Post#1310 » by Hoopalotta » Tue Jun 26, 2012 10:24 am
So, it’s been forever since I posted here….
I didn’t really get to watch any games during the season with the timezones having 6 AM gametimes, the infant daughter and then technical problems last time I got league pass (how is it that I can stream encrypted Netflix off a VPN but the NBA is unable to get me a good feed?). In fact, though, the little girl is now a lot easier to deal with, being at the cusp of 9 months old and I’ve got time for trawling the secret of pirate coves upon the internets for Wizards games. I’ve seen some post deadline games now, and – spoiler alter – we’re really good at whomping on Bryon Mullet of the Bobbles.
Anywho, “hello again, everybody!” and….gosh, it looks like there was a basketball trade that sure has us in a nice lather....
Big picture:
It’s a hedge, it settles too soon and I don’t really like it, but I’m not at all on board with the four-horsemen vibe depending on our underlying strategy.
Basically, the big questions are just “What was the opportunity cost?” and “How much will it help us on the court?” in the short term.
Opportunity costs and some agreement with yon grousing geese's:
It’s not a good enough deal to have jumped on at this point in the offseason for me. I also don’t agree with those who say “we’ll never know what else was out there” because we can see the other deals that go down and make educated assessments of our ability to get that sort of thing done.
The opportunity cost could potentially be very high, though this is offset by our ability to trade either Okafor or, especially, Nene. However, I don’t know if we’ll be ruthless enough in an algorithm kind of way to pull the trigger on a Nene deal with the aspect that looks like this: “Hey Wall, here’s a vet, your favorite target and….oh wait, maybe not”. What I’ve seen of Nene so far is fantastic; the guy is unbelievably aware on both ends, locked in like headlice; but, realistically, a big, bold swing towards upside is likely going to require a willingness to do something we don’t want to. I believe we have put ourselves into position to where that “don’t want to” is most probably sending the second hairiest Brazilian in the league out next offseason after a playoff appearance (actually, there was that center with the ‘fro drafted recently; third hairiest soon?).
I place plenty of emphasis on on-court aspects this next season which I’ll go over below, but this is maybe the crux of it for me: I can accept the direction aspect of this trade in conjunction with Nene as far as the cap space if we have the balls to move Hillario at some point or if Okafor’s market value is higher than we think and we capitalize on that this season (it needs to be this season for Oak). If these guys are “assets” we can win with, I don’t feel we’ve strayed from the path. We’re just “incubating the flexibility”, to use a line that totally sounds Ernielicious. Now, if we’re going to get all schmaltzy with this particular rotation and keep both guys through 2014, we’ve incurred a very substantial opportunity cost. While I’m not hyper optimistic about what we’d be able to do with the cap space, if we’re not willing to try, the walls of the pickle barrel envelop the sky.
Some of the language used by Leonsis sounded really awful after the trade on this too; I mean, there were a few code words in his messages (“not here for long”, or whatever it was), but it wasn’t really Patton rocking his pearl handled’s into the air while making pelvic thrusts either. I hope we’re holdin’ ‘em close with a mind towards slapping out the boot derringer at an opportune moment, but dame, Ted, you sure picked out some crappy wrapping paper to package this in verbally.
Also, another aside to grouse about: it is also a hell of a lot of money tied up on two 28 minute bigs by any and all estimations. It’s not the end of the world and might be a fluid situation, but it’s a right proper pile and can work only because we have a whole pittsnoggle of rookie deals on the ledgers. The only veteran teams that could afford both those dudes and still win are way up into tax country, so the resource allocation has to be mentioned as an issue. There’s always substantial risk of value depleting injury here too.
How much will it help us on the court?:
I have no clue here; nothing really. I’ve looked at assorted numbers and am going to download some Hornets games; maybe some from 2011. This is a, as they say, “confirmation resides within your Jello” sort of thing. Or whatever that expression it is, but the thing is, I just don’t know as of now. I recall scouting Ariza specifically when we were looking to dump Caron and there were Houston rumors, but I can’t really recall much other than thinking he was very mobile but trying to do way too much offensively.
The defensive potential is there, so a good solid defensive efficiency rating of 102 (PP100P) or so next year would suggest to me that things broke as we had hoped. I’m thinking a good upside range for us would be league rankings around 8-12 in defense, 17-20 in offense and then with middle of the pack rebounding. That’s maybe 42 wins. Honestly, our floor and ceiling for next year probably aren't all that far apart, so if things break wrong, we are very unlikely to be morgue fodder.
