Strike One...Strike Two
By Darryl Howerton #21
First two moves out the free agency gate were not good ones.
The Detroit Pistons fumbled their $18 million worth of cap space by overspending on two non-All-Stars—Ben Gordon and Charlie Villanueva. I seriously doubt any NBA general manager has either player on their Top 50 list, yet Joe Dumars and the Detroit Pistons decided to pay them as such.
On my personal rankings and NBA market-value charts, these two didn’t even reach $13 million combined.
And that’s beside the point. If you have $18 million of space, you save it until you can land an All-NBA-type player. You don’t split it between two decent starters.
The 8th-highest paid player in the NBA will make $19,766,860 in 2009-10. The 25th-highest paid player will make $14,976,754. So if you have $18 million worth of space, you are that rare team that can land such a star, either by trade or signing. To split that money between two decent starters is a major mistake.
What makes the move especially damaging is that the Pistons had an inside track on any player they could have wanted, either this year or in the much-anticipated summer of 2010. They already had a playoff team intact—one that could finish .500 even if they saved their major spending money.
Instead, they wasted it on two good—not great—offensive players who don’t defend or rebound for their position well. In essence, Detroit has exchanged Chauncey Billups, Rasheed Wallace and Amir Johnson for Gordon and Villanueva.
They’ve exchanged conference finals appearances for .500 ball at the same price.
Unless Dumars has a major blockbuster up his sleeve involving Richard Hamilton and other Pistons, Detroit wasted all their cap advantage and still won’t win 50 games. This is almost as bad as Joe D’s summer of 2003.
Indeed, the D is gone from Detroit.
And like Detroit, Chris Wallace and the Memphis Grizzlies also blew their cap-space advantage, doing Mike Dunleavy and the Los Angeles Clippers a favor by taking Zach Randolph’s monster contract off their hands.
So, yes, Memphis will improve now that they’ve essentially replaced Darko Milicic (who was recently traded for new Clipper Quentin Richardson) with Randolph and draft pick Hasheem Thabeet.
But the Grizzlies are still light years away from becoming a playoff team. And what’s truly sad is that under proper management, the Grizz have had the cap space the last couple years to make such a leap.
Even now, they still have the wherewithal to sign a $13 million player. But their track record shows they’d probably bungle that move too.
Thanks to Memphis, the Clippers have a bright future again—and no longer are considered the worst organization in the league.
What’s especially disturbing about this Randolph-Richardson deal is that the Grizzlies traded Pau Gasol away 1 ½ years ago to save money on his big contract. By taking on Randolph’s baggage ($16.0 and $17.3 million the next two seasons), the Grizzlies are showing the world they have no plan and no consistency to what they’re doing.
Yes, they saved $15 million last season, so in their eyes, the Gasol trade was not all bad. But for the next two years, Memphis is playing with Randolph when they could have had a Top 3 center instead.
And now that they’ve chosen to use some of their voluminous cap space, they’ve wasted it on a high-baggage player who’s never lived up to his potential. In my book, Z-Bo is barely more than half worth ($9 mil) what he’s actually getting paid ($16 mil).
Or should I say, overpaid.
Any team in the league could have acquired his contract for a second-round pick, and they all said no. Meanwhile, the Griswolds decided to waste cap space to do so.
It’s tough for me to decide which team made the worst ’09 free-agent debut—Detroit or Memphis.
Gives a new meaning to an old saying—the early birds caught worms.
Now it’s time for the smart GMs to take advantage of the new market, now that two of the three cap-space teams have taken themselves out of the game.
