User Comments, Suggestions, or Complaints | Privacy Policy | Terms of Service | Advertising
|
Demarini, Easton and TPX Baseball Bats
|
AllianceTickets.com has cheap MLB Tickets. Get all your Colorado Rockies Tickets, Seattle Mariners Tickets, San Francisco Giants Tickets and all your favorite baseball tickets here. We also carry cheap Denver Broncos Tickets, Seattle Seahawks Tickets and Denver Nuggets Tickets. |
For wholesale prices on baseball gifts and equipment, check these stores out! |
Page rendered in 0.6850 seconds
54 querie(s) executed
Reader Comments and Retorts
Go to end of page
Statements posted here are those of our readers and do not represent the BaseballThinkFactory. Names are provided by the poster and are not verified. We ask that posters follow our submission policy. Please report any inappropriate comments.
Every situation is unique, and maybe you felt that way, but I heard from/saw Celtics' and that day who didn't get it and were pissed off.
If you don't like the deal from NO's POV, that's fine but:
a) We don't know what was going to happen next.
b) Based on everything we know, Demps wanted to move Paul to LAC or GS but couldn't get the young guard he wanted. Failing that, he tried to put together a team of guys who are pretty good, would be in the playoff mix, and have some trade value.
You can say Demps should have waited, played chicken with the Clippers and the Warriors, but there are good reasons not to.
And let's face it--your emotions are in play here. The Lakers not getting Paul makes you feel better. That's OK, too, but most people, even those who hate the Lakers as much as you do, are not giving Stern as much slack on this as you seem to be.
I was writing in reference to Stern supposedly trying to show ALL the players that they can't dictate where they want to play. He can dictate where Paul gets to play because he's invested with quasi-owner powers (or at least he is the spokesman to an owner's majority opinion), but he's not going to be able to do the same with Howard. No way does he try to pull this again. If Griffin a few years from now decides he doesn't want to re-sign with the Clippers, Stern won't be able to do anything about that either. And so on.
I agree, if these three teams tweak the deal and re-submit, I'm not sure Stern turns it down. On the other hand, if he's working on the directive of irate owners who under no circumstances want Paul to end up with the Lakers unless Bynum is included, taking Howard out of the future picture, then there may be nothing to be done about it.
"When will we just change the name of 25 of the 30 teams to the Washington Generals?" Stay classy, Dan... I hope the e-mail was in Comic Sans.
Commissioner,
It would be a travesty to allow the Lakers to acquire Chris Paul in the apparent trade being discussed.
This trade should go to a vote of the 29 owners of the Hornets.
Over the next three seasons this deal would save the Lakers approximately $20 million in salaries and approximately $21 million in luxury taxes. That $21 million goes to non-taxpaying teams and to fund revenue sharing.
I cannot remember ever seeing a trade where a team got by far the best player in the trade and saved over $40 million in the process. And it doesn’t appear that they would give up any draft picks, which might allow to later make a trade for Dwight Howard. (They would also get a large trade exception that would help them improve their team and/or eventually trade for Howard.) When the Lakers got Pau Gasol (at the time considered an extremely lopsided trade) they took on tens of millions in additional salary and luxury tax and they gave up a number of prospects (one in Marc Gasol who may become a max-salary player).
I just don’t see how we can allow this trade to happen.
I know the vast majority of owners feel the same way that I do.
When will we just change the name of 25 of the 30 teams to the Washington Generals?
Makes sense. Maybe that would help Gilbert relax enough to let the Lakers get Paul.
I'm not saying I do. I'm simply stating that if Demps took on Scola and Martin because his grand plan was to later flip them for building block young players and first round picks, I don't think that was a very good idea. Hey, I know I'm not a plugged-in insider but it would really surprise me if Scola and Martin had that kind of trade value. Scola is 31 and Martin is going to be 29 in early January. It would be dumb to trade youth and first round picks that aren't in the 20s for them.
If I was Demps, I would have traded for Patterson instead of Scola.
Got it. I agree with you there.
It depends on what you mean by "building block players" and how high the picks are. It is also possible that being a second-tier playoff team was the goal and he thought NO could make make money in that scenario. Maybe he liked the contracts of the guys he was getting and thought he could offload them. Hard to say.
