tmorgan wrote:If Ivey is dealt, the primary motivation is keeping our future payroll in check. While Markkanen is a fit, his contract is not. Trying to pay Cade, Duren, Ausar and Markkanen in a couple years would be really hard. I’m probably jumping the gun on worrying about payroll, but you can already see what it is doing to teams like Minnesota and Denver.
Not interested in trading Holland with Ivey. My odd fascination with Holland, along with how the team has looked without Ivey, is one of the reasons I made this thread. Given some more development time, I think Holland can be solid offensive player (a notch below Ivey, almost certainly) that brings disruptive defense that fits our team identity. I do like Sexton, don’t get me wrong, but we have a lot of guards we’d like to keep already, not even including Ivey. If we’re resigning Beasley and Schroder, there’s just no minutes — heck, there’s not even enough minutes for Holland if Ivey isn’t traded, and Sasser is definitely out in the cold.
We’ve got an abundance of guards and a shortage of quality forwards. The problem is finding better 3’s and 4’s that are either true superstars (and thus we pay out the nose and unload multiple promising players and picks) or affordable good players that don’t wreck our future payroll. That’s the issue with Lauri — he’s a very good player, but not the former, and definitely not the latter.
Pistons should be careful about the money they hand out to Ivey and Duren, also Ausar. They all have shown promise but also a lot of red flags in their games, which makes me doubt they can be winning pieces in a contender. If you can agree to a good long term contract (say starting in the low 20s) then ok, otherwise Lauri looks like a much better fit long term, if you can get him for one of them plus some other asset (player / pick) then you should, he'd help making sense of the roster you have, Ausar and Holland would look much better alongside him. I'd definitely consider it.
