Free Ballin' » michael redd http://freeballinblog.com Michael Mandlin is Tue, 13 Jul 2010 06:26:55 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Luis Scola, Larry Hughes, and the Summer of ’05 – Part I http://freeballinblog.com/basketball-commentary/luis-scola-larry-hughes-and-the-summer-of-05/ http://freeballinblog.com/basketball-commentary/luis-scola-larry-hughes-and-the-summer-of-05/#comments Tue, 12 Jan 2010 06:55:34 +0000 mmandlin http://freeballinblog.com/?p=1013 Most Rockets fans I chat with these days take it as a given that the Rockets will make every effort to re-sign Luis Scola this summer.  Now, as much as I like Scola, I don’t see why the Rockets would commit significant money or years to Scola when Carl Landry is going into the last year of his contract.  But regardless of their interest, I think it highly unlikely Scola will be in Houston next year, because provided NBA teams come up with the necessary salary cap space, he is going to get a Larry Hughes contract.  In fact, I think you’re going to see a ton of Hughes contracts this summer, and a few key Michael Redd contracts, too.

Background

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 Things Currently Stand
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
]]> http://freeballinblog.com/basketball-commentary/luis-scola-larry-hughes-and-the-summer-of-05/feed/ 0 NBA VIEW: Eastern Conference, Central Division http://freeballinblog.com/basketball-commentary/nba-view-eastern-conference-central-division/ http://freeballinblog.com/basketball-commentary/nba-view-eastern-conference-central-division/#comments Tue, 17 Nov 2009 04:36:05 +0000 mmandlin http://freeballinblog.com/?p=827 Indiana: The Pacers chased me all over America last year.  It seemed that everywhere I went, they were the visiting team.  So I got to see them a lot.  Mostly, I learned that if you only looked at Danny Granger for all 48 minutes of game play, even especially when he’s on the bench, the Pacers are a site to behold; they do just about everything right.  Unfortunately almost everything other than Granger is wrong.  Their roster looks like one of those fantasy basketball teams where the owner made the no-brainer choice in the first round (Granger) and flubbed the rest.

“T.J. Ford is a lock to lead the league in assists once he gets his minutes in Indiana!”

“Mike Dunleavy’s first good season totally wasn’t a fluke!”

Hell, the Pacers don’t even have enough talent to take that joke into the fourth round of a made up draft of a made up fantasy league.  Brandon Rush is going to be a good rotation player.  Some people think Roy Hibbert is hot stuff, but I haven’t seen enough him (didn’t get much run in the games I saw,) to have an opinion.  Almost everyone else on the team hurts them either by sucking or by being overpaid.

Chicago: NBA stars consistently take the ball into the paint and finish or they shoot the lights out.  There are the rare exceptions, but for the most part, if a guy can’t do one of those two things, he’s not going to be a star.  Can you see Tyrus Thomas developing a highly effective post game?  Or a good-enough handle to penetrate from the perimeter?  Can you see him becoming a great shooter?  Neither can I.  He’s not going to be a star, no matter how young he is or how high he jumps.  His upside is as a third option on a good team.  Fortunately for the Bulls, Derrick Rose is a star, and Luol Deng is a fairly good second option, and John Salmons is a high-quality third option.

I didn’t like the Bulls last year; I like them this year.  Last year they had only three players who could regularly create their own scoring opportunities: Rose, Ben Gordon, and Salmons.  And of those three, only Rose even tried to pass the ball.  Ben Gordon is a good player, sort of, kind of, but he was a bad fit.  Spreading his 16 shots around the roster will help Deng get his mojo back and might help Thomas find his bearings.

Milwaukee: Signing Michael Redd in 2005 was sentimental.  They should have let Cleveland sign him to play with LeBron.  Instead, they took a course that made it virtually impossible to build a contender during the length of his contract.  I wrote “virtually impossible” because a miracle (hitting the lotto jackpot) gave them a shot to making it work and they screwed that up, too.  Almost every move they’ve made since signing Redd has been awful.  Not bad, awful.

Oh yes, but they did draft that Brandon Jennings character.  I saw him tonight for the first time, facing Dallas.  My take?  He was totally out of control half the time and clearly barely knows what he’s doing out there; and he was still one of the best players on the floor.  I wouldn’t bet against him.

Unfortunately, Jennings was an obvious choice in the 10th spot for a team with garbage pointguards.  So it’s not like choosing Jennings was a coup, or an indication that the Bucks are going to do smart things, going forward.  However, I did like Ilyasova, tonight.  And I love signing young players to small multi-year contracts ($7M over 3 years.)  Who knows?  History says it’s a fluke smart move.  We’ll see.

Cleveland: They will win the Central Division and in the playoffs they will beat anyone but Boston or Orlando in 5 games or less.  Is this news to anyone?  Maybe it is.  It was pretty absurd hearing all of the commentary on problems in Cleveland in the first week of the season.  I liked and still like the Shaq move.  He makes around 60% of his shots.  Isn’t that a nice addition to a team that has the best scorer in the game and no one else who can be counted on, game in and game out, to put points on the board?  What Shaq can’t do is practically irrelevant; nearing his 38th birthday, he’s still one of the most dominant post scorer’s in the game.  Fouls are the one concern with Shaq, but mostly it’s just a question of whether he’ll be a force for 30 minutes a game, or only 20 minutes a game.

Detroit: I don’t think Joe Dumars is somehow less smart than he used to be; I think he’s having a midlife crisis.  I didn’t immediately hate the Billups/Iverson trade like so many others did; I thought it was weird and risky, but not insane.  It didn’t pan out, but he got a ton of salary cap space to reinvent the Pistons.  And he did, spending almost 30% of Detroit’s cap space on two players (Ben Gordon and Charlie Villanueva) who don’t rebound, defend much, or pass.  That they can’t/won’t pass the ball is particularly problematic, since Rodney Stuckey doesn’t do it either, and Richard Hamilton’s effectiveness is almost entirely dependent on ball movement.  I see this team looking a lot like Denver did with  Iverson, Carmelo Anthony, J.R. Smith, and Linas Kleiza—but less talented.  And when it didn’t pan out for Denver, they still had Anthony to build around.  When this Detroit squad doesn’t work, what are they going to do?

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