Morey had an obsession with Jack of all trades, 3&D types instead of pursuing actual shooting specialists. The Nets showed that with the extraordinary offense that you get you don't necessarily need top tier defense, just sufficient defense to make timely stops.
We will see in the playoffs. In the last 20 years there has been one team not in the top 10 in defensive efficiency to win the finals.
that's a luxury you get when you play in NY or LA and superstars are raining down from the skies right onto your roster, whether you run your franchise well or not. and when your owner has unlimited money. defense usually matters and sharpshooters are expensive. the rockets couldn't afford to take on the warriors and just hope we would outscore them because we didn't have arguably the 3 greatest iso scorers in the game on one team (cp3 was really good but not like these guys, and there was no 3rd guy) and the warriors were a much bigger obstacle than any that exists right now. also, harris costs more than 2 times what tucker does. i think even more than tucker and ariza combined. if you can't ever go into the luxury tax, spending $18M/yr on joe harris may not be something you can afford.
Ryno (at $19m last yr here) was paid more than Harris ($16m now). Not to say he was worth it v Harris, just talking what we paid. I’m pretty confident we would have gone over the tax if we had the chance to swap out EGo (@ $15m) for Durant (@ $40m)
Definitely some Hindsight is 20/20 stuff I remember when we got Rino . . . my thoughts were I did not know much about him but Trusted Morey Rocket River
Yep had harden played in California or New York majority of his career he would have had 4 mvps by now
My discussion isn’t about hindsight. I’m arguing whether Tilman would have gone over the tax, if we had the chance to swap Durant for EGo. Of course we would have. And by reminding that we did pay a sharpshooter (Ryno) more than Harris, I’m pointing out the salary makeup of the Nets vs 2017-18 Rockets would have looked almost identical, if you swapped EGo for Durant.
Fwiw, NY has only had 1 NBA MVP since the award was first introduced in 1955. California has only had 6.
NY never had anyone like Harden but they can match with California in terms of fans, market, and money
i think some of that goes back to the "superstars raining down" thing. if you aren't confident that KD/lebron/kawhi are coming to your team, then you can't be confident that your owner will pay the LT. and at that point, it becomes really difficult to throw that much money at a shooter as an optimal strategy, no matter how much you want to surround harden with shooters. now obviously we did throw that much money at a shooter in ryno, but i think it's safe to say it was hurting us by 2018 and also it's hard to take much away from the cap spike offseason when parsons is getting $24.5M/yr and deng/mozgov got $16M/yr to basically never play. i don't think morey is offering that contract in 2016 or 2018. but given how horrible we were in 2016, how desperately we wanted to show harden it wasn't falling apart, how little prime free agents wanted to come here, and how huge the cap spike was, we're probably lucky that we escaped that offseason with an overpaid ryno, an underpaid EGo, and a really underpaid beverley.
