Deng to Lakers 4yrs 72 million

[dockingsched]

Yeah that would have been 3 years and $52 mil. Regardless I can't remember the last time Kupchak has offered a decent contract. The contracts he gave out to Luke, Sasha and Fisher each needed a first rounder to dump. Nash's S&T is a nightmare we still live through. The last Kobe extension was clown college stuff.

He signed Artest and Odom to below market deals, which is his only saving grace.

Lou Williams

[MrWaffles]

Yeah that would have been 3 years and $52 mil. Regardless I can't remember the last time Kupchak has offered a decent contract. The contracts he gave out to Luke, Sasha and Fisher each needed a first rounder to dump. Nash's S&T is a nightmare we still live through. The last Kobe extension was clown college stuff.

He signed Artest and Odom to below market deals, which is his only saving grace.

Lou Williams may be his best contract to date. Nick Young contract looked really bad the past two years, but this year it's looking nice. The player option also looks pretty good this summer as well. But yes, most of his contracts have been pretty trash.

[crazyeights]

Yeah I hear you, Slava, but what this latest revelation only illustrates is that a 4th year was the difference. Washington was seen as a much more known quantity to FAs than what we were this summer (and unfortunately still are).

As hard as it is to wrap our minds around not only the new salary cap, but also the Deng signing, it's a fact that young players don't just learn by osmosis. It's like with any job, you need to be trained by vets, you need to see how professionals operate.

Some seem to expect that the Lakers should only sign people the same age as D'Angelo. Look at all the young teams in the league right now, they're all struggling to get to the next step. Kobe had a ton of great vets on his teams. Magic, too.

When you convert the contract into relative dollars to last year, I still don't see why people are tearing their hair out over this signing. We can afford to do it, not because "we're the Lakers" but because we have so many rookie contracts on the books. We're getting amazing value from Nick and Lou right now.

To me, this is a bit of a red herring. We all knew the score. We had to turn this franchise around and make it a landing spot for a potential FA in the next year or two, while putting our youth in a position to succeed.

Deng is taking the heat so Ingram can develop at his own pace. Ingram's slowly gaining confidence, you can see it game-by-game. Those two are linked, and by the time Ingram's ready to start, Deng will serve as a solid vet off the bench.

I get that he started slow, but that's because we have so much depth and no clear pecking order. He's stated clearly that he wasn't sure his role on offense. We have such a young team and integrated so many new parts with a new coaching staff. There are so many factors at play here, the fact that people have already given up on this signing I think doesn't respect the situation on the ground.

[Slava]

I perfectly agree the rationale behind your statements but I felt we overpaid both in terms of years and money when the deals were announced and everything that's come out since then only makes it worse by how far off we were in our own free agent evaluations compared to the league wide market price. That's some gross incompetence and something that cannot be pushed aside no matter how well each of Deng and Mozgov improve from what they have shown so far.

Only thing that would make sense is if hiring Walton came with a promise of getting those two guys in and they did not want to renege or fail on it.

[BEazy]

Mitch Kupchak's motto: Washed up? Need to get paid before your career is over? Come on over to the Lakers.