Ryan Gomes

Oklahoma City - Ryan Gomes and Hasheem Thabeet: The duo have played a combined 68 minutes all season and are redundant on a healthy Thunder team. However, Thabeet plays the more difficult to fill position, and showed enough last season to merit sticking around. If one is to be cut to trim excess spending, it will surely be Gomes.

[...] And this is probably a good thing. Of the 106 players from 2008, 31 of them had an average salary for the duration of between $3 million and $9.3 million, and only two of them (Ben Gordon and Robert Swift) were one year deals. Included in there were four years deals for the likes of Eduardo Najera ($12 million) and James Posey ($25,020,800), five-year deals for the likes of Ryan Gomes ($21,175,000) and Daniel Gibson ($20,054,000) and oversized three-years deals for the likes of Sasha Vujacic ($15 million) and Stephen Jackson ($27,769,500). Of those players, only Gomes has ever received another deal and is still in the league, an unguaranteed minimum salary one with OKC. You know your contract was too long when the player never gets another one afterwards.

[T]he amnesty clause (that we're having to pretend will exist here, but which almost certainly will exist in some form) will further expand the range of available talents. A lot of decent players are going to become available, not because they can't play the game, but because they can't justify their contract. A lot of the candidates are obvious and inevitable, some perhaps less so. Here's a potential list:

- L.A. Clippers: Randy Foye and Ryan Gomes - As long as you don't play him as point guard - a position he simply does not "get" - Foye is not a bad player, as undersized 38% shooting two guards with mediocre jumpshots go. But Foye is also being paid $4,250,000 next season to do the work of someone being paid about half that. Meanwhile, Gomes is on the hook for $8 million over the next two seasons, and is coming off the back of a terrible season; a PER of 9.0 with ever-worsening rebounding. The Clippers still don't have an answer for their small forward hole, but Gomes definitely isn't it. (Maurice Williams, if he does not already, will have some trade value down the road and ought not be amnestied. Not when there are alternatives.)

Cleveland finally did something with their angry owner's willingness to spend, taking on Baron Davis's exorbitant outstanding salary, and getting a top 10 pick for their troubles. The upcoming draft is going to be truly bad - we're talking 2000 calibre bad - but nevertheless, every draft has talent in it. Even the crap ones. Cleveland, who inevitably have to build through the draft, is right to trade into it, as long as they are sure that Baron's salary proves not to be prohibitive down the road. Meanwhile, L.A. ends the entirely unproductive B-Diddy era, and opens up $6 million in 2012 cap room. Why a team with 2012 cap room aspirations decided to sign Ryan Gomes to a contract that will pay him $4 million that summer is not immediately clear, but it's too late to change that now.

3) Players can be traded from the minute a team's season ends, up until the start of the moratorium (so for lottery teams, that's mid April until the end of June.) This is how draft night trades are allowed to happen. However, players can only be traded if they're not going to be free agents that summer, or if they have no options that would allow them to become so. If they have an option, player or team, then that option must be exercised concurrent with the trade, and thus the player will not be a free agent. Teams can bypass this by making the final year an unguaranteed season, rather than an option year. This is how Erick Dampier was traded. It is also how Ryan Gomes was traded before free agency started.

Ric Bucher chimes in with news of the trade between Minnesota and Portland, while simultaneously calling Stu Scott "Sue." [...] It's a baffling trade for Minnesota. Ryan Gomes is better than Martell Webster, but they have included the number 16 as well. Furthermore, while I'm purely speculating here, Portland could turn Gomes's favourable contract into Michael Beasley. That would mean Portland got Beasley and #16, when Minnesota got Martell Webster. Or they could just waive Gomes and have Luke Babbitt for much cheaper than Martell Webster. Either way, it makes no sense. Minnesota have really struggled since Fred Hoiberg left.