The Assassination Of Devean George By The Coward Donnie Nelson
August 2nd, 2009
February 13th, 2008. Wednesday. Raining. The Dallas Mavericks are tootling along with a 34-17 record. They’re pretty good, and perhaps they know it, because they’re suddenly overwhelmed with the urge to do something drastic. A veteran team with only one good young player decides on a plan to get older. The Mavericks decide that Jason Kidd is a significant upgrade over Devin Harris, and work out a variety of scenarios that see them trade Devin and two future first-round draft picks for Kidd. They’re probably wrong, but they work hard at it anyway, determined to obtain a player that two years ago would have been a steal. But not so much now. Eventually, they stumble upon a scenario that both they and the Nets can agree upon. Dallas agrees to trade Harris, the picks, cash, DeSagana Diop, Maurice Ager, Jerry Stackhouse and Devean George to the Nets in exchange for Kidd and Malik Allen. The fillers are largely meaningless; outside of Harris, only Diop is a significant player for the Mavericks. The core of the deal is Harris for Kidd, and both teams seem pretty happy with that. The fundamental pieces are together, peripherals of the long-awaited deal are finally in place, and everyone’s a winner. Things then get a bit weird. Through a hitherto little-known technicality, one of the lesser components of the deal – backup forward George – has the power to veto the trade. George re-signed with the Mavericks in the previous offseason to a one-year contract, and Dallas will have early Bird rights on him when his contract expires. However, if George gets traded, the recipient team will lose his Bird rights if they trade for him, which reduces George’s chances of getting handily paid next season. [Let’s pretend for a minute that such chances existed.] […]
Wake Me Up When September Ends
September 25th, 2008
John Hollinger wrote a long old piece two weeks ago in which he opines upon pretty much every transaction made this summer. Well, if he can, I can. From the people you know about, to the insignificant ones you couldn’t give a Keith Closs about. That’s how I want it, so that’s how it’s going to be. If you’re the kind of person who is annoyed by long posts, then the length of this post will annoy you. It is essentially done as a compendium of all the relative NBA parts of the Summer Signings sequence of posts, written so that I don’t have to do it when I do my season previews. This way, I might actually get them all done this year. (Readers note: If the format and opinions contained within this piece are incredibly similar to those of John Hollinger, then that’s because John Hollinger is very good at what he does. And that’s why he did this first. To a much higher standard. (Instead of this, just search for your favourite team’s name for their transactions.) Big old eight figure deals: Philadelphia landed a big name free agent, which hasn’t happened in the entire time that I’ve followed the sport. They did so by signing Elton Brand for five years and $79.8 million, after Brand reneged on a verbal agreement to re-sign with the L.A. Clippers, a deed for which he will join Carlos Boozer and John Salmons in hell or whatever. After this, Philadelphia also re-signed Andre Iguodala to a six-year, $80 million deal – those two now form the Sixers core, along with Louis Williams, Samuel Dalembert, Thaddeus Young and Andre Miller (who is staring down the barrel of an extension.) But none of them can shoot threes. Baron Davis opted out and […]
