agreed. felt like beltran all over again from like 2 days before he announced. feel like that to anyone else? (except i wasn't as disappointed--1 because he's not quite as good, and 2 because i expected it after i got set up so bad with beltran)
"Queen James" gives me a distinct impression of the jaded-lover syndrome. All these posters that wanted him had their feelings hurt with James' rejection, so they polarize to a James-hatred, talking about how he did us wrong. Maybe he did do us wrong, but saying so makes us look like little b****es. I'd rather just say "Good luck in Minnesota, Mr. James," and move on with the offseason.
Those are vaporware #'s. Fair salary is the best you can do at the time you do it. Sometimes lessor people get more money because at the time of negotiations a team with no other options decided to pay it. Does that make it fair? Welcome to capitalism. ...In Minny. I don't want a whinny b!tch like him holding our team hostage with his trade kicker. Then the next guy wants a kicker and the next. Next thing you know 3/4ths of the team has trade kickers and making trades becomes virtually impossible. It makes no sense that a player shows his hand prior to negotittions about where he wants to go as a free agent ...particularly if money also plays into the decision... which apparently it does since he thinks he is underpaid 1 day after signing a new contract. Given that James said he wants to come here, tells me that he never did. He knew we wanted him so he used us to drive up market value. That menuever got him a player option added on.
Once again, how does he "keep us hostage?" It's not like we're going to get more for MLE period. If we get him for the MLE, we trade no one for him, so to be unable to trade him away is only negative if he doesn't produce in his first couple of years with us. And someone please tell me how "fair salary" is a vaporware statistic. It's based off of their performance, +/-, defense, etc. Even if you do, go by +/- stats, which is basically the same logic we give to a player like Battier. This logic that once you give a trade kicker "everyone will" is flawed. The only reason he deserves it is because he is getting paid low. If everyone would take lower than deserved salaries, then fine give everyone a trade kicker. I would gladly take Juwan at 2 million if he had a trade kicker. And I'm pretty sure James could have gotten a player option without doing his "stunt", as he is obviously worth that. Whatever, he's gone, but I don't blame him for it. I highly doubt that James was sitting here "plotting" to exact his revenge.
As a member of the Clutch Forum I expect a higher level from the Clutch Forum Administrators. Talking like this about an NBA Player is stepping down to his level.
Um... I've never had a girlfriend like that. No matter how hot she might be, nobody is hot enough to act like that.
What if Mike gets fat and happy and digresses to 10ppg shooting 32%? ...like Cato ...like MoT ...like Moochie Norris ...like Stromile Swift, etc. If Cato had a no-trade clause, we wouldn't have TMac. We offered him the MLE. We also offered Stro MLE and he managed to sink his own trade value. I think James can sink his own value too. Time will tell. Econ101. Some website doesn't dictate "fair" ...the market determines fair. Mike got the most that the market can bear right now. How does 82games compute his salary if you take his career #'s rather than his best #'s? You are using contraversial logic, at best, with this "low value" point of yours to determine that Mike is undervalued. I doubt Dallas, Minny or Houston referred to 82games to establish their offers. I fully beleive he and his agent maticulously plotted how to maximize his contract. As part of that, I'm sure James intentionally said he wants to return to Houston because he knew we'd start the bidding pretty high. I also have no doubt that James intentionally brought up the infamous trade kicker in the 11th hour. If he was so worried about stability, why didn't it come up sooner?
As Clutch indicated, if James is a Queen, the problem is that there's not a lot of Aces left in the deck, and we need cards -- bad. There's maybe a pair of six's (Marcus Banks/DeShawn Stevenson) and a Joker (Sprewell) left. Other than that we're screwed - of course we do have the "Rules for Straight Draw Poker" instructional card (Bowen) ...of course they did. They wouldn't be doing their jobs otherwise and centuries of economic modeling would be undone and we would all become communitarian marxists. Why is this problematic?
I'm pretty sure Mike James has already proved you wrong. Weren't you the one who was estatic when we traded him?
I disagree. If you lose a card in the deck, you can always turn the instructional card into the missing card using a marker. In other words, it has some utility. Bowen is more like the cellophane packaging that the cards come in.
So can we just go ahead and refer to MJ as 'Latifah' from now on? But to be fair, even though I know it's hard to be fair about this.. It really sounds to me like Queenie may have at one point really wanted to come back to Houston. But it was not so much for the reason of wanting to return to this TEAM and play for JVG and the Rockets' organization again, as such, as much as it was a desire to come back to the CITY, where his house is, where his wife is, where he is putting down his roots. But once he got into the negotiations with us and with the other teams, more than likely the people like Cuban and KG and others, people who either wanted him badly or badly wanted to prevent him coming HERE began to whisper in his ear, turning that little spark of resentment into a full-blown flame. And once it became crunch-time, in his mind, he had all but ruled out returning here, after 'what we put him through'. The double whammy - he had been so praised and pursued, so built-up, while at the same time the leverage against us was being used to its full effect - this all served to both pump himself up in his mind as well as tear us down and cause him to come up with 'requirements' like a trade kicker, as a way to ensure he would be able to say that, once again, 'we did him wrong'. I guess the moral of this story is that those contract issues that could not be resolved until 2 weeks AFTER the draft need to be changed, those dates altered, so that they can be resolved BEFORE the draft. I feel very certain that if we had been able to actually get him to sign on the dotted line very quickly, instead of being forced to let him have all that time to stew and create phantoms in his imagination (at the urging of our opponents), he probably would have come back here. Having said all that, I wonder how long it would have taken for him to begin to feel slighted again, and potentially become a very negative force in the locker room. Perhaps after a particularly heated exchange with JVG during practice, perhaps after failing to hit the big shot or make the right pass, and starting to hear it from the fans.. who knows? Obviously he still held a great deal of resentment over being traded away for Rafer, and it is probably better for us that it raised its ugly head now, rather than after giving him a fat guaranteed contract.
Or after JVG assigns him to come off the bench and he realizes that isn't helping his MVP cause one bit...
