VeganKingsFan wrote:The DeMarcus Cousins trade really gave the Kings a future. What everybody was going crazy about for not getting enough in return may be looked back at as what completely turned the franchise around.
We wouldn't have had either first round pick. We wouldn't have Buddy Hield. We wouldn't have seen Skal and Willie blossom or Papagiannis show us flashes of what he can be. No Fox, Justin Jackson or Harry Giles. No young team to bring in Z-Bo, George Hill and Vinsanity for. We'd have DeMarcus Cousins ready to eat up a $200 million contract and a mediocre team around him. Don't doubt Vlade.
If the Kings ended up with Tucker, and some of the other names they went after this year I'd be a little disappointed that it didn't happen when Cuz was here because there were a ton of options in FA to put around someone like him this year. They still would have been good fits with the crew now because of needs, but I think Vlade knew that putting a team around Cuz was going down the tubes if from nothing more than a cap perspective. This is possibly an era of almost a flat cap, and as it is revenues might be down again next year do to the east now being almost entirely irrelevant. You have to have most of your pieces in place before paying one player nearly half of your cap. I could look at Utahs cap situation and see how that probably played a huge part in them losing Hayward. Without fail, it seems to be cap restrictions with middle rung teams that is causing them to lose their franchise players and in the end the fans suffer. This is why we are starting to see situations of players getting together and trying to put a super team together like in Miami, which we may see next year with some of these big names that will be on the market. Besides the competitive imbalance with even just one other super team necessitating it, the cap does as well.
The super max was a good idea in theory, but in the end it will be only good for those teams with a superstar that's on a team already in major contention. It won't help smaller market teams that are sitting in the middle. In fact, it will probably keep them in the middle for the majority of that contract. The NBA is going to have to look at a way of closing the gap between it's highest and lowest paid players because under the rules of trade restrictions it's just going to make it harder to make deals with those players so teams can get some type of value.
Now of course the Kings FO prior to, and maybe even partly when Vlade was here, can share the blame. They whiffed on too many drafts and put too many lotto pick players on the bench to fade away into the land of zero value. But that's what happened, and why yes, moving Cousins was probably completely necessary. Now the Kings have a chance to start over. I'm down with the mentor thing up to the point that it's starts negatively effecting asset value and/or productivity. There is a line there and I just hope that Vlade, Joerger, and co. know where it is.