Things are really uncertain in the East right now with Boston and Orlando probably being blowd’ed up along with rumors of Chicago doing something with a Vet and then new super-secret down low whispers of even the Hawks potentially going Samson at the pillars.
I suspect, though, that it will be better than suggested by the resident gloomoligists. Most everyone hated Hinrich when we got him too. We have impeccable character and some rather respectable defensive pedigree, so no, I don’t think these guys are as worthless as has been suggested: probably middle of the road starting center and upper echelon of the bottom third of starting small forwards (like, the 20th best starting small forward in the league).
One thing that is clear to me now is that Jordan Crawford must either be assigned to our affiliate, the Hyderabad Hufflepuffs, or possibly ritually sacrificed on an obsidian altar with a Kris knife when the moon is full (a fitting end to a Wizard). He completely compromises the substantial investments made elsewhere in a way that is far out of balance with the resources required to rectify the problem (ie: Randy Foye on a two year deal for part of the MLE or something like that; yes, I said it). I don’t care if we draft Beal: Crawford = gone. Dude’s going to cost 5 or more wins next year if he plays 24 minutes a game, mark my words. The only thing to recommend him is that Beal could be awful and the fans would STILL guffaw like the wise men when he finally supplants the much reviled Jordan Crawford.
Points of some disagreement with the kvetchsters:
First of all, there are of course many different perspectives from folks who don’t like the trade, so I’m not trying to put words in anyone’s mouth. I already mentioned what I didn’t like above, but some of the lines of reasoning within the criticism seems off to me.
Some people talking about the whole slow and steady, “let’s just not do anything and mine cap space for another year” are seriously underselling the risks of doing nothing and trying to milk cap-space for value instead of improving the play on the court. I understand that many who don’t like the trade would have suggested a different something and are therefore not in this camp, so I’m not lumping you’ze guys in there. However, for those wanting a hyper conservative "flexibility at all costs", I would point out that John Wall is entering his third year in the NBA. That is to say, he’ll be playing year three of his rookie contract, or, put another way, will have been on the Washington Wizards for three years after completing next season. Going forward then, it's three years for John Wall as a professional basketball player. Are we on the same page here?
You cannot, and I repeat, cannot do nothing and pretend that this is does not entail significant dangers of its own. Unless you believe that we were really a lock for a minimum, and I mean minimum, of 35 wins with a roster not much different than we were carrying through the “Bobs R UR B*tchz!” phase of the season, you are incurring much greater downside risk than you’re admitting. Much greater. And I’m not talking 35 wins when things break right, I’m talking about an injury riddled year with a dose of ‘maybe Josh Heytvelt on a 10-day can hell….p?’. Now, if you don’t think Okafor and our guy Arizona can get you to at least 35 wins with a genuine playoff push, you’re complaining from what I would see as a rational stance, but that is very different from the “let’s just keep value plumbing for BOYDs” critique I am addressing here.
So, let me be perfectly clear here: there are extraordinary risks involved in putting Wall yet again into what could have easily become, not just a bad, but also an outright emburr-assing situation. People say, “he’s under contract and then restricted, so no worries”. OK, if Wall and the rest of us were the pixelated denizens of a hard-drive, yes, but that’s removing a lot of friction which comes with human beings being involved. Good sirs, were it that we willingly courted a cacophony of carcasses within our clubhouse, an outright morass of moan-worthy woe was poised to chomp us on the proverbial arse.
It hasn’t happened with the Wizards, so it’s maybe something of a blindspot amongst this noble yeomanry, but Wall could publicly demand a trade on a random drizzly Tuesday in February after Salmon’s goes off for 30 and hangs on the rim twice. Wall absolutely could and probably would if we allowed that to happen. All you’d need was Charles and Kenny talking smack 30 games into the season with no chance at a playoff push and you’re there. Boys and girls, we pretty much had to enter, “don’t lose” mode. If you really believe that we had a stable “don’t lose” mode lined up with our previous roster and accept the danger I'm talking about, OK, I disagree that our “don’t loosen” was so tight, but at least you acknowledge the risks (and again, “let’s do a different something” is a fair critique and I’m not talking about that position). But, I believe that there was a very genuine “code red, code red!” joker in the deck of the do-nothing plan that risked a true systemic failure that would see us in year one of a new rebuild.
