lipoli390 wrote:Morey is a heck of a PBO. He signs Tucker for $8.3 million per year then signs Luc at the vet minimum of about $2.5 million per year for one year. Both of those guys for $10.8 million per year. Compare that to Taj at $14 million per year and Crawford for $4.3 million, totaling $18.3 million per year. I'd take Tucker and Luc on their contracts in a heartbeat over the two we have. In fact, I would have preferred Luc at $7 million per year, leaving another $7 million to sign CJ Miles. I think Luc is as good a defender as Taj. Moreover, Luc is a better perimeter shooter and two years younger.
Note that, even with Jimmy Butler, we haven't become a FA destination and we're not getting any bargains or discounts from FAs. Even the fact that Taj once played for Thibs didn't get him here on a discount. According to Doogie, we had to offer Taj more that OKC to get him here. I really doubt anyone was going to offer Teague more than we're paying him.
It's tough to build an NBA championship contender here. You absolutely have to do it primarily through the draft, supplemented if possible, by a good trade. And then you have to find those diamonds in the rough in free agency -- G-Leaguers or Euro prospects. Further, when you find them, you have to convince them to sign here over other alternatives for the minimum salary.
Good points Lip. I see the glass being a bit more half full though by shifting the point of comparison away from one of the other 29 teams in the league to our own history and the rest of the teams.
The Morey signings are good for the price, and I agree we're not a highly-respected franchise (yet), but I wouldn't dismiss our offseason because Morey got a couple of good deals. We might not have gotten great deals on our free agents, but when was the last time
any decent free agents signed with us, for any price? Rush and Aldrich aren't that good. Prince and Andre Miller were basically retired. Kirilenko? Maybe, but he wasn't really considered to be that good. I literally cannot think of any other decent free agents who have signed here. Brandon Roy's bone-on-bone knees were already shot when he signed with us.
Can anybody think of an offseason when we improved as much through free agency? In Teague, Gibson, and Crawford, we got a starting PG, a possible starting PF, and an aging but still potent scorer off the bench. All through free agency.
We've been the laughingstock of the league for over a decade now. David Kahn (ugh, it hurts just typing that guy's name), Kurt Rambis, our post-KG history is just embarrassing. And we have to face it, regardless of how much you might love the state, to many basketball players, Minnesota looks like a boring, white, rural backwater. The fan base is tepid (how many small, quiet crowds have visiting NBA players heard at Target Center now?), and more broadly, Minnesota sports teams attract a pretty casual suburban fan base. We're not quite Utah or OKC or maybe Indiana or Sacramento in terms of undesirability of location, but it's bad, and at least Utah and OKC have more rabid fan bases for basketball. Maybe you could throw Detroit and Cleveland and Orlando into that list on par with us, but at least Detroit and Cleveland have more black people (if they'd have called us the Minneapolis Wolves we might have been somewhat better off in terms of perception), and Orlando is warm. San Antonio isn't great, but they win so much it doesn't matter. Given the challenges of the perception of Minnesota, we have less room for error when it comes to winning, and sadly, all we've done since KG left has basically been committing errors. No wonder we haven't attracted a decent free agent (that I can think of) in over a decade. We haven't made the playoffs in 12, check that, 13 years, the second longest streak in history.
This summer, we got three. They're not perfect, but they're pretty good, and it's clear that without Thibs and Butler, we would not have signed 3 pretty good players. It's arguably not as good as getting the deals Morey got, but I'd say it's a huge step forward, and at least we're not dealing with front office insanity like the Knicks or Cavs, locking up insane money on mediocre players like Portland, or starting the downward spiral like Indiana and Atlanta. And that's the other point of comparison I think we need to make to be fair to our front office. Boston and the Rockets did well, as did OKC with the Patterson deal, and I kind of like Utah's offseason (if you ignore losing their best player!), but other than that, who did a better job this summer in free agency?
So to me, I feel a bit better about the direction this team is heading in terms of its perception in the league and its ability to build in multiple ways moving forward.
