Morey has admitted that it was his idea. And I think it has JVG's finger prints on it too. BUT, CD was the GM, and I am pretty sure CD was the one who did the negotiations at that time. A lot of posters here who oppose the trade until this day (with a few exceptions) do not oppose the Battier-Gay deal in principle. They just think that we got too little back. If that is the beef, then it's on CD, not on Morey.
Actually the Grizz made the trade in Feb 2008, a season and a half after we traded him to them, so his contract had only one season left. That made it much more tradeable. And what did they get back? Jason Collins, who is really really bad. Here was John Hollinger's assessment of Collins that year. "He had the league's worst PER for a second straight season, and of the league's 65 centers he was the worst in four separate categories: TS%, defensive rebound rate, rebound rate, and PER. He was also nearly the worst in turnover ratio, offensive rebound rate and shooting percentage, and it's not like it was an outlier of a year -- that's pretty consistent with how he's played the past few years." My point about Scola is that we would not have had the cap space to make the Scola deal if we hadn't dumped Swift's contract. The only reason SA gave us Scola was b/c they didn't want to pay Jackie Butler. You know what? Butler made less than Swift's salary. First point is pretty debatable, since the NBA is much harder than college. Second point, yes you're right we did need more scoring. I'm not really going to get into offense/defense issues here since I think it's a matter of taste and we'll go in circles forever on this. I can see this is not a stat you really care about. So the only thing I'll say is that every star wing player has a much higher A/TO ratio than Gay in the league. You can look them up yourself. We all know Battier is not a stat filler, but it's also pretty obvious that Gay is not the star the Rudy lovers make him out to be.
Why does Morey get so much credit from this message board. Mike James, Bonzi Wells, Steve Francis, Joey Dorsey, keeping Tracy McGrady when he could of traded him earlier; all of these could be considered bad decisions in his 2-3 years as GM. And before people start mentioning Brooks, Scola, and Landry; remeber he has also had an incredible amount of money to work with as compared to about 85% of the rest of the league.
morey is fantastic. i love how he seems to pull off the right deal at just the right time... we will see if he can keep this up and get us a real center and fill out this roster will talent upgrades before the season starts. some of morey's past moves have been questionable, but i view these as mostly low risk/high reward type moves. my only real beef with morey at this point is that we lost artest - and got nothing in return for him. but there were so many other factors that contributed to ron making that decision to leave the rockets (namely the injuries and a potential lottery bound season). those factors dramatically hurt morey's chances to execute his game plan as well as he could've. i just wish we coulda got something for the guy we gave up two first round picks for. ah well, can't win them all... even so, morey is still an excellent GM in my eyes. mcgrady's contract just became more valuable with news that the NBA salary cap is shrinking next year. there has been so much movement this off-season... and there's plenty more moves waiting to happen. i'm confident that morey will win over even more of us fans by next season's trade deadline.
