To jog your memory, in the summer of ’05 the Cavs were looking for a sharpshooting guard to compliment LeBron’s He-Can-Do-Everything-But-Shoot game.  And as it happened, Ray Allen and Michael Redd were on the market (note: this is back when Redd had a full compliment of ligaments and cartilage).  At that point, Cavs management was still handling LeBron like a 15 year-old on a second date with a Playmate—the range of possible outcomes stretching from a happy future in plastics to wetting oneself.  And the Cavs wet themselves.

They offered Ray Allen the max, but he turned it down, taking the max in Seattle, instead.  So the Cavs made a big push for Michael Redd, offering him the max as well.  It would have been kind of like the Rashard Griffith deal in Orlando: hugely overpaying a player because he’s a great fit.  But Redd rejected the offer, staying with the Bucks for the max.  So the Cavs went out and signed Larry Hughes for $70 million over five years.  God that was a terrible move, and not just in hindsight.  Forget that Hughes had been an underachiever for his entire career until that contract year, the Cavs were looking for a shooter (they proclaimed it) and Hughes was a terrible shooter.  He made 28% from 3 that season (he’s currently at 31% for his career) and 43% overall.  And yes, his injuries while with the Cavs also played a role in his ineffectiveness, but considering that Hughes had only played 70 games in a season twice in his career to that point (they signed him after he managed only 61 games in the ’04 – ’05 season), his frailty was hardly a surprise.

As I’ve mentioned numerous times before, almost all NBA teams suffer from salary cap incontinence; they simply can’t hold on to cap space.  They have to spend it.  In this case, even though the Cavs had the rights to LeBron James for two more seasons, they felt pressured to make a splash and put some big talent (or what they believed to be big talent) next to him.  But importantly, the biggest problem wasn’t the absurd salary, it was the years.  A five year commitment?  Insane.  And you’ll see plenty of that insanity this summer, if possible.

The big question of the summer is whether teams will have enough cap space to spend as stupidly as they so desperately want to.  In a normal market, unusually tight budgets and an unusually large pool of talent should drive down the price of that talent.  And right now there are only a handful of teams that project to have enough cap space to get a max player.  But from the gazillionty WHAT IF? NBA articles clogging the internet tubes, it seems that there are numerous legitimately plausible options for teams to create significant cap space.  And if there’s anything we know about NBA teams, it’s that they will spend if they possibly can.  Tomorrow I’ll take a look at some of the spending opportunities, including the opportunity to stuff the pockets of a certain long-haired Argentinian