Name the past 4 NBA Champions... what did they have in common? 2 solid 7 footers The Rockets had the opportunity to add that to their resume, and you guys DIDN'T WANT IT? Give me a break. Don't get me wrong, I love Martin and Scola, but if you have the opportunity to add two very solid seven footers to your lineup... you take it. Period. End of discussion.
I would love to know the last team that took home the gold that was not upper third or half in defense.
I think that Morey is less concerned about money now because he realizes that to get an incremental increase from good to better, you have to overpay. Think diamonds. A 1 carat rock is not incrementally more expensive than a 3/4 carat rock. The way the new CBA works you can always get decent players for a modest price. While I'm not totally sold on the Gasol deal, I'm not going to judge anything based on stupid reports/sources that have been wrong the entire time.
1.5x Scola's 2011 salary is $12.9 million. It's a valid concern. Alternatively, you could argue that Scola is underpaid at $8.6 million. Not a lot, but a little.
I disagree. The Rockets would get significantly better. Gasol is a perennial All-Star and is better than anyone we have. The deal would open up room to bring in Nene, another upgrade to our frontcourt. Losing Kmart would hurt, but at least we wouldn't have to deal with his defense anymore. Scola and KMart aren't exactly young either. And this is risky for the Lakers. They will have very little frontcourt depth.
It's not shortsighted at all. With Nene and Gasol, you have a 50 win team and are one wing player away from being a serious championship contender. You can still find that guy in the draft, or package patterson, morris, bud, and lee to get the SG or SF desired. Also, there is no guarantee the Lakers get Dwight Howard. I doubt Orlando wants Bynum and his huge contract with nothing else in return. And LA won't have the cap space for him. Without Howard, LA is a much weaker team than before this deal.
DD, I agree that it's virtually a wash on paper, but the trade would have repositioned us to attract and sign the big-time superstar talent we all agree is necessary to be a true championship contender, and which we do not currently have. You have to overpay for size because it's hard to find a franchise big; and that's exactly what we did. Had the trade gone down, we would have gone from having one of the worst front lines in the NBA to one of the best (assuming the Nene signing was to follow). We didn't give away any of our key young talent (pat, morris, lowry, and lee were all untouched). I had reservations about this deal initially, but after really thinking about it, i'm convinced that it would have been a big first step towards becoming an elite team. Frankly, my biggest reservation was how it would affect LA, but i actually think they are a worse team having gotten rid of all their size and putting all of their eggs in the Bynum will stay healthy basket. It basically takes two almost allstars to get a legit front court allstar. That's basically what we did. We consolidated talent into one player who fit a position of need, and we freed up playing time for guys who we all know will shine given the opportunity. Courtney Lee and Patterson are ready to play big minutes, but they won't see the floor nearly as much as they should if we keep Scola and Martin. This was a good trade for Houston, and it's a damn shame that the NBA exceeded it's legitimate authority killing it, harming 3 franchises in the process and calling into question the legitimacy of all league business.
The only way I'd be semi ok with this trade would be if Howard is dealt to the Nets first. But even then, the Lakers can do so much with Bynum trade wise its not even funny. Not to mention they'd already have the next star to build around if all else fails. And for the Rockets, I'd much rather look elsewhere than Nene. Just cant fathom paying a 15 / 7 guy $14 mil a year. Just doenst make sense, I know centers are hard to find, but damn, thats almost max money. And would leave us very little room to make other moves, we'd be capped out.
It was just reported up here in Dallas that Stern has also nixed the Howard to New Jersey trade as well. The game is indeed afoot. Also, Orlando is supposedly filing tampering charges against New Jersey and the Rockets over Howard. I mean, HUH?
So you are trying to tell me that Nene and Gasol, who combined would arguably the best front court in the league today, is the equivalent of a 20 ppg scorer, a pick probably not in the top 10, an undersized power forward, and a point guard that will probably never be a starter?
I wouldn`t go that far - but they wouldn`t be that far better as you think. Nene is overrated. In a normal year Nene would get a 10 millions a year contract. He is big, he can rebound and he can score - but he is no franchise player and shouldn`t get anywhere near the max contract. Gasol is 31 years old and might have some motivation issues. Scola is a leader, great lockerroom presence and a great scorer. Both of our guys are capable of going for 40 points any given night. And both are on fair contracts. Nene and Gasol would not be the best big men combo of the league (I`d take Amare and Chandler - or Howard and whoever) - and they would miss a player that can create his own shot. This trade would make us better yes - but it will hurt this teams ability to form a championship calibre team. With Gasol you have 3 years left - max. He doesn`t attract other superstars like a CP3, Wade or Lebron does.
