I think the loss of Luc hurts but I understand the apprehension as well. He kept having repeated shoulder injuries and was so scared to shoot in the playoffs he became a huge liability. Shoulder injuries don't tend to get better especially dislocations. I think losing him hurts but I also won't be surprised to see him injured for a lengthy period of time again this season and become a shell of his former self in turn. When you don't trust your body, you hesitate and we saw that last year after he came back on the active roster.
Not every buyout season is automatically "Joe Johnson." We don't know the intel the Rockets have. We can certainly circle back to this later in the year and judge it.
So, who were some of the best buyout guys over the last 3 years? I bet Tillman won’t allow the use of the MLE anyway for any player and justness pockets the Luxury Tax Profit. Meanwhile, he will make Morey say that they would have done it for “the right player”
Luc was the biggest loss of the offseason. Not Ariza. He DID play like a $10 million a season player. And I hope we can get him back somehow. We need to hope that the Clippers lose a lot of games and are out of the playoffs by the February trade deadline. Maybe we can trade Nene's sack of bones and a second rounder for Luc and get him back where he belongs.
CFers in late June: "We came up short and can't just roll out the same team next year and hope it's miraculously better. Morey has to do something!" CFers now: "Overrated GM Morey made changes to a legit title contender because he can't stop himself! And he only knows numbers, not real basketball! Now we suck and this season is already hopeless!"
The point of making changes is to improve the on-court talent, not to get worse talent to make Luxury Tax Profit.
There's not a GM in the league who thinks giving Trevor Ariza $15M at age 48 or whatever is a good move. At least now that the only one who thought that has been fired.
And yet we don't know if Luc wanted to stay here. Everyone is pissed at Morey for not re-signing him, but he was an unrestricted FA and decided he wanted to go back to LA. Maybe he likes the city, maybe he hates Houston, maybe he likes Doc and hates MDA. My point: Until we have some factual evidence that Morey never even spoke to Luc's agent about the possibility of him coming back, this is all just whining about nothing.
I think we were waiting on the Melo ordeal and we couldn’t offer Luc what he got with the clippers or we had to wait until it had been resolved.
Luc said repeatedly he wanted to stay here. It appears we only offered him the minimum and he was offended by it. Kelly Iko reported they were talking, Luc himself said it in the Chronicle when he hosted his soccer game, etc. He wasn't willing to stay for the minimum.
morey didn't want to pay luc the extra $1.5M to keep him b/c he had already blown that wad on MCW smh ya i get that the extra money would have come out of the MLE and he wants to save that for buyouts, but that is still a longshot. witness the crap we ended up with out of the buyout market last season
Nobody wants to tell me why saving for the buy outs is something smart, I just dont understand why. Hopefully I eat crow this season.
