dougthonus wrote:At some point, Pat takes the best deal the market will give him. Simply saying he wouldn't sign a deal until he got one bigger than what we offered assumes the market would offer him that deal eventually, and there's no reason to think that is true based on other deals that were signed like Okoro or Toppin whom were in the same scenario, equally as good or better prospects, and did not get FA offers and are both on way better team deals now.
The other option, and the one that looks like it would have happened had we gone down this road, is Pat would have been forced to sign an Okoro like deal with us.
We're probably saying different things here and you're ignoring my comments on sequencing. You said waiting til rfa would make it more likely that he signed our deal. All I'm saying is once AK knew that Patrick would agree to this deal before rfa, unless he was willing to risk tons of reputation damage by potential withdrawing the offer and downgrading it to an Okoro type offer, AK could only do worse for the Bulls by letting Patrick go into FA relative to the deal he signed. Maybe you're saying he should have done that (pulled the offer and replaced it with a lesser one). I've always said the Bulls just shouldn't have offered /agreed to the deal they did at all. But I don't think they should have lowered the offer after it was made.
I disagree. You simply don't go 5 years on a player you don't believe in long term. If you don't believe in a player long term, then you also aren't that scared if he leaves for nothing if things don't work out. I absolutely think AK believed in Pat long term at the time of the deal, in fact all the evidence would seem to suggest that is the case. You should never view a 5 year deal for a mediocre prospect as something you can easily move later if it doesn't work out. Teams don't want to be long on years on guys not in their top 3 players, and Pat never had that type of upside.
Believing on a player or not is never a binary thing. I think the Bulls, like you, believed Patrick could be a rotation combo forward in a 3 and D role, and that if that's all he ever was, they could grudgingly live with his new contract at least marginally over losing him for nothing. I said I didn't think they've been a "big believer" in him since his rookie year. They obviously thought he could be a star when they drafted him. I see no evidence that they've felt this way for the last couple years at least. Teams including the Bulls have been giving out 4 and 5 year deals forever to guys they don't project to bein their top 3. The list is very long.
You have just assigned a different belief system to AK which has no better evidence to support it than the one you are rejecting. In fact, I find it way less supportable that AK didn't really believe in Pat but just thought signing him to this deal was a better option than waiting. I think you pre-negotiate explicitly with guys you think it is important to keep. He bent over in every way possible on this deal going max years and making the last year a PO. There's simply no reason to do that on a player you are luke warm about.
Again, belief in a player isn't binary. The Bulls and every other team have pre-negotiated with non core rotation guys forever. You have no evidence that he "bent over in every way possible." For all you know, Patrick's agent (who may very well be as bad at judging the market as AK may be) was firm on something much higher til AK said "you have to sign this now or we'll pull the offer and try to re-sign Demar which might leave Patrick in the cold severely on a deal with another team". Again, not saying he handled it right or that I was OK with the outcome. Just saying nothing about what happened suggests to me that AK highly valued Patrick or was confident he'd be a long term above average starter. He was signed to fringe starter money on a declining deal for what should be his "prime". Again, a lot of this depends on whether Patrick's agent or the Bulls were the one to finally cave to the other's alleged final offer (you never know what your negotiating counterpart was willing to go to because every offer is allegedly final or it defeats it's own purpose). But of course there's a reason to do it even for a player you're lukewarm about - you think it's better than the alternative, whether you like it or not. We should sure as hell have been lukewarm on guys like Coby, Ayo and Giddey too when we last signed/traded for them. And we should be now on all of them too. Doesn't mean we shouldn't or wouldn't potentially offer (what we perceive) as a 5 year relatively value contract to them if we still have them when they expire. The only guys in the whole league that execs shouldn't be perpetually "lukewarm" about are like the top 5-10 players in the league on their artificially low max contracts and vet minimum guys that you KNOW can play a solid rotation role (like a Drummond or whoever). Everyone else should be a "meh" in the eyes of execs depending heavily on the context of their contract, team payroll outlook and roster fit.
This is the first time we've ever acquired a long term piece to compete with him, and we did it after we paid him not before, and the guy we got was not expected to be available.
I'm actually not sure who or what you're referring to lol. IMO, here are all the bona-fides that the Bulls have brought in to potentially compete with Patrick in recent years after they drafted him at #4 overall and started him all 71 of his games as a rookie:
Demar Rerozan
Alex Caruso or Lonzo Ball (it was never possible that both of them and Patrick would all be starting)
The above three significant contracts were all given out to good players immediately after Patrick failed to impress much in starting 71 games as a rookie, and all three players could directly or indirectly take Patrick's role or minutes. The next three seasons he started only 9/17, 65/82, and 30/43 games! That's not a trivial amount of doubt shown by the Bulls. Then what did they do, in the same summer they had to decide on Patrick? They signed him to a decreasing (in terms of time value) deal while also acquiring 3 new players that could very plausibly take his long term role and/or minutes in Giddey, Matas and Smith (yes Smith, he is really our second option to do Patrick's primary role which is to defend the physically largest opposing offensive threat).
Bulls have been transparently lukewarm about Patrick for the past 3.5 seasons IMO. They SHOULD have let that assessment, which was quite reasonable, drive them to offer him a smaller, shorter deal (we mostly all agree), but they didn't, because they made an assessment mistake. Not necessarily on him as a player, but on him as an asset to manage. They had excessive fear on what losing him for nothing would lead to. They thought "oh we can't afford to lose our 5th-8th man for the next 4 years for nothing" . When they should have thought "we can't afford to pay a 4th - 8th man 18 mil a year for 5 years in our current state".
We've consistently given him way more role than his play warrants. He's been out played by vet min players for four years.
No argument here but that's not what I said. I said we've never given him much offensive opportunity, as in scheme opportunities or shot attempts (nor should we have). He's pretty much always been a 4th or 5th option on the court. If you're a big believer in a guy after drafting him #4 and starting him all 71 of his games as a rookie, you do not relegate him to last-option scorer and bench him for portions of all of the next 3.5 seasons. That's the definition of lukewarm. That's the problem! The Bulls committed 5 years to a guy they were openly lukewarm about! He was offen injured during potential trade windows during these past 3.5 years too. Otherwise I suspect he'd already be gone. Now he's finally eligible to be traded again as of a few days ago for effectively the first time in over a year. We'll see what happens.
Which should also be a sign that you don't sign guys to top of market deals then hope to trade them later as a strategy. Maybe that is his strategy, maybe it isn't, but if it is, it's a bad one.
Agreed. I don't think his strategy is to deliberately sign guys to top of market. I think he had unwarranted fear that 18 mil flat for 5 years wasn't going to be top of market. He also thought Vuc's current downsized deal wasn't going to be top of market, or at least had unwarranted fear that it wouldn't be. THAT is the problem. There's zero evidence that he's super high on either guy. He just (wrongly) believes it's better asset management to commit even to guys he's lukewarm on. Smh
