DuckIII wrote:That not what I’m doing. Cost and value are inextricably linked. Pat was heading into an offseason in which he was going to have at least some degree of leverage heading into a very unpredictable negotiation and market. Now he has absolutely none.
Let me rephrase it this way:
I'd break it down into these general scenarios:
1: Other teams irrationally have too much fear about his condition/upside now and stay away irrationally. The Bulls are the smarter FO and use this irrational fear as leverage to gain a better contract. In this scenario, I agree, we would end up with a better risk/reward proposition.
2: Other teams have rational fears about his condition/upside and the Bulls get him at market value, which is now less, because his value is less. This is near neutral but likely slightly negative (we'd rather probably have a better player and pay them more, but if it's at natural market value it's mostly neutral either way).
3: Other teams have rational fears about his condition/upside and the Bulls overpay him anyway. In this scenario, we pay the less or the same as if he was not hurt, but the drop in value of the asset is larger than the drop in value of the contract and the overall risk/reward proposition is worse.
4: No teams have fears about his condition/upside at all, and in fact his contract is not available at a discount, and market value does not dip at all, and we have to pay what we have to pay or let him walk. This is likely a negative situation, because there sure seems like there _should_ be an adjustment on his value, and if there isn't, we're likely just paying the same for a lower probability of a good outcome.
Of these scenarios, history would tell me that scenario 3 or 4 are the two most likely scenarios based on how the league tends to operate (most optimistic team sets the market) and how the Bulls have operated under AKME (folding in negotiations to anyone they like really quickly and generally using the overpay as their lever to close deals).
I sure hope we end up in bucket #1, and we have a better feel for the actuality than everyone else, and the rest of the league just doesn't look closely at the situation and summarily dismisses it and then we also use this leverage to extract a better deal, but there are a lot of underlying assumptions there that just don't feel like they're backed up to me.
1: That there isn't significant increased risk
2: That our FO is smarter than other FOs
3: That our FO is willing to negotiate hard even if the above two things are true and take advantage
I don't think I would bet on a single one of those three assumptions being true, but I think all three need to be true for this to be a positive contractual situation for us while using a Monte Carlo like approach to guess the range of outcomes.
To be clear, it doesn't mean we can't land in boats 2-4 and have a good outcome, we could. We could do what feels like an overpay, and Pat could become the next LeBron James out of nowhere and validate any contract, but if you start looking at 'likely' outcomes, only bucket #1 delivers you the likely outcome that this works out for our long term benefit, bucket #2 is likely to be neutral, and buckets 3 and 4 are more likely to be negative.