The best thing to get for Paul was a young guard. Gordon, Westbrook, and Curry apparently were not on the table. Your argument appears to be that Demps, not getting guys like that, should have waited. But, to move Paul, he was/is probably going to have to take back a a fairly high salary--like, for example, Chris Kaman, who was in the Clippers' offer. There is also the salary floor to think about, long-term. NO only has six guys under contract right now. As long as tow of them are Paul and Okafor, that's not an issue. But it could be.
Not Avery Bradley, let's get that out of the way.
If Demps made the trade he did because he wanted New Orleans to make money in the short-term and was also concerned about reaching the salary floor, well, one, that's a pretty short-sighted way to handle the trading of your mega-franchise star and two, those are business decisions that would have come down from the league office and I highly doubt that it happened.
Who knows, maybe the trade would have worked out brilliantly for Demps, including later getting a high return for Scola and Martin but I just think that if you're going to trade your young superstar and basically start over, you should start over. At the very least, the youth to veteran ratio shouldn't be 1:3.
Sure. But at the price he's likely to charge- and the interest rate on top of that- it's probably not worth it.
My uninformed prediction for tomorrow is that the fight is over whether the Lakers get Scola (which they want) or Okafor (which 29 other owners want.) If Paul isn't in LA in short order, things are going to get ugly.
I think there is a chance the email is a fake--seems like it would be easy enough to do.
In some ways, the veto of the deal is just a continuation of the lockout. I guess I hope the Paul deal goes through and Howard gets traded to Brooklyn.
Dec 30, 2010
On the other hand, there's no player loyalty with Billups. They shafted him pretty good. It could work out well for him though if no teams bids on his contract and he can sign with the Heat. I would not be in favor of that scenario, nor should Bulls fans. I'm not sure why Cuban is against signing and trading Chandler for Billups. Their salaries match up and since Billups's contract expires after this season, he would still retain the precious cap space he seems determined to hold out for Deron. Getting Billups would push Kidd to guarding 2-guards full-time, which he's best at, and create a pretty devastating lineup of shooters.
Unfortunately, if Paul has to go to Boston kicking and screaming then I fear that the chances of him re-signing would be very very tiny.
There is room for disagreement about the basketball reasons behind what Demps did, and it is precisely because of that that I think it is clear that Stern f'd up. If one of Mitch Kupchak's old roomies on the early 80s Lakers ran NO and traded Paul for Blake, Walton, World Peace, and Ebanks, then (duh) Stern needs to veto that and fire the guy.
But Paul for Pau Gasol and Lamar Odom?
As for the “basketball reasons” part of the deal, I don’t know. I always over estimate how much a team can get for a superstar on his way out. I’ve seen a number of league experts say New Orleans got a good deal, but I don’t see it. Three 30ish guys on pretty sizable money. So New Orleans finishes middle of the pack and loses in the second round while having no cap space and no high draft picks. Yay?
For the final part of it, the angle many sports reporters are pursuing is the “sticking it to the Lakers” angle. I suppose there is something to that. I’m not going to lie, the wailing coming from ESPNLA and other parts of Lakerland sounds very much like a 9 year old girl screeching that she didn’t receive a pony this year like every other birthday. I would say it also gives some idea of how good of a basketball deal New Orleans got, with all respect Robinred.
The league should have foreseen this was going to be an issue, as the quote from Phil Jackson illustrates. I’m not sure what they could have done, but I don’t think they could have handled it any worse. It never should have gotten to this point, but the other owners should have a say, and if they shot it down, even out of spite, that is their right given league ownership of the team. If Stern doesn't want scenarios like this one, don't let people run franchises into the ground.
Also, whether he had any impact on this or not: Dan Gilbert is a pox on humanity. He's a classic Aggrieved White Man with the added benefit of a couple hundred million dollars, just to make him more obnoxious.
As for the “basketball reasons” part of the deal, I don’t know. I always over estimate how much a team can get for a superstar on his way out. I’ve seen a number of league experts say New Orleans got a good deal, but I don’t see it. Three 30ish guys on pretty sizable money. So New Orleans finishes middle of the pack and loses in the second round while having no cap space and no high draft picks. Yay?
