Perhaps you meant "spurious" ... as in a spurious comment. There is no word such as "superious" ... or perhaps you just meant that you ceded "superiority."
Not even! One played for conference USA and the other for the Pac-10. Which conference do you think has more legitimacy?
How is the prospect of paying millions for an unproven commodity missing the point? If you're gonna play an unproven commodity, I'd rather play a rookie like Lior. He might just turn out to be the next Bargnani. In fact, I'll go as far as to say this... Amir Johnson has to be treated the same as any player without playing time. Look at Novak. Hell the attitude on this board towards Amir would be as if the Knicks were drooling over Novak. Why the hell would anyone be drooling over Novak's potential when he's barely stepped out on the court. Oh my Novak is our savior! Novak will drill 3 pointers all day long. Lets pay Novak 33 million dollars over three years. You see how ridiculous this line of reasoning is over Amir?
You're right.All these guys are unproven and none of them is likely to explode overnight. I also agree with you, giving Amir the entire MLE is overpaying him. The difference between him and Novak is that in the limited time Amir has been on the court, he looks like he can play in the NBA.Novak doesn't look like a NBA talent right now. As far as Eliyahu is concerned, I'm looking forward to seeing him in the summer league.If he does well it might be worth having him on the team. Lior's main weakness is his supposed weak outside shooting,it will be good to see if he can make it to the team.
we need to give amir the money and gamble on that but only if you some how pull a trade that gets you artest without giving up battier this way if it didn't workout with amir or the rookie u could always fall back on artest which i would rather start at the 3 spot and let battier when 6th man of the year he or bonzi hell kings might just take salary cap relief this damn morey general manger is begining to piss me off. bring me artest and give amir mle for 2 years with a third as an option and get our roster ready it isn't this damn hard.
3 years $10 million from Detroit. Make it 4 years and 16 million, force them to overpay. Of course, the Rockets may have a deal with Detroit or actually want Webber, we just don't know. I have been watching Amir for 2 years, I like what I saw, he can play.....will he be an all star? Who knows, but IMO he is worth a gamble. DD
It it wasn't "this damn hard," then every GM in the league would have his team ready at this point. Who have you seen make themselves markedly better at this stage? Orlando? Portland? Who else? As far as Johnson is concerned, I simply wouldn't want to put my hopes entirely on him. He is a great prospect, but I could only bite if we had a solid rotation player already in place. What I don't want to see is a Johnson-Hayes rotation to start the season. It wouldn't necessarily be worse than last year's, but it wouldn't be better and has the chance to be awful. Give me a Gooden for spare parts, if possible, then an Amir for the MLE. That way, you have a surefire rotation player this year and a potentially outstanding player in Johnson coming off the bench with an opportunity to contribute.
At this point you can't prove to me that Amir is any better than Landry. For my 2 cents I'd go with Landry.
I actually like Landry a ton, but he and Hayes are a bit redundant at this point. What Johnson brings is length and the ability to cover for Yao in the paint defensively.
How about we sign Webber to the league minimum and give Amir a good portion of the MLE to keep Detroit from signing. Webber knows coach A's system and can play right away. It would be like insurance incase Amir isn't quite ready(for those of you doubters) and Webber is the perfect vet to teach our young PF's their role in the offense that Adleman likes to run. Oh yea, Webber also has playoff experience with this offense as well. It's a win-win.
Just because neither of two guys sees much action, that doesn't mean that they're equal players. Johson's problem is that he's got Rasheed Wallace, Antonio McDyess, Chris Webber, Jason Maxiell and Nazr Mohammed on the same team. Novak was playing behind Chuck Hayes and Juwan Howard. I'll go out on a limb here and say that it's probably a tiny bit harder to crack Detroit's PF rotation than it would be in Houston. Johnson is the better prospect because he has size, athleticism and skills. At this point Novak is just a shooter. While Novak does have the potential to be a great shooter, there's not too much of a chance that he'll be much else except a shooter. There's always been guys buried on team's depth charts and other teams always know about them and covet them. Look at Jermaine O'Neal's four years in Portland. He couldn't crack their rotation, but everyone knew he could play. He averaged 10.2,13.5,8.9 and 12.3 minutes/game in Portland. His pts/game were 4.1,4.5,2.6 and 3.9. Despite those modest numbers, Indiana looked at his size, skills and athleticism and knew that he could play. That paid off very well for them as he quickly developed into a 20/10 guy quickly after getting some playing time.
Webber as a short term solution at PF wouldn't be terrible. He certainly has the passing skills that work well in Adelman's system. The problem with acquiring Johnson is that the only shot we probably would have is if we can offer enough money that would force Detroit to go over the LT threshold. I don't even know if that's possible. After Billups took a smaller starting salary, Detroit may have enough room to match up to the MLE without going over the tax threshold. If that were the case, then I think Detroit would match any offer that we made. Maybe Morey already knows that Detroit has enough space to match any offer we make, so he won't bother making an offer. The only way it makes sense to make an offer to Johnson is if we know that it's enough to force Detroit into Luxury Tax land.
Good example on Jermaine Oneal. Although the sample size is small, Johnson displayed he outperformed the average NBA VETERANs in his first series of NBA games. He's shooting at 55%, hitting FTs at 78%, grabs one rebounds every three to four minutes, gets one block every ten minutes. I would say those numbers are fair indicators of his ability rather than getting lucky, as odds are against him to get lucky in many categores at the same time. He is only twenty years old but already dominated the D league, in which many more expericenced players plays in. Johnson will likely only get better. It's a gamble, but a small gamble with small losing margin. If he busts, we still get a decent back up. It's like buying a stock of which both technical(stats) and fundamental(size,athleticism, age) all point to the good side. It's business and business takes calculated risk.
We are some hungry unfed dogs man. We want some bones with something to chew on!!!! Mike James ain't got no savory meat. Nor does Aaron Brooks. It's like that cartoon of the hungry dog when anything he looks at turns into a scrumptious ham. Licking my chops! Yeah!!!