So, I have no problem with “don’t lose” mode given that we have four upside rookie contracts on, or about to be on, the books. Again, did we get the wrong “don’t lose” players? Maybe, but I haven’t tasted the Jello yet.
Also, as far as value plumbing with cap-space for BOYD’s, almost half the teams in the got-dingled league have cap space this summer. Sunk costs have been discussed as the foundation of Econ-101, but supply and demand is a more fundamental fiscal principle and the truth is that cap space is not really at a premium right now. There’s mostly crappy players to sign and lots of money to do it with, so you’ve got the inverse of what you'd like to see. This is one thing that makes the deal more appealing to me in that I believe those who think veterans should be paid at a rate which is commensurate with their production have an extreme and arguably unreasonable position which is detached from NBA reality. Yes, “….and, heck, if Gadzuric can’t even...” would have been a great line to slip into Jimmy Stewart’s filibuster at the end of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, but it just doesn’t work that way in the NBA.
The fact is, very few veteran players actually live up to their contracts, so staying within the moneyball equilibrium is built on having some productive rookie deals to offset the overpaid vets. I would view an actual “fairly paid” veteran as being a 7 out of 10 on the money-ball meter rather than a 5. If you view “fairly paid” as being a 5, you’re bound to hate almost everything that ever happens beyond max deals on transcendent players and rock-steady bigs on their first contract.
Moreover, and going back to all the cap space sitting there, it’s not like we have this economic moat with a patent on a transcendent device that can clear the Belgian countryside of unexploded ordinance left over from some horrible, forgotten war. If bad contracts are war, the NBA is Yemen; blokes, they’re still dropping bombs and we’re less than a week away from an all-out offensive! It remains to be determined exactly how much cap is out there as something like Philly amnestying Brand could make a big swing, but there is every reason to suspect that bad contracts are about to be passed around like beers at a clam bake.
Why is that? Why does it always happen this way? Are the owners so foolish? What most people don’t understand is that the NBA’s revenue split of 51.15% for the players guarantees that the players get….wait for it…..51.15% of the revenue no matter what the contracts handed out say. Everyone says “here we go again!”, but the truth is that the contracts as reported are a prevarication. The money listed is just a façade – chip away at the stucco with your penknife and the foundation is always 51.15% no matter how much or how little money the contracts are reported as, so the only thing the contracts do is decide who pays what percentage and for how long. In other words, the contracts handed out are “funny money” and the more bloated NBA Fiat contracts team’s collectively print, the lower the outlay on each individual contract, regardless of the nameplate value. If the whole herd spooks and teams stampede right towards Drew Gooden and Big Baby Davis, most teams figure, “what the hell, we’re just on board for a bit more and for a bit longer” rather than “my slice will be slightly smaller if I look like I’m doing nothing and turn the fans off”.
All that is to say that, given that the owners can never pay out more or less than 51.15% of the league’s total revenue and few teams sense significant opportunity costs, there is always a big incentive to spend money. So, veteran’s get overpaid by default.
Now, as noted above, we well might have incurred a significant opportunity cost as we in fact had shown discipline up to this point and did have a significant chunk of space which might have provided us with a single decisive player that is usually nabbed with chunks of space larger than MLE’s (be it for a trade or free agent). So, that’s the problem with the combination of this deal and the Nene deal together, if we don’t have a plan to gain some flexibility within the next year.
However, as for market rates, were they free agents, I’m thinking that Ariza and Okafor would probably be looking at something in the range of $24-28 million combined on two years each, but they’d have the leverage to get deals longer than that. So, on the one hand, it’s likely that there’s a few teams which manage to utilize their cap-space on some upside (BOYDs) and a team or two that will utilize their space, probably in conjunction with assets, to get a Dicky-V-PTP, baby. On the other hand, most teams that commit resources this offseason are going to get marginal players on long deals that make nobody jealous and it remains to be seen what kind of cap market there's going to be during the season.
Moving on, as far as the crowded front court angle which has been brought up, I would hit the same tone were it that we’d brought in big minute dudes, but with Nene being a 28 minute guy, Okafor’s probably also in for the same, so you’ve got a good, solid platoon situation for our third and fourth bigs. This is no good for the 5th big by any means, but I don’t dislike it for out third and fourth guys from a development situation. Fighting for 20 minutes a game should be just fine and it’s almost certain that there’s going to be injuries.
