a butterfly flaps its wings in africa (long)

you guys remember the scene in jurassic park where the nerdy math guy is talking about chaos theory and how single, seemingly insignificant events can end up having massive reprecussions? in the scene, he talks about how a butterfly could flap its wings in africa, and the little bit of wind it creates could, over the course of just the right combination of events, bring rain in another part of the world, when it would have been dry otherwise.

well, i think we just had a perfect example of that with the Rockets. I think we can say with some degree of confidence that one missed dunk changed the course of a large number of lives today.

How?

well, we all know Morey and his approach to basketball. lost in all the discussion of whether lowry will or wont be a good fit, and whether the team will miss rafer, and which team "won" the trade is one important point: morey did something very uncharacteristic today - he wasted a valuable asset.

by not trading ron artest today, morey wasted the value he had as an expiring contract. this is quite unlike him, especially if he had no intention of retaining ron after this season (which appears more and more likely to be the case as the season wears on). assuming we are right on this, we can surmise by the combination of these factors that Morey's decision to keep ron was born of necessity, i.e. a tactical decision, and NOT a strategic one. Part of being a great (not good, but great) GM is the ability to avoid at all costs having to act out of need, or because you are being painted in a corner, because it makes your actions predictable. as a GM with predictable needs, other GMs can much more easily take advantage of you, and more often than not you will end up on the short end of your trades and transactions. so how is it that a man like Morey got put in such a predicament?

Let's go back to this offseason, and the acquisition of artest. Making the acquisition at that time made sense for many reasons, but even if we remove all of the reasons that are related to ron's performance on court, Morey always had a safety net with ron. This safety net was his expiring contract. When the rockets acquired Ron, Morey also acquired the option to utilize the value of Ron's expiring contract as an asset if he observed that Ron either did not fit the team, or could be moved in such a fashion as to benefit the rockets more in the long run. It is my opinion, (and this is purely my opinion) that Morey never intended on keeping artest past this trade deadline, and only acquired him from Sacramento because the acquisition cost of Ron's contract was extremely low, and the asset he was getting would in all likelihood be worth significantly more around the trading deadline. surely as obvious a case of buy low, sell high as we could ever see. So, given that a ton of teams were buying expirings at inflated prices, why the hell didn't he sell high? surely he knew that the opportunity was there, and that if he didnt sell at all, his asset would lose all value?

all this context, just to bring us to the butterfly. our very own tracy mcgrady. the highlight reel shows him taking off down the court with a couple of Milwaukee players close at his heels, attempting to gather himself for a dunk, and . . . well, we all know the rest. what I didnt see at the time, is that this awkward looking botched dunk was not just that, but also a butterfly flapping its wings, figuratively speaking, and setting in motion a chain of impossible-to-predict events that would end up throwing a giant wrench into Morey's machinery. that missed dunk, its effects on tracy's gigantic, fragile ego, his complete and total overreaction in trying to blame it on an injury, and his subsequent rift with rockets management and staff, were pretty much the worst case scenario for any plans Morey could have had to trade artest. because now tracy was no longer available as a rotation player, and there was no guarantee that he would be for the rest of the season, or even the season to come. and if there would be no tracy to pair with Yao, then he had to keep ron, because there is simply no other player out there that you could get for him that gives you the talent per dollar that Ron does. talent per dollar is an extremely important thing for the rockets, if the team is aiming to be competitive with $20M worth of cap space sitting at home sulking, so this meant a sobering thought for Morey and crew: the rockets' best chance to win meant keeping Ron, and wasting an asset. ouch.

i would venture to say that Morey, knowing from jump that there was a very high chance he would be trading artest at the deadline, had probably spent an enormous amount of time working on viable artest trades, not rafer trades, or tmac trades. we can only guess at what some of those trades looked like on paper, and what conversations were held with other GMs, over the MONTHS that this was all likely to have been in the works. Imagine how different this day could have been if we were moving $10-$15M in contracts instead of $5M. Imagine what types of player comparisons, plans for playoff games, team by team analysis we would be doing. Imagine how many players lives, not just outgoing, but incoming, were affected. Imagine how intricate of a deal Morey could have engineered with months to plan out all the moving parts.

But none of it happened. Because Tracy missed one dunk. Go figure. After everything I've said about Tracy over the years, about how I dont respect him as a player, about how he doesn't work, about how he always takes the easy way out and ends up only hurting himself . . . after ALL that, its strangely fitting that from now on I'm going to remember him as a butterfly, and not because I am trying to insult him. I'll remember him that way because thats exactly what he turned out to be.