nate33 wrote:payitforward wrote:There's nothing to "agree to disagree" about! Of course Boston could have signed Porzingis outright -- why not?
Boston didn’t have cap room to sign Porzingis. The only way to acquire him was to work out a trade with Washington.
You are wrong about Washington having no leverage. They had substantial leverage because their consent was necessary to facilitate a trade to Boston. Porzingis’ threat to opt out was a fairly empty threat. If he opted out, he could only go to a team with cap room. IIRC, the only team with cap room was Detroit. There may have been one or two others, but certainly not any team with championship aspirations.
Thanks, nate -- as you point out, we had a choice I didn't consider: we might have played hard ball with Porzingis, & he wouldn't have been able to opt out. Instead, he would have remained a Washington Wizard for one more year & then become an unrestricted free agent.
My mistake. Except, it's not Porzingis w/ whom we had to play hard ball, is it? It's Boston.
So now let's look again. & in doing so I'm going to assume that you have some business experience to draw on.
Let's consider as follows Tell me what you would have done, nate:
You've just come in as a FO team. You're looking at a project where you have to tear down the entire edifice, to the studs, & rebuild. KP wants out. Your options are:
a) play hardball, keep KP for another year (as a disgruntled player, to be sure -- or do you think not?), & then let him walk for nothing?
b) work out a deal where KP leaves & you get Tyus Jones?
c) insist that Tyus isn't enough, & they'll just have to come up with more?
Your business experience, I have no doubt, will cause you to recognize that
c is a completely empty option.
Why? Because you're simply not going to choose a, & the guy on the other side of the table is perfectly aware of the fact. The potential negative effects of a are immense & entirely incalculable. & it has zero positive effect.
Only a fool would choose a -- or, of course, someone posting on a message board who will experience no consequence of what he writes & therefore has no particular reason to think it through.
So, what do you do/ Smart person that you are, you start with c, pro forma -- "what's the best you can do?" -- & when they come back with b,
you take the deal.Or, to put it another way, you have zero leverage. You're not going to keep KP around, that's for sure! Do I really have to lay out the many reasons you'd never do that?
&, so, now that we've taken the toy train all the way around the circular track, we are back to what I said in the first place. We had no leverage. We took what we could get.