Points of much more severe disagreement:
Two points jump out to me amongst the complaining that strikes as well, well out there: 1) We should have gotten the 10th pick 2) We should have tanked next year.
I already went over the salary cap landscape above, but the market for the 10th pick has been set by a few recent deals (OKC getting Aldrich and, to a lesser extent, the Baron Davis trade). The true value of the 10th pick probably swings from year to year based on perceptions of the quality of each individual draft class, but the over under is about $10 million-ish. You take Mo Peterson to OKC and throw in what we consider those picks in the early-mid 20’s that went back to the Hornets and you get at least $10 million (depends how you factor in the roster slots salary and all sorts of dreary details). Maybe this draft is seen as $11 Million, I don’t know, but in order for anyone to say that $10 million recompense was in order coming back our way, you’re saying that Ariza and Okafor are actually worth something like $19.5 million combined over two years on each guy. Did Big Baby’s agent say “Otis, if you ink my boy to twenty-four over four, I think I can talk Danny into getting you a pair of late first round swings in 2012”? He did not say any such thing. You can say that $29.5 million for our guys is too much and $24 Mil is market if you’re feeling litigious, but nobody push it much beyond that because there is heaps of evidence to the contrary. It is totally unrealistic to talk about the 10th coming back with Rashard going out. David West coming off knee surgery at 31 just got $20 million over two years and it wasn’t even a bad contract.
If a team in position to win that didn’t mind a big payroll pulled off the trade, nobody would say anything and we wouldn’t even be talking about draft picks. The downside, again, is contextual as it creates opportunity costs for us specifically as well as potential redundancy; the value is just par for the course – cost of doing business in the league. It’s one thing to say the value wasn’t there for us to where the trade is unjustified, but it’s another to talk about an entire $10 million swing.
It's not a heck of a lot of posters here, but as far as those who say we should have just outright tanked next year and gone for the top pick…..are you F’ing kidding me? Here’s an exercise, who is both bad enough to lead you to a statistically relevant chance at a top pick in their third year, but also good enough to be a top two player on a team with a real shot at a chip? We're more likely to find sparkly My Little Pony stickers affixed to Dick Cheney’s hunting rifle than we are to identify any such player. Wall can just change his name to Olowokandi if we have a 19.9% shot at the top pick next year and, if he doesn't demand a trade, he’s either mentally been broken down by our losing environment or just outright stinks. How about, if we're tanking next year, let's just do it for five instead.
Lookit, forget what I said, if you told me the 2013 draft was going to be absolutely stellar, I’d have a conversation about tanking. Fine. If you said there was one great player and then a big drop off, I’d pass easily as I don’t like those odds. If you said it was like 2003 with great players out to the fifth pick (and Darko!), I’d say “John, it’s spelled ‘O-L-O-W-O……’.” Ok, maybe not, but it’s defensible to talk about and try and conceive of a way. But, here’s the onion, the point that right bloody well staggers me.....next year’s draft looks historically weak! How could anyone see this as a smart move? Honestly, we’re supposed to flirt with a real chance of calamity for what is statistically most likely to turn into Cody Zeller? Any sort of reasoned risk analysis is going to show that the chances of negative outcomes on this path are completely outsized against the upside odds. Almost surely at least two teams will go straight gutterball (Charlotte by default, maybe New Orleans too), so we’d probably be looking at a 15.6% chance at best. How is this even being brought up by anyone at all?
In Review:
It’s basically an underwhelming trade that might mean low expectations by Ted or it might mean that we’re going a roundabout route towards something better by "incubating assets" (I'm trade marking that, so don't get any ideas, now). It’s not really that Okafor and Ariza are crippling contracts that I hate, it’s just that in conjunction with Nene we’ve got too much money committed.
Leonsis really couldn’t have sold it much worse than he did, though; I mean, that was not winning language and it just seemed so very risk averse with how it was packaged. But, I think I could swing pretty decisively one way or the other if I had an inkling as to what the considerations are behind the scenes going forward.
Anyway, I guess I’m too nuanced on this one to have a real tidy conclusion, but I’ll continue mouthing off through the draft and then next season I should be good top go.
