dougthonus wrote:League Circles wrote:As soon as Patrick is benched, his trade value is essentially permanently at negative. That's a huge problem for 5 years. Like, enormous.
The decision to bench/start him isn't a 5 year decision, it could be a 1 month long decision like last year.
On the other hand, if he continues starting, he's always going to be perhaps 6 weeks of good play away from being a positive trade asset. That clock probably doesn't start as long as he's on the bench. Before you suggest (in theory) that you could just bench him if warranted and then only when he starts to play better do you move him to the starting lineup, again I'd say it's not that simple. Let's say Matas is outplaying him, but Patrick improves from how he was doing (to get himself benched in this hypothetical). The damage is already done to his asset value. Teams now KNOW that we don't really value him (cause we proved we don't have a role for him commensurate with his salary), and will offer less as a result.
Again, you seem to be living in some mystical world where Pat starts, but we think he's terrible, but also no one else notices he's terrible, and the gap between him being able to be traded and not traded is based on whether he is starting or coming off the bench.
We aren't going to bench him because at the moment he's the best PF on the team. If that isn't true at some point in the future, then it will either be because someone else became a stud or because he's awful. If it's the latter of those cases, he still won't have trade value and if it is the former then he will.
Bottom line, when you ink a guy to a deal like that, IMO, you HAVE TO commit to playing him as a starter for at least a year or a year and a half, regardless of how poorly he might be playing.
By the end of this deal, its an MLE deal.
Why on earth wouldn't they entertain trading him at any moment after he's eligible if an offer warrants it?
Have you watched our FO for the past 4 years?
Patrick Williams should currently have the longest leash of any player on our roster, only because the length of his leash has the most impact to affect us for better or worse long term.
His leash should be about the same as everyone else's leash that's important to the team. His contract isn't so bad that it's worth worrying about him becoming a massive negative asset unless his skills regress to a point where he couldn't be traded anyway at which point starting him would make no difference.
Everything you've said is still some form of argument that relies on perception and idiocy of the people we're trading with.
Even making a one month decision to bench him this early into a deal like this should and would be an enormous red flag to other teams. It would clearly signal that we never believed strongly in him, but extended him out of fear, and are now stuck with him and trying to dump him. What teams are willing to offer for a player is ABSOLUTELY affected by what they think it will take to get them. Which decreases heavily if he's benched.
I don't deal in the binaries that you imply. There is no such thing as players being able or unable to trade. They can ALL be traded, with almost zero exceptions IMO. That doesn't mean that every trade that could be made is in fact offered. IMO, for better or worse, in the nba, trades are only formally offered if the offering team is willing to do it AND believes that the other team might also. (The Bulls didn't offer Zach for Lebron James even though they'd do it in a heart beat). There is also no binary of him sucking or playing well, nor one where he's clearly a better or worse option than others who can play his positions (Smith, Craig, Matas, Julian, Giddey). There is almost certainly going to be a lot of gray area. I'm saying we need to continue to start him indefinitely until it's crystal clear that a change is needed. The same is not true of most of our other players, for various reasons.
The idea isn't that starting will fool anyone. It's maximizing the opportunity for him to play himself out of potential poor play. That gets significantly decreased off the bench. And again, if his replacement is good, but then Patrick bounces back and plays better off the bench, his value will absolutely be lower than it would have been if he had bounced back in the same way having never lost his role, in no small part because it would appear that we still value him more. Every FO on earth knows that virtually any team with a bench player on a 5 year deal will give him away for expiring contracts.
We'll see if his deal is an MLE deal by the end. But even if it was, everyone on earth knows that a rebuilding team like us will not value an MLE bench player value player 4 years down the road. Bad teams shouldn't even have multi year contracts for 7th men. Let alone 5 years.
He could easily have an injury, have Matas step into his role, play better than him, and harm Patrick's value even if Patrick is playing pretty well. I can't believe you don't see that.
I think you're also overlooking the likelihood that this is further complicated by a multi player trade.
And yes, I've seen our FO the last 4 years. They've been trying to trade a number of players, and just traded two of their most important ones this summer. Considering they've benched Patrick multiple times, it's absolutely plausible that they're open to trading him at any time after he's eligible. Just cause they signed him doesn't mean they're married to him. All it means is they preferred to offer him that deal than risk letting him walk. Similar situation but less extreme than giving Zach a max extension only to obviously try to trade him like a year later.
