This is the second part of my two-part column that is looking at this off-season and the 5 best, and worst, moves that were made. We started it off last week looking at the teams who made the best moves and should reap the most benefits from a summer well-spent. This week, we’re going to flip the script a bit and wade into the murky waters of incompetence and ineptitude that makes up most of the NBA’s franchises.
Some of you will see some old familiar faces on this list…..it probably isn’t a shock to see the Clippers and Hawks on any list that talks about stupidity. However, I’m also going to make the case against some moves that I think have been overrated by the mainstream press and moves by some normally smart teams, that could blow up in their faces.
Before we go further let me just quickly recap the Top 5 Best Moves of this off-season:
5) The Lakers re-hire Phil Jackson
4) The Heat acquire Williams, Posey, and Walker
3) The Cavs sign Larry Hughes
2) The Knicks hire Larry Brown
1) The Heat re-sign Shaquille Oneal
Those were the best of the best, let’s break down the very worst of the 2005 off-season:
The 5 Worst Moves:
5) The Hawks Redundancy Department of Redundancy:
This offseason held so much promise for the Hawks. They were sitting on a ton of cash, they had 2 very good rookie players who were getting better every month, they had the #2 pick in the draft, and they had an excited new group of owners looking to inject life into the city.
What they ended up with was not a lot of cash, 5 players that all are best at wing positions, an ownership group in total chaos, and the only injection that was given to the city was that of the lethal variety.
It should have all been so simple. Fight the urge to take the SF from North Carolina, draft the best PG on your board. Take your money and buy up as many big men as you possibly can and look to find a rugged rebounding PF who didn’t need the ball to be effective.
The first mistake was drafting Marvin Williams. Now, will Marvin be a good player? I think he probably will be. The problem is that your current SF is already a darn good player and just came out of HS. Benching him will do him NO good, and there is a more-than-good chance you won’t get equal value back on a trade. Not trading him will probably leave him disgruntled and worthless to you.
Now, you could put Marvin at PF, but it seems pretty clear that his natural fit is SF and you are already starting an undersized SF at PF in Al Harrington, who some would say is a less flashy version of Marvin to begin with.
Why didn’t they just draft PG? I don’t know. It isn’t as if they had many options there, unless you count Tony Delk (who incidentally has compared the Hawks to the situation in Afghanistan!). A cheap alternative at PG would have been a great idea for a team with young wing players like Josh Smith and Josh Childress. What they did at PG instead was mistake #2…..
“Hey, let’s pay 70 million dollars for a solid-yet-unspectacular SG, and let’s make him a PG just because he isn’t all that selfish.”
I wonder if that’s the thought that Hawks owners woke up with about 3 weeks ago. The team already had talented wing players, remember it had just drafted yet ANOTHER one in Marvin Williams. So of course they needed a 32nd talented wing player to complete the whole Time-Life commemorative set. But this time they were gonna show they weren’t no dummies. This time they were going to take that wing player and put him at a position they actually needed. It’s kinda like an alcoholic drinking 26 bottles of Nyquil for a cold. It seems like a better idea before you actually do it….afterwards you see that all it did was make the big problem much much worse.
Around 100 million bucks later they now have a PG that has never run a team, and a good SF that they have to bench (either Smith or Williams). Great job Atlanta. The only way to top this off would be to buy out the only minority owner with enough sense to try to stop all this from happening…..oh wait….you did that too. Wonderful.
4) Simmons out; Mobley in:
Ya know I’ve long argued that the Clippers catch a lot of undue flack about their unwillingness to overpay mediocre players. In most of the cases I’ve felt that the Clips were justified in letting overrated players leave for greener pastures….as long as they resigned the big guns. Once they made the move to keep Elton Brand and Corey Maggette I was willing to cut them some slack and I was happy to see that the rest of the mainstream media idiots were doing the same.
Then they went nuts.
Now, when they let Bobby Simmons go I was in a wait-and-see mode. I saw the media nail them, yet again, for letting the Most Improved Player go to the Bucks. Truthfully, the Bucks did overpay (5 years 47 million) , and thus I was willing to let the Clips slide. I certainly felt the money spent on Simmons would be worth it, but at the same time I figured the Clips could plug in a player that could fill the breech until they got into the lottery once again. Well as it turns out, that was wishful thinking.
In comes Cuttino Mobley, who’s claim to fame is getting booted out of teams because his game is so worthless that teams can’t win when he plays. Do NOT get me wrong, I think Cuttino is a great guy and honestly I think he’s a credit to the game from a personality standpoint. He’s well spoken, he seems like he genuinely wants to win, and you don’t hear about him in the news hauling off and cold-cocking white-boys for sport. (Yeah I’m looking at your KG)
The problem is that Mobley isn’t very good, and what’s worse is that he’s even less valuable. He’s a chucker who doesn’t play very good defense….and really never has. Every Gm who has had him has decided the team would be better if he weren’t on it. Be it respected Gm’s like those in Houston and Sacramento, or guys who don’t even have jobs anymore like the “hockey-guy” formerly in Orlando. Point is, he isn’t gonna help you very much.
Well the Clippers decided to pay him 5 years $42 million, for those counting at home that’s about $1 million less than Bobby Simmons got. Here’s the rub. Bobby is taller, doesn’t need the ball as much, is 6 years younger, and allows Corey Maggette to play SG instead of SF.
