DBoys wrote:Sorry but your conspiracy theory idea on Miller just doesn't hold up.
Of course the league wants the money to go to the players that most deserve it, but they leave that evaluation to the various teams. Sometimes they err and overpay, and sometimes they get great bargains. That's life. Move on.
Miller was signed by NO - who is certainly not throwing money wildly - to a 2 year deal where they kept him. They paid him for a whole season already, at that rate. Obviously when they signed him, they thought it was the right amount.
If you think he was intended to be used in a trade at some later date, maybe so (or maybe not), but that would be no motivation for them to intentionally make him way overpaid as you claim. The best trade value is the bargain-priced player - so if they thought he was worth less, no doubt they would have paid him less.
And your theory ignores that at the time, he was a 6-6 wing, probably seen as a 3 & D guy who just came off a breakout year where he played almost 2000 minutes and shot over 41% on 3s. That's not just a worthless spare - those wings who can shoot are a valued NBA commodity, and some get paid way more than that.
Anyhow if they wanted a $7M player as a future trade chip, they would have found someone else who was better and more worth $7M or more (if they thought there was one) for that money. They could have signed any number of players to a deal of this size, no matter whether they felt like they might trade them some day later, so they must have felt they would be getting more for their money from him than with someone else.
I can't agree at all with your assertion that they didn't overpay him for trade purposes
The fact that Miller's second year was unguaranteed is a dead giveaway for what the real plans were.
Miller is a complete negative on defense and all he does is shoot threes, albeit at a good clip. If he didn't get 7 mil a year Pelicans would have had to give up other assets in the Adams trade that they didn't want to.
As on over the cap team, you can't just find another similar 7 million dollar player. Bird Rights enabled us to overpay him