When I first heard about the deal, I focused on the LAL aspect of it and how I didn't think it necessarily improved them and I was fine with it. However, now that I see who all was supposed to be involved, I think it makes sense for both HOU and NOH (still don't see it for the LAL). For as good as Paul is (I think he's a Top 5 guy on the merits and my 2nd favorite player) it's not as if he was consistently guiding NOH deep into the playoffs. This deal would have given NOH a full lineup that would probably make the playoffs and get knocked out in the 1st round, which is pretty much what the Paul-era has consisted of. So, I get it for them. For HOU, assuming what I read somewhere was correct and they would still be able to add Nene and then have a Nene-Gasol frontcourt, it makes perfect sense IMO. For LAL, I think it makes them too small and susceptible to injury, which if I were a LAL fan I would be concerned about (assuming the Knicks' request to have injury/player fatigue setting turned off doesn't go through)
On the potential Howard to NJ stuff, I may be naive but I think you have to get more than Brook Lopez and crap for Howard. How good are those draft picks that are being included?
--I don't follow this paragraph. The best way of minimizing the "absurdity" is for the Hornets to make good deals. Gasol and Odom are both better players than anybody else involved in the Carmelo deal (####, you could argue Gasol is a better player than Melo, though I kinda feel Gasol's statistical greatness is Laker-specific and he will disappoint wherever else he goes).
Think about it this way: you have to give up a top 10 player (Paul). Everybody in the NBA knows you never want to trade your quarter for a bunch of dimes and nickels. How many players better than Gasol are even in the league? Were the Hornets supposed to sit and wait for somebody to offer them their next ten first-rounders or something?
As 531 points out Gasol was going to the Rockets. Thats beside the point though which is what I was trying to get at. LA could have traded a cloned Kareem and a resurrected Wilt and it wouldn't change the image problem the NBA has in a league owned team trading a superstar to the NBA's flagship franchise. That is and was a huge problem. There is the perception problem as well as the owner problem. Take Cuban for example. He let Chandler go, presumably to take a run at a free agent like CP3 next year. He has spent a lot of time and money on the Mavs. Why would he approve a Paul trade to LA from a crappily run team that he partially owns? I'm not in any way saying the trade being blocked is not bad. It makes the NBA look like a yahoo roto league. But the owners' reaction was predictable and the conspiracy theories that would abound following a trade of Paul to LA is also predictable.
Apologies for any communication problems, on mobile.
It's the only leverage the held-up markets have, the league is well-placed to absorb the blow if he leaves, and if he takes the money and stays, you've set a precedent and stiffened the spines of the next "small market" that gets held hostage.
If you're going to go to all the trouble of negotiating a CBA with a big home team advantage, you have to be willing to enforce the advantage.
The league's f'd things up badly to date, but if they come out with this objective and this strategy, it's a net positive.
So, the NBA is gonna take the huge PR hit and antagonize some of its best assets (I'd imagine LeBron/Melo/Wade/etc. . . will rally around CP3) to deprive one of their top players of an extra couple million per season.
Billy Hunter should have made sure the Hornets situation was covered in the CBA and that the league suits wouldn't be able to veto (or even influence) bona fide basketball decisions, and that disputes in the area would be handled by a delineated arbitration process empowered to make quick, basketball-only decisions. That was a f up on his part.
Class act.
Game 3 against the Mavs was a classic performance.
Over Dan Gilbert's dead body.
Right there's your best "competitive balance" provision, and it was so simple ....
1. They can't possibly approve a trade to another team. That would destroy the league's credibility with several owners/GMs/fanbases.
2. They can't possibly hold onto him and let him walk for nothing- that would cripple the Hornets's ability to rebuild.
What are the options?
If Paul doesn't show up for camp things are going to get really ugly, which sucks not only in that we won't get to watch him play basketball, but because he seems like one of the league's genuinely good guys and now he's caught in this mess.
I always hesitate to call anyone a "good guy", we just never know what's a public personality and what's real. I'm not assuming everyone is a secret #######, but I'm not going to put anyone on a pedestal either (this is something I'm going to have to work on as I introduce my son to sports, so I've been thinking about it a lot). I have read some good stuff about Paul, too, and I have no reason to assume he's got some secret demon waiting to come out. Having said all that, he's a nut-puncher.
Dan Gilbert can eat a dick.
Well-said.
---
Sorry to hear about Roy. I am still pissed the Bulls took Tyrus Thomas instead of him, even knowing that his career ends today.
---
I said before I kinda wanted Howard to go to NJ/Brooklyn. That offer is going to have to be sweetened, because we know multiple teams (including the Lakers now) can beat that easily.
I think Martin will age well. His game reminds me of Reggie Miller/Ray Allen, who both have been effective well into their 30s.
