyst that believes the Knicks won’t win more games next year than they did last year. You can’t…because they will. And that’s why he was a big addition.
1) The Miami Heat get Shaq to take a paycut:
No move had more impact on any team than this did for the Heat.
First, it allowed them to keep the human mismatch. Say what you like about his skills eroding, there is no greater mismatch in the NBA than Shaq vs your average center.
Second, the pay cut helped them address the rest of their team. Riley has a budget. Riley has orders to not pay too much in luxury tax this season or any other, no matter how close the team is to winning it all. The simple fact is that they could not have acquired Williams, Posey, and Walker without Shaq taking some cash from off of his deal. It’s a credit to both sides here. The team got Shaq to do it even after Shaq said he would never pull a “KG” and take less, and Shaq gets credit for making the final decision to actually leave money on the table. And not just some money….an ass-load of money.
Make no mistake about it; this deal isn’t about the money Shaq makes in 2009. This was a deal made to make 2 more runs at a ring with an improved team and the flexibility to add to a post-Shaq world for the Miami Heat. When you see how much more Heat merchandise was sold because of Shaq this was also a stab at keeping him involved with the team even past his playing days. We are talking about stake in the franchise that goes deeper than just signing autographs for the season ticket holders, and for longer than a 5 year deal. They wanted to make Shaq a “Heat lifer” and this deal probably did it.
That does it for this week. Those are my top 5 moves from the 2005 offseason.
Do NOT forget to join me next week when I give a much needed written bashing to some teams that seem to have no clue how to run an NBA franchise. It’s PTC’s Top 5 Worst Moves of the NBA Offseason.
(Questions? Comments. Email me.)
