nate33 wrote:Chocolate City Jordanaire wrote:prime1time wrote:
And this isn't even surprising. Look at all the players who have been run out of town. Javale McGee (multiple championships), Nick Young (championship), Otto Porter (championship) and Bobby Portis (championship) just to name a few. I expect that next offseason the same thing will happen with Avdija.
DeShawn Stevenson, Caron Butler, Brendan Haywood, Gary Payton III, Rip Hamilton, Rasheed Wallace.
Chris Webber deserves mention.
I agree with your prediction of Advija being next.
Nope! I'm not going to let this revisionist history stand.
McGee and Young were not good players that we gave up on who then went on to lead teams to championships. They were bad players that we gave up on, who then toiled in obscurity as bench players for years and years. They managed to land on championship teams because NOBODY wanted them after 5+ years of failure, so they were available as cheap free agents. There is no way a rational person would consider this a failure of the Wizards player development. The Wizards got 4 years out of Nene when they traded McGee. Nene was the best center we've had since Ruland. (Also, Nick Young averaged 2.6 points, 0.6 rebounds and 0.2 assists in the playoffs. McGee averaged 2.9 points and 3.1 rebounds. Let's not overstate their contribution.)
Likewise, Otto Porter's championship was after years and years of being a negative contract and a burden to the Chicago Bulls. When his contract mercifully ended, the Warriors signed him as a free agent for cheap. He had one brief year where his glass skeleton held up reasonably well in a bench role, and now he is back to being hurt all the time. Again, not a failure of player development. In hindsight, it was clearly a good move to dump him for salary relief rather than pay him the remaining 3 years on his max contract to be hurt all the time.
Bobby Portis was let go because New York signed him to a $15M contract where he went on to average just 10 points and 5 boards. Again, it was the right move. Portis was a useful rotation player, but he didn't deserve double the MLE. New York let him go after that one bad season and he found a nice home in Milwaukee, but at just $4M a year. Portis wasn't going to play in DC for $4M a year so the idea that we somehow blew it by not retaining him is absurd.
Stevenson, Butler and Haywood were let go because they were over-the-hill vets on a team that desperately needed to rebuild. I think Grunfeld did a lousy job of getting value for them in the Dallas trade, but the decision to let them go was not wrong at all. They weren't "run out of town". They were let go as part of a rebuild, which ALL intelligent teams have to do at some point. It's not like we could have won a championship here if we just retained them. Moving those guys is what landed us the #1 overall draft pick and John Wall.
I'll give you Rip Hamilton, Rasheed Wallace and Chris Webber, but that's ancient history. That was before even Ernie Grunfeld.
Young was a little more valuable than McGee in his postseason appearances. I remember rooting for Arenas/Grizzlies in the early 2010s but Young came up huge (for a role player anyways) when the Clippers managed to beat the Grizzlies.
Young was also forced to become a rotation player in the Rockets/Warriors series after that Iguodala injury and I'm not sure if the Warriors win without him given just the roster construction. Overall, a disappointing season for Young - but I think he played his role for that series well (low volume 3 point shooter that didn't get exposed defensively) playing around 15 mpg.
As for McGee, it was a good trade at the time. Although the Wizards certainly would have been off signing McGee on the cheap (or Nene) few years later rather than what they ended up doing with their cap space in 2016.
That Mavericks trade may not have turned out even to be a tank trade if Josh Howard didn't get injured. That Wizards team was semi-entertaining maybe because my expectations were so low. Although I was rewatching the 2011 finals recently, DeShawn Stevenson was actually semi valuable- he had 3 first half 3s against the Heat in game 6, he was playing crunch time in game 4 - and even got into a physical exchange with Haslem and Chalmers that netted the Mavericks 1 more free throw.