2. They can't possibly hold onto him and let him walk for nothing- that would cripple the Hornets's ability to rebuild.
1. Agree.
2. Maybe they're hoping they sell the team before it gets to that point, and the team gets more money with him still around. Then it's the new owner's problem (of course, they will know going into it that Paul is not sticking around; but maybe they can provide insight into what type of package they'd want back; not everyone agrees a 6 seed and out in the playoffs is a worse strategy than young guys/picks/hope for the best).
But the key to me is that while one can argue, as Norcan does, that NO should have gotten young guys, the deal is not some kind of joke deal that requires league intervention, so if Demps wanted it done, the league should have let it go through. If the Hornets were just run by a regular owner, and the guy said, "I'm not comfortable", then, OK. That is not the context here.
The OMFG NOW THE F'ING LAKERS WILL GET DWIGHT HOWARD argument is OK on a message board, but not as a matter of league policy.
I have heard rumors, perhaps false, that Cuban, having just seen his team sweep the Lakers and win the trophy, was one of the prime movers against the deal. If so, I think less of Cuban as an owner/competitor now.
The only possible way the league's move here is remotely defensible would be if they managed to sell the Hornets before the trade deadline, so that the new ownership could rebuild as it saw fit. Otherwise, they've locked themselves and the Hornets into a position where, unless they sheepishly let the trade through in a revised form, they can't fairly move him anywhere. The move was transparently ham-fisted, and there's no real road to graceful resolution here.
Sad to see Brandon Roy have to retire, though I'm not really surprised it came to this. I have been pretty apprehensive about the reports that came out recently about how they not only weren't going to amnesty him this season, but that he might start. He's one of those guys whose body denied him the career he should have had, but that guy is long gone. I'm glad he's walking away now with his head up. I hope his knees are shot for basketball but still fine for normal activity.
Yep.
Crazy how many of those guys have been Blazers- Walton, Bowie, Roy, maybe Oden.
Totally agree. In a perfect world, the league isn't run by petulant brats. Not a perfect world.
Portland is sad with the rumor of Brandon Roy. At least it explains why they wouldn't use the amnesty.
I'm having a hard time thinking of a commish in sports doing more damage to their reputation than David Stern these last few weeks. Even Bettman isn't as loathed by NHL fans anymore as Stern is getting.
It's not between the lines:
Congrats! Good luck with the next few weeks/months.
This, if true, makes me furious.
a) He confirmed the Gilbert letter as real and made the same comic sans joke as someone upthread.
b) Nene was close with Houston
http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7334835/the-sixth-day-nba-christmas
Congrats!!!
Congrats!!!! Good stuff ahead.
I'd have to disagree. There are many reasons to dislike Cuban as a competitor, but I don't think this is one of them. He had every right to protest at the Hornets taking on salary last year and he was within his rights to raise a stink here.
League owned teams lead to competition being compromised, whether its the Expos or the Hornets. You get the pillage the farm system to win now Bartolo type trades from Minaya and you get situations like this one. For the record I think the Hornets GM was doing his best, I just think in the trade a superstar situation you are better off blowing it up. But people like Cuban and Jackson saw this coming last year. Nothing was done. It is stupefying that it got to the point of Demps making a trade and Stern giving the veto. It should never have gotten to that point. I'm not sure what the solution what other than to have a buyer or contract the team. But I'm pretty sure waiting to the last minute and then pushing the self destruct button wasn't the best option, which everyone seems to agree on. I just disagree with the notion that it is realistic to expect the owners to join hands on a deal involving a league owned team.
On an unrelated note, has anyone read Simmons' article? Ugh. I'm not sure why anyone would bother with his vision of the NBA. When your vision of the NBA makes the Premiere League look like a bastion of parity, you've got issues.
edit: krusty beat me to the Simmons article
Which is plainly tampering, which means Stern may have grounds to step in and block any trade that ensues.
Well played, Nets. Well played.
Stern has to assume discussions involved: (1) the team sweet-talking Howard to make a demand to be traded to specifically their team; and (2) an agreement that he would sign with them in free agency. First is bad, second is terrible -- direct circumvention of CBA.
Paul case isn't really precedent, but it effectively is. Can't see Stern letting Howard for Brook Lopez-centered pupu platter go through if tampering true.
congrats, jimmy!
I didn't think it was bad until it got to the end and the Lakers/Knicks mystique stuff. Then it flew completely off the rails.
