Vic is 28 so you know he's looking for his big max contract to set him up for life. No reason to give him that when we aren't planning on contending for another 2 years.
But the fact that Butler is already a borderline HOF candidate shows how much better he is than Oladipo. Also, we can agree to disagree on some of the guys you listed. Penny was great, but his peak was painfully short. Ben Walllace was a phenomenal defender, but as useless offensively as it gets. And Chauncey had a long, really good career, but longevity is the only case I think you can make for him over Butler. I'd probably take Butler's career over all three at this point, gun to my head.
I am just comparing accomplishment. Bulter: 3 all nba third team, 4 all defensive second team; Billups: 1 all nba second team, 2 all nba third team, 2 all defensive second team, 1 ring, 1 FMVP; Wallace: 3 all nba second team, 2 all nba third team, 4 DPOY, 1 ring. I think it's safe to say both Billups and Wallace accomplished more than Bulter. Of course Bulter's career is way from over, so we'll see what he can accomplish in the years left. In the case of Penny, you're right about his career being too short. He had two all nba first team nomination, one third team, and finished top 3 in MVP voting once, so one can argue he was a top 5 player for one year. Butler is never close to top 5, or even top 10. But longivity is an important factor when it comes to HOF considerations, Derrick Rose, who is an MVP might not get into HOF because of his short prime.
I'm basing it on his play, not really whether he would make it or not cuz actually making the all star team depends on your popularity and not on your play. Case in point John Wall and D Angelo Russell would have more All star votes than Oladipo but they aren't as good as Dipo and have worse advanced stats than Dipo as well. Team records are an amalgamation of the entire salary cap not really just Harden and Durant so the record isn't a good comparison. In a theoretical comparison Magic has 129M salary so if you think Harden and KD are underpaid at 50M just those 2 alone and a bunch of vet mins at 3M each should have a better record than the Magic. I think that's too much theoretical situation to argue either way so let's just drop it. My original post and the one that you replied to is "Tbh Dipo at 30M and another dude at 20M is better than Harden at 50M." If your assumption is Harden at 40M then you really shouldn't be arguing with me cuz that's not what my post is about. I think what's disingenuous is you replying to my post about Harden at 50M on the rockets and then arguing that his salary is only 40M and only a contender would pay him 50M. The Rockets offered Harden 50M to stay so yes, they would be willing to pay Harden 50M despite not being a contender. I omitted all that other parts about Lebron cuz I don't wanna get sidetracked. We do have Wall on the roster but even if assuming Fertita is willing to pay whatever it takes the Rox are already hard capped and would have to gut the roster even more just to keep Harden at 50M for the next 3 yrs. https://www.houstonchronicle.com/te...n-turns-down-Rockets-103-million-15732253.php Again I'm not talking about VALUABLE I'm talking about better. I already said in my original post what makes Harden valuable is superstars don't grow on trees. If there were 100 tier 1 superstar players asking for 50M a year to play or they walk then Harden wouldn't be valued so much. Value is tied to scarcity not really its benefit. We all need air to breathe otherwise we die in 5 minutes but nobody is bottling up air cuz there is so many of it around. The value of breathable air is effectively zero despite it being one of the most essential things in our life today. In the same way you can see Harden is more valuable than Dipo+another random 20M dude just because of how many assets we got for Harden. But in actual production on the court Harden doesn't equal Dipo+another 20M dude because the difference between Harden and Dipo this season is only 5 pts and 5 assists. A 20M player is expected to do more than 5 pts 5 asts so just on that you can see production wise Dipo+another 20M dude is def better than Harden by himself. For a team that is totally bereft of talent like the Rox they need as many young pieces as possible. Obviously given his accolades and the scarcity of tier 1 superstars Harden at 50M is prob more valuable than Dipo and a random 20M dude but in terms of effective production added to the team Dipo and that other 20M dude would work better cuz you add more overall talent. Like I said VALUE aside there is a dollar/talent dropoff as you go up the scale, if the goal is just to make the team better by putting the best combination of talent on the court then Dipo+20M dude is better than Harden just by virtue of them being younger than Harden. Dipo alone resets the clock by 3 years, and if we get another 20M dude I'd expect that guy to be even younger. Lots of belly aching losing a superstar like Harden but I'd rather be the Rockets than Portland right now, they have Dame who is more valuable than any person currently on the Rockets but they are also hard locked to chasing Lebron even if everybody knows they have no chance to win just to fix Dame's legacy. You should have really stopped there. Again, my original post isn't about value it's talking about adding raw talent to the team. In that theoretical example if you took 1 Harden vs 16 Houses guess what you are losing every game we play because the assumption there is the only restriction is the salary cap. If you add another max player guess what that's another 5-16 Danuel Houses on my team vs your one additional player so you'd get destroyed even harder than before. The whole point of that is just to show you that actual production is not the same as being valuable.