Once again, the Clippers screw it up.
3) The Grizz let Swift go:
I don’t know what’s worse: Playing a stupid platoon system that hurts your best players like Pau Gasol and Stomile Swift, playing inferior players like Lorenzen Wright OVER Stomile Swift, or just deciding to hell with Stomile Swift and letting go to a big time rival like the Rockets.
Now I’m sure Jerry West is thinking like 45 moves ahead of me and he has it all planned out. I’m sure there is a good reason he’s paid Brian Cardinal 47 gazillion bucks. I’m sure picking up Eddie Jones wasn’t a total waste of everyone time, but until I see that 45th move I’m gonna call out “His Logo-ness”.
We’re talking about a big man, in Swift, with a healthy FG% of 45% and with a rebounding rate (% of missed shots rebounded by X player while on the court) is higher than more hyped players like Rasheed Wallace and Shareef Abdur Rahim. And yet the Griz decided to let him go for nothing.
What it does now is seriously hurt the depth of Memphis and it makes the Rockets serious title contenders. It gives them a quick leaper to compensate for Ming’s plodding game, and it gives the team another high-riser to pair with T-Mac.
I don’t understand this move and I think it’s going to be a huge blow for the Grizzlies.
2) The Knicks not using the “Allan Houston Clause” on freaking Allan Houston:
I get it. Owner James Dolan has more money than Jesus, Donald Trump, and my testis combined. I get that. However, we are talking about the amnesty clause in which a team can cut a player and be exempt from paying the luxury tax for that player. In NBA circles the clause had acquired the nickname of the “Allan Houston Clause” because his contract was so undeniably horrid, that it was just assumed by any clear thinking person that the team would get rid of the last 2 years and 40 million in luxury tax money on that puppy.
However, James Dolan isn’t a clear thinking man when it comes to matters of the NBA. Instead of using the “Allan Houston Clause” on Allan Houston, they instead used it on an overpaid backup in Jerome Williams who was tough and was one of the few players that actually provided spark and defense…..ya know, things the team has very little of.
The move cost the team a functioning player in Jerome, as Houston is hurt with a bum leg, and cost James Dolan about 20 million dollars (the difference in savings between Williams and Houston. I have no clue how this man got rich, but it certainly wasn’t because he blew 20 million bucks for no reason. This move still makes my head spin.
1) The Nets suddenly get brain-dead:
It isn’t every day that a GM can make a move that takes his team into being the top 3 within the conference. It isn’t every day that you can make that move for what amounts to the MLE. And yet, here the Nets were with the ability to add Shareef Abdur Rahim, for way less money than he is worth, and the team doesn’t do it because it’s worried about an injury that happened so long ago…..I’m not even positive Brittany Spears was born yet.
Here’s the deal, the Nets’ doctors could not pass SAR on a physical performed on him because of what the team is calling a “problem” with his right knee. Now, this is a concern that was never detected by his last 2 teams AND GM Rod Thorn admitted that Rahim had never missed a game in 8 years because of it.
The question is: What on earth was Thorn trying to accomplish.
I know the easy answer is that he was trying to protect his team from getting into a long term deal with a player who he considered damaged goods. But my guess is that something else was in play. The team was trying to work a separate deal with SAR AFTER they publicly disclosed their medical concerns. Is it possible that Thorn was trying to get SAR’s stock so low that he could actually get him cheaper than the MLE? Was he trying to play hardball with a player so that he could spend less money? I think he was. I think he wanted to take all of Rahim’s leverage away from him without lying and this was his best way to do that. I think getting an all-star for the MLE wasn’t enough of a bargain for him, and he wanted to go the whole nine yards.
We will know in the next few years just how right Thorn was. If SAR suffers injury after injury then Thorn was playing it smart. Lord knows any team with Vince Carter on it has to be careful when it comes to investing money on injury-prone players. However, the fact that Thorn still extended a modified version of that contract to SAR AFTER he failed his physical, tells me that his concerns ran only so deep.
In my view the Nets should have just shut up, gotten a huge steal with the Rahim signing, and went on to challenge for the Eastern Conference. Now they will be lucky to get out of the 2nd round of the playoffs……and NO Marc Jackson is not an acceptable alternative!!
Well folks, there you have it. Those are the 5 moves that will have fans scratching their heads by the end of the season. Join me next week for an even better column when I say something very smart, and I possibly include some view mail.
Before I go, though, I would like to thank Patrick Nguyen for his shout-out last week. I also urge all of you to read his work. His most recent On the Offense talks about the sad sad MLS and the decision by the NCAA to overturn that stupid ruling regarding the FSU Seminoles. Gee, you’d think the NCAA would actually ask the tribe FIRST if had any problem because it went about making stupid rulings. Apparently those high up the food chain like to do the thinking and feeling FOR people, since obviously they are too stupid to think for themselves.
Anyhow, give him a read.
Also go read Dr. Jay Gauss’ Pine Tar For Sale. “Jay has a voice that could make a wolverine purr and suits, so fine, he makes Sinatra look like a hobo. In other words, Jay Gauss is the balls.”
Questions? Comments? I’m “ain’t” scared