Here's a somewhat longish but very good summation of the CP3 fiasco. Long story short: the NBA brought this situation upon itself by not a insisting on a hard cap, a franchise player tag or draft pick compensation for teams that lose free agents in the new CBA. http://nba-point-forward.si.com/2011/12/09/nba-turns-chris-paul-deal-into-disaster/ NBA turns Chris Paul deal into disaster The three-team trade that would've sent Chris Paul to the Lakers was a fair deal. (US PRESSWIRE) Throughout the lockout, I kept returning to the same question: What kind of league does the NBA want to be? How would it like players to move around? League officials talked incessantly of competitive balance, and Adam Silver spoke about “restricting player movement” so that all 30 teams could compete on more equal footing. And yet the owners, both at the start and finish of the talks, proposed a set of rules that guaranteed more mid-level veteran types would be flying around the league each summer as teams craved cap flexibility. And so it became clear: The league was fine with more player movement, provided the “right” sort of players were moving. That group did not include franchise-level stars or players on inexpensive rookie deals. The NBA wanted to keep young players tethered on the cheap to teams that draft them, and it wanted to increase the advantage incumbent teams had in keeping their own stars. Home teams had always been able to offer more money and more years, but that hadn’t been enough to keep LeBron James in Cleveland or Carmelo Anthony in Denver, with the latter using the extend-and-trade loophole to choose his team and get the money only Denver could offer. The NBA and the union settled on piecemeal solutions to this non-problem. They tweaked the extend-and-trade rules to make Melo-style moves more difficult, timing-wise, and less lucrative. They sought to prevent luxury tax teams from executing sign-and-trade transactions, though they held off until 2013-14, just enough time for Chris Paul and Dwight Howard to go this route if they were willing to take a bit less cash and a shorter deal. They allowed incumbent teams to offer annual raises 3 percentage points higher than rival suitors could — half a percentage point larger than the gap in the old deal. And guess what? None of this has made any difference, something anyone paying attention could have predicted months ago. If the NBA really wanted to keep stars in place or help team that lose star players, it needed to do something dramatic: a hard cap, a franchise player tag, draft pick compensation for teams that lose free agents, or the institution of unlimited maximum salaries, so that teams could only realistically afford one star player. The league pushed for only one of those things — a hard cap — and they gave up on that fight once it became clear the union would never accept it. And these are dramatic changes. Pushing for any of them might have cost the entire season, a catastrophic outcome the league (justifiably) could not accept. And so we got awkward compromises, unintended consequences and a system that looks very much like the old one. That’s the trade-off: Skirt a disastrous missed season, accept the consequences of a collective bargaining agreement filled with compromises. The deal did not remove Paul’s ability to tell the Hornets he would leave after this season. It didn’t remove his freedom to warn any team interested in acquiring him that he would enter free agency regardless. Heck, the deal actually encouraged Paul to enter free agency by limiting the length of an extension any team — including the Hornets — could offer him now. That is the compromise the NBA made to save the season. But on Thursday, they decided they could not live with that compromise and made the short-sighted, panicked decision to veto Chris Paul’s trade to the Lakers — a decision the three teams involve are appealing today, ESPN.com reports. It was not an unfair deal. The Lakers got the best piece involved, but they also surrendered two of their four best players and turned a unique strength — their length on the front line–into a weakness. The Hornets got a “B”-level return — several solid near-All-Stars, assets you could easily flip later, but no blue-chipper on the level of Stephen Curry (probably unavailable to them so far), Eric Gordon (ditto) or Rajon Rondo (reportedly very available to New Orleans, and a possible missed opportunity for them). The Rockets got one of the world’s 15 best players in Pau Gasol, a franchise-level center, and they probably weren’t done. Everyone had risks or rewards here. This was not a heist for the Lakers — not even close. And they earned this trade by acquiring the right kinds of assets to make it. They got Odom in the Shaquille O’Neal trade, a deal that set their franchise back during the mid-2000s. They got Gasol in the classic predatory big-market style of nabbing an expensive player in exchange for expiring contracts (Kwame Brown) and flotsam, but as Memphis showed last season, the Lakers paid a price. Having money absolutely helped the Lakers land the Paul trade bait and keep it in Laker colors until the moment came to strike. And having money would have helped the Lakers stomach the tax bills that would come down the road, notwithstanding Dan Gilbert’s inaccurate and misguided claims, made in an email to Stern, that the Lakers were going to bank massive savings from this trade. The larger point is this: Stars have leverage in basketball, and they always will, unless you want to return the reserve system Oscar Robertson fought against forty years ago. Robertson, by the way, negotiated himself a no-trade clause in Cincinnati and vetoed a deal in 1970 that would have sent him to Baltimore. Why? Because Robertson preferred a deal to Milwaukee, where he could team up with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. He got his way. None of this is new. Stars dominate the game and tilt the balance of power when they move, and they’ll want to move when they’re unhappy. Kevin Durant, Derrick Rose and Tim Duncan are not unhappy, and so they have not moved and have no plans to. The Hornets and Magic had more than a half-decade to make their stars happy, and both of them came close; the Magic made the Finals in 2009 and should have again the next season, and the Hornets nearly won the west’s top seed in 2008 before injuries, whiffed draft picks and poor free agency signings doomed them to mediocrity. The Hornets were insanely lucky to draft Chris Paul — thanks Atlanta and Portland! — and the combination of luck, skill and management would always determine whether Paul would stay a Hornet forever. That is how it has always been. The league could have pushed for a system that would change that reality in a meaningful way, but it chose not to. Making that push would have cost the league the season, and it likely would have involved reaching for player movement restrictions many NBA observers — this one included — would have found ethically repugnant. The NBA, for reasons good and convenient, chose compromise instead. It chose Band-Aids and tweaks, and it chose to allow the Knicks to spend $30 million this season on Tyson Chandler — the combined value of Chandler’s reported salary and the cost of using the amnesty provision on Chauncey Billups. The league’s other big-money juggernaut throwing its cash around that way irked some folks around the league a few hours before the Paul trade pushed Stern, Gilbert and whomever else over the top. You don’t get to run a league this way. You don’t get to ratify a collective bargaining agreement that allows for a particular move and then quash such a move when it happens. The league should have let the Paul deal proceed, and now it has trapped itself in a situation where it must either let it pass on appeal or face any number of consequences — Paul bolting in free agency for nothing, the Hornets accepting a worse trade down the line and other stuff atop the chaos and bitterness already uncoiling throughout the league.
This smells rotten. I have a sneaking suspicion the NBA and small market owners are conspiring to keep certain notable stars playing in small markets with their teams or out of big markets. Some agreement was made to get the owners on board with the new CBA, maybe.
Except the trade was Martin, Scola, Dragic, 1st round pick, & 2nd round pick for only one of those 7 footers.