The solution to this is not to allow the other owners to have input onto the basketball moves of one of their competitors. So what if they own the team now? What they are getting out of owning the team is the preservation of one of their markets and more time to find a buyer at a price that they want. They should not have been allowed to make any decisions about the basketball decisions because 1) it's collusive 2) it looks terrible for the integrity of the league 3) it is very dangerous to the future value of the Hornets.
And if you read Wojnarowksi's article, you'll see that that is exactly what everyone thought they had done. They appointed some guy as the Team President and Demps was supposed to report only to him. Demps supposedly had full authority to make decisions on the team as long as he didn't get into the tax. All of the execs who were dealing with him thought he had authority to speak for the Hornets. Then Stern and the owners upset all of that at the eleventh hour. It is absolutely reasonable to expect the owners and Stern to realize that they can't micromanage the team that is one of their competitors, even though they have take over ownership. It's a huge conflict of interest and a betrayal of the fans and the entire idea of a competitive sports league.
A commissioner who was really looking out for the best interests of the league would have allowed the leadership he had put in place to run the team as they saw fit. The other owners should have realized that was the only way for the situation to be tenable. The fact that some of them are too stupid/spoiled to realize that means that they deserve all the criticism they are getting on this deal.
On the Big Baby/Bass front, I really like the move for the C's. Bass is exactly the kind of big man they need. I'm not sure why Orlando is doing it, but they've been underusing Bass for a while, so I guess it's not shocking.
Congrats, Jimmy!
We just saw Albert Pujols go to LA, and while there has been some predictable hand-wringing, the broad consensus among the baseball "intelligentsia" is that Anaheim is very likely to regret the deal's cost and length. You could say the same about just about every big time free agent in MLB.
Max contracts put an artificial cap on cost and length (risk) - just about 30 out of 30 teams would give LeBron, Wade, Paul, Howard, etc the contracts that they got or are going to get. Nobody can offer a foolish amount of money or years, so of course they choose the best destinations. Why would anyone ever play in Cleveland beyond his rookie contract? You can draw analogies to the Indians, but they could keep one superstar around if they really wanted to by offering him stupid $ and years (see the Twins and Mauer).
How much value did the Cavs franchise lose when LeBron left? 4 times the max amount that the team was allowed to offer him? More? What sense does that make?
You might say that the Heat would've just offered even more, which is true. LeBron almost definitely would've left anyway. But you'd at least be forcing difficult decisions on all parties and potentially hamstring Miami if the deal doesn't work out. As-is, there's no difficult decision to be made by anyone involved -- they're all just left waiting for the inevitable*.
But Dan Gilbert, of course, is focused on the other side -- manipulating the free agent market even more to keep stars from fleeing undesirable teams. It seems like it's just not going to happen unless you can go as far as not having free agency at all or introducing the concept of franchise players, which is unrealistic.
* Which is why I find Darren Rovell's tweets about the Hornets having more value with CP3 unusually simplistic. He says they need to keep Paul for the next year so that they can save fans' goodwill. If I were a Hornets fan, I'd already be some mix of bummed and outraged that there is literally nothing my team can do to have any hope of keeping its superstar -- in other words, the goodwill would be gone.
EDIT: Guess I should have submit a lot earlier.
Really, really ####### stupid. Supposedly Howard changed agents from ex-agent to his dad ... wonder if somehow related?
Stern doesn't even need to frontally attack to kill the deal; all he needs to do is freeze the Nets' draft picks -- the ones going to Orlando -- pending completion of investigation, and it's over.
nets tampering: really stupid indeed.
rovell: i saw someone describe themselves as "hate-following" him (on twitter). i think that's about right.
Yes. I am a fan of one of the smallest-market teams in the league, so I guess I'm supposed to be in favor of all this cap nonsense, but I have long felt that the net result of the cap, tax, max deals, and all the different contract rules is pretty negative for the small market teams and does essentially none of the stuff that the owners/league say and many of the fans believe that it does.
It seems to me that you can propose nearly any rule and say it is to improve competitive balance, and a lot of fans will just assume that it actually does so.
David Stern overrules Prez Lincoln, voids emancipation proclamation. Bryant Gumbel cackling & rolling blunt on Underground Railraod 2 Canada
I think if you poled the posters here, the majority would support eliminating the max salary ceiling.
Fair enough Maxwn. I think the ship sailed on competitive integrity awhile ago, but if Demps was given the authority to make a good faith effort to run the team by the owners, that's even worse than I thought. I hadn't realized how much authority he was given. If the owners agreed to let Demps run the team and are reneging, that's ugly. I wonder if it was put to a vote at the time and some owners were against it?
