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.] […]
The Milwaukee Bucks and their new head coach Scott Skiles are an eclectic mix. Recent Skiles-free Bucks teams have been capable of repeated instances of really bad defence, whereas recent Skiles-led Bulls teams (last year excluded) have been one of the best defensive units in the NBA. Make no mistake about it – Scott Skiles can coach defence. He really can. He even made Michael Sweetney and Eddy Curry into decent defensive players, briefly. In theory, therefore, a union of the two will bring the much-needed defensive improvement to an offensively strong Milwaukee line-up. Or at least, that’s one way to look at it. Alternatively, Milwaukee might have just hired a coach that them away from their strengths, further exposing the flaws in their personnel. This could go either way. For every Skiles strength, there is a Skiles flaw. While he’s shown that he can teach help defence to those players previously written off as futile, he also has a small offensive playbook. While he can coach guards onto better things, he can’t get the same results from big men, yet seemingly insists that he can. For every young player that thrives under his guidance, one more will be alienated and underwhelming. And for every amusing sarcastic comment he makes to the press, he’ll make someone hate him. Perhaps mercifully, the Bucks don’t have too many young players. Their identity as a veteran team looking for something to push them back into contention was cemented this summer, when they dealt the closest thing that they had to a promising youngster – Yi Jianlian – as the primary piece for an in-his-prime Richard Jefferson. In free agency, the Bucks picked up Skiles’s favourite, Malik Allen, as well as other veteran backups Tyronn Lue and Francisco Elson. Trading away Mo Williams saw […]
Chicago Bulls Players acquired via free agency or trade: Joe Smith (two years, $10 million) Players acquired via draft: First round: Joakim Noah (9th overall) Second round: Aaron Gray (49th overall), JamesOn Curry (51st overall) Players retained: Andres Nocioni (re-signed, six years, $45 million) Players departed: Malik Allen (signed with New Jersey), Michael Sweetney (left unrestricted, unsigned), P.J. Brown (unsigned), Andre Barrett (made restricted, unsigned, may yet return), Martynas Andriuskevicius (left unrestricted, signed in Spain) Some words: (The following entry may well be written with a small hint of bias. Or, alternately, it may be written with huge seething dollops of it. I’m a Bulls fan, just so’s you know.) Has anybody ever told you that you need a dominant post scorer to win a title? If not, then you’re not a Bulls fan. Since the dawn of time (or since the Eddy Curry trade, whichever), this edict has been hurled at Bulls fans and management alike by people of all backgrounds and IQ levels, and never more so than in the immediate aftermath of the Pau Gasol trade-that-never-was at the last trade deadline. Forget the fact that Detroit managed this supposedly impossible feat just three years ago: these people remain steadfast in their opinion. And why shouldn’t they? People say it on the TV, after all, so it must be true. After General Manager John Paxson did not pull the trigger on a deal for Gasol due to the excessive demands of Grizzlies GM Jerry West and the continued breakout of Luol Deng, talk of the Bulls’ need for a ‘dominant’ post scorer continued. “Experts” then shifted their attention to Kevin Garnett, ignoring for a moment the fact that such a move was never realistically possible due to the Bulls salary cap position. After […]
