Memphis's idea of Moneyball: Throw out as much money as you can. It's amazing to me that the franchise that gave away Pau Gasol (handing the Lakers 3 consecutive Finals appearances and 2 Championships) now thinks that Rudy Gay should be paid as if he is among the very best players in the league. He's almost the textbook example of an "overrated" player when it comes to statistical analysis: -"He can score"...but he needs 40 mpg on a fast paced team to not even reach 20 ppg. -Doesn't get to the FT line all that much. Scoring efficiency is OK but nothing to write home about. -Gives you little outside of his own points: his assists are few and his rebounding is unimpressive, even with minutes and pace driving his per-game averages up. -A mediocre to horrible defender. I haven't bothered to examine it too deeply, but supposedly this signing will keep Memphis from resigning some of their other core players. Do you really need to pay max money for someone to "lead" your team to a losing record year after year? I bet Morey is laughing his ass off right now.
That's ridiculous. They traded away Pau Gasol for nothing and they are paying Rudy Gay 5 year/$80 mil. LOL.
Considering that the best record that they've achieved in the "Rudy Gay era" ( :grin: ) is 40-42, a losing record, I really wouldn't say that they are doing well.
Excellent post. The nominal amount of the cap doesn't matter, even if you increase or decrease it all teams will still have the same space to use. What changes the game is how "efficient" you are with your space. Championship teams have overly undervalued players like Duncan, Kobe, Hakeem etc. who are worth much more than the max amount. Anybody who thinks Memphis didn't set themselves back 6 years with this contract is kidding themselves. Rudy gay gets his pts on how many shots again? How is his D again? Isn't he the 3rd best player on that team as well, after Gasol and Mayo? LOL what's funny is they can't pay all their players now, expect them to let go of Gasol or Mayo or Thabeet when they become FAs. I was starting to think that Chris Wallace may be slightly better than Kahn. But now I'm thinking maybe the Gasol trade wasn't an inside job at all. CW really is just stupid, and I can literally do a better job than both him and Kahn, even if I don't go to the US and just teleconference with everyone on what to do. P.S. How does the Battier/Gay trade work out now haterz? Grizz lost tons of games due to Gay's horrible D, and now he's costing them a max contract. Fail on both long AND short term.
You know, those people who hated the Battier trade believed that we had given away a potential TMac replacement for a role player.
Kelly Dwyer agrees with you. http://sports.yahoo.com/nba/blog/ba...he-Grizzlies?urn=nba,252961#remaining-content
trust me, the other FAs are staying at home reading these posts and dreaming about landing a max contract, maybe scolar will get 11 mil a year for 3 years, maybe lowry will end up with MLE...
http://boards.grizzliesonline.com/index.php?showtopic=10020 This is what the Grizzlies fans have to say...I like this one:
Rudy Gay is not a max player. Grizzlies are pretty dumb, they could have let another team set the market up for Gay and they could have just matched the offer. There was no way another team would give Gay a max deal like that.
I thought he wouldget deng money. Thats too much and memphis has a point. Kinda like the milsap deal last year with the frontloaded money and such. Maybe they move zach.
When you're a historically poor team, you overpay for players. The better your team, the less you have to commit money to players. If rudy had been producing at his rate, he probably wouldve been signed for far less earlier. Johnson wasnt a max player when he was traded to atl and he's not one now, but since atl was so bad for so long, they decided to just keep the squad together. There are only about 5 or 6 players in the league worth max money, james,wade,durant,carmello,kobe,paul,howard, and probably nash and maybe dirk. All these other guys are probably 10-12mm per year guys.
Overpaying players is one of the many reasons why historically bad teams stay bad. Memphis, with or without Rudy Gay, will be a mediocre to bad team. If Rudy Gay wouldn't take less than max money, I would've let him walk. That would clear cap and contribute to the team's future ability to sign a real free agent star. Any badness resulting from Rudy would contribute to the team's chances of getting a high lottery pick. And it's not like badness is unheard of for the Grizzlies, who have had recent 22, 22, and 24-win seasons after they stupidly traded away Pau Gasol. They need to rebuild, instead of locking themselves in crappiness for the forseeable future.
Battier is a superior overall basketball player to Gay. And much cheaper. Being objective is more than looking at stats. Gay is one-dimensional and would not improve this team as much as Battier has over the past several years.
