Dont you think its a little unfair to be critical of Morey considering Landry's history of knee problems and the fact that he hadnt proved anything at the time of the contract? Foresight is 20/20.
m_cable is one of the most level headed posters on this board. You can tell by the context of the post that he's giving Morey plenty of credit for all the good moves he's made. He's just saying he wishes we could have handled Landry's original contract situation different. I think we all feel that way.
The story doesn't even bother with fake "a source close to the Lakers...". I'm convinced this story was fed to the media by Landry's agent.
If this is legit, the Lakers must be willing to over-pay him. They wouldn't bother offering him something they expect the Rockets to match. The Rockets will not re-sign Landry at all costs. For example, if the Lakers give him the full MLE, I suspect the Rox will let him go. They'd be better off using that money on a 2/3 or a PG, if there's one out there they want. As far as that goes, being in a $5 million better cap position would be better than paying him the full MLE.
I think Morey's done a decent job so far, but he definitely made a mistake by not getting a team option on Landry's 2nd season. There's absolutely no downside for the club by getting a team option for a player. I'm not even sure why he did it. It must have been a trade-off for Landry's agent to agree to a lower guaranteed amount. A deal like that could have saved the club a couple hundred thousand if Landry ended up getting cut, but will probably end up costing the team at least a million dollars to re-sign him early. Face it, Morey completely miscalculated the risk analysis of the Landry deal. And it's put us in a tough situation that we didn't have to be in.
Shouldn't the team be more worried about the getting Artest than Landry? If they want landry, lets just sign and trade for turiaf at 2.5m and call it a day.
I wonder if Landry didn't want the team option in the contract. I remembered he was unhappy about the contract Rockets offered him...
Like I said, I'm guessing that Landry's agent gave up some guaranteed money in exchange for Morey dropping the 2nd year team option. There's really no other defensible reason to give up the leverage of a team option. However you slice it, it was a bad move.
The contract wasn't guaranteed in it's first year. Landry would only take a guaranteed contract. I assume there Rockets would've liked to add a team option on the 2nd year but the agent would only take a guaranteed deal in both years.
Like I said, it's speculation, but I suspect that Morey gave up the 2nd year team option in order to give up less guaranteed in the 1st year. Otherwise there's no reason to give up the team option. Virtually all 2nd round guys have team options for year two, so Landry's agent didn't have the leverage to force two guaranteed years. Morey must have given up the team option. That's they only way this makes any sense.
Morey was right after all. After only 1-2 month of 15+ minutes/g and Landry goes out with a busted knee.
Landry's agent mentioned the first year wasn't guaranteed to the Chron. There's a search engine for their articles on their site.
I tend to agree with this idea. Until Landry shows that he can develop a money jumper, I don't see any value in giving him a sizeable contract. He is still undersized for his position, and for the near future, will be relying on pure explosiveness with an iffy knee.
Under the circumstances Morey did what most GM's would of done. It was a calculated gamble that he lost and I bet he is glad he lost. What do you think the chances were that Landry contributed as much as he did? I’m understand m_cables point and I'm not dogging him for his opinion, just disagreeing with him. Just being silly. Hindsight is 20/20. There is that better?
it wasn't about Morey not wanting to guarantee Carl. My gut says it really was Les Alexander's call. He took on a lot of money in the summer, and didn't want to pay the tax. In the end, the team got under the tax by the trade deadline anyhow... it wasn't a great decision to not have a 2nd year, but I still highly doubt the consequence is anything more than the Rockets paying Landry a few millions more. (Frankly, there is little chance they sign a full MLE player anyway... in fact, in all of the NBA, there were only 3 or 4 full MLE signings last year).