Yes, Congrats. We just passed the 4 month mark, and it's been great so far. Enjoy. I assume you named the child Tyrus, regardless of the sex.
To add to the sh!tstorm, Twitterverse alight with seemingly well-reported story that Howard met with Prokhorov and King last night without Orlando's knowledge.
Which is plainly tampering, which means Stern may have grounds to step in and block any trade that ensues.
Well played, Nets. Well played.
Unreal.
---
It almost looks like FTO and Der congratulating Jimmy on the Big Baby trade; I'm sure he hates Davis.
Simmons has a different "vision" of the league every other day. He is relatively consistent on the big market/historical team/city thing, but then the next day he seems to want restricted player movement.
Also, can we please stop pretending the lockout was about anything other than reducing the share of revenue that the players get?
Yeah, this is what I thought at first. Anyway, I'll extend my congratulations to Jimmy as well.
EDIT: Am I crazy to now want the Knicks to figure out a way to get Baron Davis?
It seems the owners, before OKing the lockout, had a decision to make: Parity, or Money. It's obvious which path they chose, but now some owners are ######## they didn't get both.
The Paul trade has NOTHING to do with the Celtics or the Knicks. The Celtics weren't the only team chasing Paul that didn't get him; were the Warriors screwed? Clippers? And as we've gone over here before Chandler's deal wasn't going to stop them from chasing Paul as FA.
@ J Sosa:
Cuban was "within his rights", as is Stern. But to me, the only ways the league steps in in this situation are if:
1. They tell Demps well beforehand that "CP stays until we have an owner" and Demps doesn't adhere to that.
or
2. The deal is so heinous (Paul for Blake, Walton, Metta World Peace, and Devin Ebanks) that it's clearly rigged and any half-awake fantasy commish would shut it down.
Based on what we know, 1 is not the case, and while there is room for debate about the merits of the deal, 2 is not the case, either.
You add that to the lockout/LeBron/Melo/big/small market/Lakers context and the Gilbert email, and you have what you have.
So IMO Cuban (if in fact he "raised a stink"--that is unconfirmed) should worry about the Mavericks, let Demps worry about the Hornets, and let Stern and Silver worry about finding an owner.
The truth of what's going on eventually will not square with some oft-repeated reports here.
He's just way too naive. He has ideas that would be good for the fans and good for the game, but can't seem to wrap his head around the business side of things and answer the question of "Why would the owners and the players would both agree to this 'great' change?"
It's just a bunch of stuff like "It's clear that the league needs at least four fewer teams" and "Teams need a way to dump obviously terrible contracts" then "Why can't we just get this done? It's all just common sense."
The merits of the deal aren't the main point. And, that IS more or less what Gilbert said, except that he didn't mention Okafor by name.
Demps would have had probably had this on Opening Night:
1 Dragic/Jack
2 Martin/Belinelli
3 Ariza/?
4 Scola/Odom
5 Okafor/Gray
Again, you can argue that putting together a team of that caliber/age was not the right play by Demps in this situation. I don't think you can argue that THIS NEEDS TO BE STOPPED--unless you are afraid the Lakers were going to get Dwight Howard.
Rovell is misguided on this. People I know in New Orleans are irate at the trade being blocked. Everyone knows Paul is leaving, so they want something tangible in exchange for him.
Understandably, this sort of event makes one want to draw conclusions right away. Unfortunately, the only information we have is what we read.
It's difficult to imagine finding something out that makes Stern look like anything other than a jackass.
It sounds like the old "I know, but I can't tell you" meme.
Centers are expensive. Even bad ones. And I don't think Jordan is a bad center. He's still raw but he can be (and has been for stretches) a defensive force in the middle.
Let's hear the snark. I would also love to hear what kind of rebuilding pieces Scola, Martin and Odom can fetch in a trade. I await enlightenment.
Did I ever suggest that Stern did the right thing? How did you come to that conclusion? Maybe it's keeping all the snarky things bottled up inside that's confusing you. I never said Stern was right in cancelling the deal. Since I believe he acted as the commissioner rather than as a faux-trustee, I don't think he has a leg to stand on in principle but he does legally as far as I've read. I do think that New Orleans made a bad deal by offloading their young superstar for a collection of older players without great trade value or on court potential. Am I allowed to make that argument? Pardon me sir.
You must be Registered and Logged In to post comments.
<< Back to main