dice wrote:TeamMan wrote:bad knees wrote:I don't understand the people who talk about GarPax's ineptness as support for their thinking that trading Jimmy was a good idea. It's a hell of a lot easier to build a great team around one great two-way wing than it is to build one from scratch. GarPax built a great team around a healthy Derrick quite quickly; there is no reason to think that they couldn't have done the same around Jimmy, if they had appreciated his talent and upside. Seems like the references to GarPax are just an attempt by some posters to shift responsibility from having made a poor judgment. It's not a sin to make a poor judgment about a player's potential - we all do it. There's also no need to shift responsibility either.
And by the way, here is an article that sets forth in detail what we knew about Jimmy, his skills, his will to improve and his will to overcome odds, at the time that we decided to trade him. His trajectory was already off the charts. He had gone from homeless in high school, to the 30th pick in the draft, to an All Star and All-NBA defender. Yet we decided that his trajectory was going to stop and/or dramatically dip downward going forward. Remarkable really.
https://myhero.com/jimmy-butler-2
It wasn't that they thought that his trajectory was going to end, it was profit.
They just simply didn't want to pay him.
not wanting to pay him had nothing to do with profit. it was all about his ability to earn a supermax payout from age 30-34. because if he couldn't (and nobody should have expected him to), it would hamper the ability to build a contender
It was only after he was gone, the Bulls started to miss the playoff, and JR started to miss that playoff revenue, that he finally woke up.
they knew they were going to miss the playoffs for at least a year after trading jimmy. the jimmy trade SHOULD have put an end to the nonsense about JR only being interested in playoff revenue. because the organization clearly wasn't satisfied with jimmy butler leading them to a low playoff seed year in and year out and they didn't think that they could build a genuine perennial contender around him
And it must hurt JR (and Gar/Pax even more) to watch these NBA finals and have their noses rubbed in their mistake.
sure. but if his game falls off over the next few seasons, they'll be able to justify their actions once again (to themselves, anyway). particularly if the bulls pass the heat at some point during that period of time
Will try to respond to all of your points without breaking your post into pieces...
After the Bulls missed the playoffs (following trading JB) there was a press release that came out saying that JR was shocked at how much revenue that it cost the team (even though he'd been warned) and his only goal was to get back to the playoffs again.
So, it appeared, that in his evaluation, making it to the playoffs (even if it was only the 1st round) would have justified paying JB. The Bulls had been doing it (off and on) for most of the years since the end of the dynasty, and JR appeared to be completely happy with it (the profit).
Now, in the aftermath of all of the firings, it also appears that Gar/Pax were indeed given that ultimatum that so many people refused to believe. So, it was not the "organization's decision", it was a Gar/Pax decision that cost them their jobs. And JR had been talked into it (missing the playoffs), but afterward felt that he'd been mislead on the revenue/profit loss that was going to happen.
So, IMO JR looked at what happened when JB got to the T-Wolves, and thought "They are getting the revenue that I could have had if we'd kept him and went to the playoffs another year".
As far as rebuilding around JB, what the Heat did (in terms of rebuilding) was easily achievable by most of the teams in the NBA (including the Bulls).
The difference was that the Heat had Riley and Spoelstra.
So, JR made (the correct ) decision that Gar/Pax had to go, simply because they had allowed themselves to slip further and further into making "bad decisions" that (looking back) can now be judged as mistakes. And that they were wrapped up in their egos instead of thanking the stars for getting Rose and JB.
The truth is, they got lucky with both Rose and JB, because their talent evaluation skills had nothing to do with picking those two players. JB was simply the best player available at the end of the 1st round, after virtually every other team in the league had already passed on him.
No one expected Jimmy to turn into a 2-way all star.
But once they had him, they didn't appreciate their luck and thought, "We're so smart that we can just do it again". So, they deserved to be fired.