Constant pursuit of flexibility— How we lost our chance to contend

After Yao’s injury and eventual retirement, Daryl Morey has been one of the biggest reasons why I continue to be enthusiastic about our team’s future through the years of mediocrity. With a maths/physics background I really like the analytics revolution that he leads the basketball world. But over the past year I am deeply disappointed over his moves (or lack of moves) that I am motivated enough to spend a couple of hours posting my thoughts and criticisms here.

You guys may think, this is just another knee-jerk reaction. We were just out of luck. With a little bit of luck we could have a big-four lineup and a championship-favorite team. I wouldn’t completely dismiss this notion, but filling the entire bench with 2nd-round rookies and veteran minimum isn’t necessarily the best outcome either. My problem with DM’s approach in the past year is that we took unnecessary risks for a very modest return. Namely, a shot at a maxed-out Bosh isn’t worth wasting the golden year for expanding payroll in the first place.

Due to the NBA salary constraints, building a championship team is mostly about having players outperforming contracts. Superstars are foundations to a team because they vastly outperform their contracts and such an outperformance does not expire with their current contract terms. The Chandler Parsons’ contracts are great assets but they have an expiration date. A championship team would typically operate with a payroll at (or above) the Luxury Tax level and still has many outperforming contracts.

Les, like a typical NBA owner, can afford a team that operates around the Luxury Tax line, but we had to go much lower, below the Salary Cap, because you can only sign Max free agents with cap space. When we were lucky enough to land Dwight Howard last summer, we had a team of extremely promising future. Immense optimism of our team arises from the fact that we were already fielding an arguably TOP 5 team in the NBA on "YEAR 0" of the Howard/Harden era with a payroll only JUST reaching the salary cap! We have two superstars in Howard and Harden (superstars outperform their MAX contracts), two very good players (Parsons and Beverly) on pennies signed for the next two years, a top defensive C in Asik on a good-valued contract. Lin’s contract wasn’t a positive but still pretty fairly-valued. We also have 2nd-year players TJones and DMo with very minimum salary and good potential.

So what was the problem and how do you improve from there? 1) Our team was not built to be the best fit on court. i.e. It’s hard to play Asik for more than 12 minutes a game. So you need to trade assets for better fit on your roster. 2) Our payroll was simply not large enough for a championship team. Even full of outperformers, playing a $60M payroll against other contenders at $80M is simply unfair. This is the unavoidable “YEAR 0” situation when you use cap space to sign players (Howard in this case), and you need to find ways to expand your payroll through trade and exceptions, and it usually takes a year or two to integrate and gel a deep enough team to truly compete.

Now here’s my key point. Instead of taking time to find the best value, we should have a sense of urgency in making the moves. Sometimes we have to accept slightly less than fair values in trading and signing because the clock is ticking. There are only two years left before Parsons and Beverly got their big pay day, and Asik and Lin will drop in trade value due to the poison-pill construction, and DMo and TJones are going to either lose their perceived potential, or eventually look for big raise in three years. Howard may decline over time, and both stars may get injured. We already had a lot of value on the payroll, we just needed $15-20M total worth of roster upgrades, be it a Bosh, an Iguodala, or multiple MLE players, at fair market rate to form a solid 9-player rotation, as quickly as possible!

Here is the list of things that could very realistically have been done since the Howard signing:

Trade Asik for a very good PF last July, throwing in picks when necessary. Josh Smith, Ryan Anderson and Paul Millsap were most mentioned at the time. Morey would rather experiment with twin-tower than going the more steady route in acquiring a PF.
Even if we highly valued Asik as a backup, we could still trade TJones or DMo for a quality PF last July. It’s harder to match salaries but there are possibilities. I was on record proposing not only trading TJones+a filler for Patterson back but also immediately giving him an extension at around $5M/year. (He just got $6M/year this summer.) This is the type of moves that you can do to expand your payroll (basically trading a former 1st round pick for an extra MLE) by acquiring the bird right of a player who is also a great fit to the team. When an opportunity presents itself, you can always consider trading Patterson(at $5M)+picks+fillers for an upgrade.
After the twin-tower failure, Asik pouting and Anderson/Millsap likely taken off the trade table, Asik could still be traded for good players before February to help the team. I assume Asik+non guaranteed contracts for Deng is possible value-wise (maybe in a 3-way) given Asik is worth a good 1st-rounder. As long as we have Deng’s bird right, we can just pay him the market price (end up to be $10M/y) to retain him this summer given that we are reportedly willing to spend. Lesser forwards like Jeff Green or Thad Young would also make a lot of sense.
We had the Room exception to use the shore up the bench. I don’t have a particular target, but we should have someone better than Casppi/Garcia. If you don’t use it, the exception is wasted.
We should just pick up Parsons’ option for the coming year. I’ve never understood the RFA idea at all unless you tell me it’s just a “human” move. I was shocked to see it happened and had no choice but to believe some big-while-affordable under-the-table deal (like ~$60M over 5 years?) had to be there. Looks like that’s not the case. A complete head-scratcher.
For the moment it’s better to keep Lin rather than trading him. He is our backup PG and SG, our sixth-man scoring option and primary facilitator when harden is out. How many replacement options are there on the market that is below $8M/year? Not to mention the 1st-rounder that is being wasted.
We could keep the proven shooter in Daniels. A good situational player to the least. Another sacrifice for cap space.