But your assumption that Harden + Durant + veteran minimums > Orlando's whole roster is based on the assumption that you could only add veteran minimum players around Harden and Durant, which is clearly false. On top of those two, there's a third max level player plus other competent vets making way more than the veteran minimum. So I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Cool. Except Dipo is still making pretty much exactly $20M less than Harden this season, so the "Harden > Dipo + $20M player" is still 100% relevant whether you're arguing 50/30 or 40/20. You're arguing semantics, but you're wrong either way. Cool, except the $50M extension wouldn't have kicked in until AFTER John Wall's contract is up. So we don't really know what that team would have looked like, but you can probably assume that a prime James Harden with a ton of cap space probably leads to Houston adding a legit No. 2 and ultimately being a contender. Also, you're really just nitpicking here. My whole point on this was that a team paying James Harden $50M is almost certainly over the cap and probably the luxury tax line, so him making 50% of the total cap is irrelevant. (Also, the cap will likely be much higher in four years when that extension would have kicked in.) You're trying to equate production to a dollar amount like X points per game is somehow equivalent to X dollars. It doesn't work that way. For example, Dipo may be worth a 70%-80% of Harden in terms of basic stats. But by most advanced statistics show, Harden is 2-3 times better a player than Dipo. Also, it completely ignores everything we know about the NBA. 1 superstar is far more valuable and important to a team than a starting five made up of role players and below average starters who could easily score 80-90 points a night and get blown out by double digits every game. Simply stacking up players' basic stats and saying "these two players are better because they combine to score more points, average more assists and get more rebounds per game" is totally asinine. No competent NBA front office exec thinks this way. Assume we have two teams with the same basic core of players that are equally suited to fit around Harden and Oladipo. Which team is likely to have the higher ceiling: the team with Harden or the team with Dipo and Player X, where Player X is the average NBA player making $20 million a year? If you say the latter, you're insane. It also completely ignores an infinite number of factors that contribute to NBA basketball, like the need to have 5 players against 5 players on the floor at all times, the salary cap, etc. And feel free to refer to my previous post, but—again—you can't just add players' basic stats and go "those guys are better because they put up more points and get more rebounds!" It doesn't work that way, and I'm not sure what point you're trying to make by taking this stance.
I’ll go against the grain. I think he fits like a glove and signs an extension with us. That’s right, I’m an eternal optimist. Fight me.
I am starting to think this might be possible. Extension wouldn't be the max so not sure Oladipo would go for that unless he really likes the team and the city which could end up being possible. Not sure if there is a deadline to extend players during the season?
I hope he does, too. To me, it's a win-win situation. With Wall's $40M on the books the next two years after this, you can't really full tank, so you might as well go for it. Brooklyn's picks also probably won't be all that great for 3-4 years anyway. Who knows? Maybe he gels, becomes the previous All-Star version of himself again the Rockets find a way to legitimately contend and attract another star. And if he does sign an extension and the opportunity to tank presents itself, you can move him before next year's trade deadline.
