Andray Blatche

Meanwhile, the source of the Nets' streak is not immediately obvious. The four different wins have featured four different starters, as injuries to Deron Williams and Kevin Garnett are forcing them to be in and out of the lineup on a nightly basis. There is little consistent about the rotation - Reggie Evans can either start and play 30 minutes or record a DNP-CD, Jason Terry's usage is similarly unpredictable (and his play significantly ineffective), and the duo of Andray Blatche and Alan Anderson do not provide much consistency even with their more consistent minutes. Both can be game changers, but both can not turn up at all - whichever it is, both will probably shoot on every touch anyway.

Andray Blatche – Brooklyn Nets

Blatche’s PER last year was 21.9. That is frankly enormous, enormous enough for 14th in the league. PER never tells the whole story about someone’s production or value, as evidenced by the fact that Amar’e Stoudemire was one spot ahead in 13th, yet it tells a big part of it. And so while the cringe-worthy moments on the court, and the distracting ones off it, continued to follow him around, it was all reconciled by just how productive (10.3 points and 5.1 rebounds in only 19 minutes per game) and cheap (one year unguaranteed minimum salary contract) Blatche was.

Both of these things should be true again. Blatche returns to the same team for the same role, but is now flanked with better teammates. He crucially remains almost as cheap – to preserve their taxpayer MLE for Andrei, the Nets re-signed Andray for the maximum amount that they could as a non-Bird right free agent, a mere 120 percent of the minimum salary. In re-signing Blatche to a one year contract (the player option in his second year does not count until it is exercised, which it surely won’t be), at the end of which he will have early Bird rights, Brooklyn have also given Blatche the right to veto any trade he is in, as he would lose this Bird right status if traded. Therefore, Brooklyn have essentially guaranteed themselves one year of fantastic quality bench production from someone who, when he’s this cheap and this good, is worth it all.

[...] Between picks, Wizards head coach Randy Wittman is interviewed, where he reinforces everything previously said about the Wizards's determination to build character and improve the locker room. If you mean it, amnesty Andray Blatche.

Flip Saunders will likely be the fall guy before the year is out, because someone has to be. But he’s trying, moreso than his players. You can’t teach a team that won’t listen. Washington’s offense is built around a point guard who can’t shoot, a shooting guard who won’t stop shooting, and a big man who shoots whatever he wants before blaming others for it on Twitter. All this is complimented by a defense that just doesn’t understand fundamental defensive positioning, nor that seems to want to try. In stockpiling assets and loading up on potential, all the Wizards have done is create a cast of misfits. Misfits who, for the most part, play as though they are in it only for themselves.

NBA contracts are only renegotiable if

a) they're going upwards, and
b) the team has cap room.

Because teams so rarely have cap room, and because it rarely behooves teams to pay their already-under-contract players more money, it almost never happens. Indeed, before this season, I could not name you a single occurrence of it happening; it probably has at some point, yet that's a testament to how rare it is. However, in this modern, sabermetric, MIT-laden internet-era NBA, executives are far more cap creative than they used to be. Therefore, this barely-used strategy has been used twice far already this season. Washington used their leftover cap room to increase Andray Blatche's salary, almost doubling his pay over the final two seasons of his contract and simultaneously tacking on a three year extension. Rather than chancing losing him on the 2012 open market, the team tied him in for five years for a total of $35,730,997, tying down a productive young player for a significant period of time. The Thunder themselves later one-upped this move with a $17.55 million extension for Collison that deliberately, humorously and yet craftily made him the fourth highest paid centre in the world ($13,670,000), behind only Amare Stoudemire ($16,486,611), Dwight Howard ($16,647,180) and Yao Ming ($17,686,100.)