I'm glad he never got another ring - He was an ### when he played here. I don't think he was ever the best player on any team he ever played on - Not Chicago, even when MJ retired and the Bulls were playing the Knicks in the playoffs they called the play for Tony K. and Pippen sat down and refused to play. He wasn't the best in Portland and certainly was not here. Maybe he was the best at Southern Arkansas Institute of Technology or wherever he played his college ball.
What may or may not happen with free agents in the future has absolutely nothing to do with the quote I responded to or to my reply. The statement was that we were rarely on the losing end of a free agent. That simply isn't true. We have primarily acquired players via trade and haven't signed too many significant players through free agency.
I was responding to your quote about us rarely losing out on free agents. That had nothing to do with trades and that statement was simply untrue. In fact, we've lost out on many more free agents than we've signed and almost none of our signings were upper tier guys. Rice, Taylor, Jackson and Mutumbo were all acquired on the cheap because there isn't/wasn't any real market for them. Drexler, Barkley, Francis and TMac were huge acquisitions, but is that really any better than say the Miami Heat acquiring Alonzo Mourning, Shaquille O'Neil, Lamar Odom, Tim Hardaway, Eddie Jones and Brian Grant in a similar timeframe? Did I think we'd sign Kobe? Nope. Why would I? We haven't been successful in even signing the 2nd tier free agents, so why would I think that we'd be able to sign the #1 guy. It's hard to sign the biggets names every year? Ok, how about signing one every 5 years? It's not like we have a track record of signing "A" level free agents and then just slacked off for a year or two. Other than Pippen (who of course wasn't even a FA signing), what top level FA have we signed in the last 10 years? We've signed the middle of the pack or so guys after all the big names have gone elsewhere. Sure, several of those guys are solid players, but that hardly makes us a mecca for free agents as implied by the original quote. Almost all of our top tier talent was acquired via trades not FA.
I enjoy reading your post regarding "FA and trades." Guess TMD doesn't know that you are a resident capologist. (yet)
You are right about us not the best at signing FA, we're not the worst either. We're behind the rich guys like Lakers, NY, Dallas ... and guys who cleaned house to start over like Denver, Miami, SA ... That is we've never had to clean house. Our team has been constant for a long time. We mostly just need (and can afford) to fit the pieces around our superstars.
To play the Devil's Advocate... Shandon Anderson for the MLE when it was cheap was a fairly impressive signing that should go in the first list, if only because we got to stick it to the Jazz You failed to mention Pippen in the "huge acquisitions". As far as the Heat go- The only one of those guys that they didn't give up significant talent for was Odom - who could hardly be considered the premier guy on last year's market considering his injury/off-court troubles, and the fact Miami went after Brand first. Odom was one of the last major guys signed on the market- he was the last of the Clippers' FAs to sign an offer sheet. For Zo, they lost Glen Rice+. For Shaq, they lost Odom, Grant, and Butler. They did get Hardaway for Kevin Willis, and Brian Grant for Gatling, Weatherspoon, and a pick (in the Shawn Kemp 3-way), but for Eddie Jones, they paid with PJ Brown AND Jamal Mashburn.