The whole point is value isn't equal to raw production on the court. It's like branded shoes from Nike vs generic sneakers from China. NIke shoes cost 10x more than generic shoes but people buy them cuz they only have 1 pair of feet. Effectively though they aren't really that much better than generic shoes since people in 3rd world countries play bball fine on those shoes. Jordan signature shoe is worth more than 10x a generic New balance sneaker but we all know it isn't that much better. Again you are failing to separate value vs effective production on the court. If Harden is really 2-3x better than Dipo on the court then he should be shooting at 2-3x efficiency from Dipo, he should be 2-3x stronger and faster than Dipo, have 2-3 higher vertical etc. Maybe you don't understand what 2-3x better really means. If a car goes 20km per hour and another car goes 40km/hr guess what that car is 2x better than the first one. I dunno which advanced stat you are looking at for example Dipo has a TS% of 53 while Harden has a TS% of 65. 65% is historic efficiency but that's not 2x better than 53%. Some advanced stats boil all that down to wins and tbh I'm not sure how much of that translates to the real world. If that were the case How come 2017-2018 Harden and Cp3 almost won a series vs GSW Warriors? According to advanced stats it shouldnt have been close to begin with cuz GSW had KD, Klay, Curry and Draymond who are all at all star level and would be so much better than the rest of the Rockets team outside CP3 and Harden. In terms of wins added according to advanced stats it shouldn't even be close yet Rox ended up with more wins over the season and prob would have beaten them had Cp3 not gotten injured. You are right but I'm not approaching it from a FO perspective I'm just talking about being better on the court. Harden just got traded for Dipo and 4 picks, 4 swaps so obv just from an asset standpoint Harden is a lot more valuable. No 20M player is worth 4 picks and 4 swaps so just on that alone Harden is more valuable than Dipo+20M player. I never said Harden isn't more valuable. No NBA really thinks that way cuz they need to think in terms of value due to the scarcity of superstars. But in terms of being better on the court then I would def argue 2 really good players and 3 scrubs is better than one great player and 4 scrubs. For example give me Wood and DIpo+3 Ryan Bowens vs Harden+4 Ryan Bowens in a 7 game series. I dunno if Advanced stats would bear that out but my money is def on Wood and Dipo. As you start increasing the quality of role players the advantage of Wood and Dipo would lessen because these role players in turn make Dipo and Wood overpaid and make up for Harden production inefficiency. The Rox though have pretty much nothing at this point so they are closer to Ryan Bowen situation IMO. Your comparison doesn't make sense because Harden is better than Dipo to begin with, given the same team yeah Harden will give you a higher ceiling. That's the main reason Harden is valuable, Harden gives you a higher ceiling and you can find good lower salaried players easily cuz there are more of them around. For a team with scrubs though Dipo, Wood and that 20M player IMO would be better than Harden and Wood. We can agree to disagree at this point cuz I wanna do other things. I know it doesn't work that way in the NBA, all I'm doing is trying to prove a point about production and value not being in sync. I don't get you I already had these assumptions in my post you ignored those and then applied it to real world situations lol we aren't gonna have a good conversation like that. Obviously teams can't stockpile 16 Danuel Houses the roster limit is only 15 people like no **** man. It seems to me you just didn't understand the gist of my post cuz you keep talking about value. I get it you prob see it just semantics. Tbh I've spent way too much time on this already and don't feel like explaining myself anymore. If you just wanna say Harden is more valuable than Dipo and 20M dude yes you are correct and I do agree with you.
I'm def turning around on that Dipo extension because Wood's play has been better than I expected. We got 3 years of him on 12M deal but playing like a 25M dude you can totally become a laker threat with a healthy Dipo, Wood, Wall and another star+our supporting cast which tbh isn't event that bad as we have seen the last couple of games.
I'm still not 100% sure what point you're making with all of this, but I think the general consensus I seem to be getting is that you seem to think two borderline All-Stars or "really good players" would be better for the same price as one all-time top 25 caliber, perennial MVP player like Harden. If that's true, then fundamentally you and I are just going to have to agree to disagree. History has shown time and time again that title teams are built around superstars, and the exceptions to the rule ('05 Pistons) are extremely rare but are generally still really stacked basketball teams with elite defenses. Also, when I said Harden was 2-3 times better based on advanced stats, I wasn't generalizing. I was being quite literal. If you look at James' best WS and WS/48 seasons, he is literally 2-3 times better than Oladipo (even greater) than all of Dipo's seasons except 17-18 (which is still nearly half of Harden's best). If you look at BPM and VORP, and it's pretty much the same story. Obviously I wasn't talking about TS%—any player that posted half of James' TS% would be worse than the worst players in the league.
https://www.spotrac.com/nba/free-agents/2022/ Pull all the stops for Zion in 2022 free agency give em the Max and sign his best friend as well.
Did you get that from me?I was saying to trade russ to Knicks for prospects and a first. I even made a thread about it,months ago
Not sure my friend? I’m on record of saying trade Russ to Knicks as far back as a week or two before the draft. But whoever said it first, Rockets didn’t take our advice. Stone hesitated, then screwed the pooch with Harden.