Daryl Morey, while having the best talent evaluation system in the business, kept cap flexibility as his priority, which severely limited his ability to aggressively pursuing roster upgrades. Had we ever use cap space this year, we would be limited to the cap (aside from the Parsons raise, which shouldn’t happen in the first place anyway), making this year another “YEAR 0”. We would have a completely depleted bench with no MLE to use. We would need to rebuild team chemistry. Even Lebron-led big 3 couldn’t win in all in “YEAR 0”.

How much is a Bosh signing worth to us? I think he is worth about $20M/year on the market (most teams wouldn’t be willing to sign him for $20M+), but maybe $25M+/year to us due to him being a good fit. But in any case he wouldn’t be outperforming his hefty contract by too much, certainly not worth the missing opportunities we could have in improving the team. Just as an example, we could have Deng/Parsons/Patterson rotating at the forward positions. We could then use this year’s MLE on a big body to backup Howard such as Chris Kaman (just signed for MLE), Glen Davis or Dejuan Blair, we could still have Lin backing up the guard positions, while still having last year’s room exception and this years’ biannual exception for good situational players. In any case, as long as we spend the money with reasonable quality, with some organic growth and better chemistry, we would have a sure-fire contending team without taking any real risks this off-season.

Just heard Morey says “You need 3 elite elite players” to win. Are we going to bank on cap spaces every year during Howard and Harden’s prime? He must not be serious. It matters how elite your No.1 is, how elite your No.2 and No.3 are. Albeit to a lesser degree, it certainly matters how good your No.4 and No.5 are. Chandler Parsons is no worse than the No.3's on quite some championship teams. Had we taken a more prudent approach, a formidable depth chart would be already established by now, and more than make up for a perceived subpar third star.

 

I'm certainly not suggesting firing Morey, but he needs to stop his "keep-gambling-until-you-win-three-times-in-a-row" approach.

In his model, once he got Howard and Harden, he should really value bird rights of good players instead of letting cap flexibility getting in his way.

 

Dear steddinotayto, you probably know more about the trade rumors than I do, but I wish you understand the overall message I'm trying to deliver.

Maybe New Orleans wasn't giving up Anderson straight up (which I wasn't sure), yes we of course needed S&T for Smith/Millsap (which I did know since we had no cap space after signing DH), but the key point is that we were not willing to trade value (Asik's contract) for a better roster fit. A 2nd-rounder or two, a foreign stash or two can go a long way in those trades.

As for the PPat suggestion, he was a much better player than TJones as of last July, and will continue to be a much better possible fit to our team. TJones barely saw court time in his first year, but did break out mid-season last year (Morey's wisdom in betting on him being a partial success, things could go much worse though), but still fall short of our need in the end. In hindsight, TJones built up more value over the past year and I may not be suggesting the best trade (thus my post is not hindsight 20/20), but we would be taking less risk and could very well have a better team and a more successful season. Sure, less flexibility in acquiring a third star, I know.

As for Luol Deng, yes he was believed to be worth more than $10M. History tells us again and again that non-superstar players near their prime almost never go against money (which is BTW why the RFA vs URFA for Parsons argument never made any sense), as long as we are willing to spend market rate (or even slightly above market rate if he somehow got a strong pitch from another team), we can surely retain him. If that is not a safe assumption, I don't know what is.

Again, we were hindered by the cap flexibility idea can could not improve the team, and we are the only "contending team" that focuses on cap flexibility.