pcbothwel wrote:JWizmentality wrote:Jordan Clarkson for cash. Remember being super pi$$ed about that. Cash turned out sucky.
The Clarkson trade has been brought up numerous times over the last couple years as another EG failure, but I dont see it. Clarkson is a low ceiling combo guard that has regressed each of the last two years. He gets paid 10M per year for the next 4 years, plays little defense, has a 1:1 AST:TOV ratio, and scores inefficiently.
Jason Smith is a better player on a better contract. Let that sink in.
Oh, and the 14 players that were drafted after him have done NOTHING in the NBA. So EG traded a mid 2nd for 2M in cash, which was the highest amount ever paid for a 2nd at the time.
EG for the most part sucks, but this myth that the Clarkson trade was somehow some big miss just isnt true.
He seems to be as good as Wayne Ellington, so I havent shed a tear
While I agree that Clarkson hasn't developed into a particularly good player, I think you may be missing the point. Sometimes, you can make the right draft choice, yet the player doesn't work out -- that risk is built into any draft & any position in that draft.
For example, I'd say that Kevin Seraphin was the right pick at #17 in 2010, even though he didn't work out. The fact that he didn't work out wouldn't make me say that I wish we had traded the pick instead, & it wouldn't make me criticize Ernie for picking KS either. In exactly the same way, the fact that Clarkson hasn't developed as one might have hoped wouldn't make me go back & say it was a mistake for the Lakers to give some cash to acquire the pick.
No, it wasn't a mistake; it was a very solid move on their part. If you don't make moves like that you miss the guys who *do* work out! E.g. in 2012 we had the #46 pick (in addition to our high R2 pick), but we threw it in in the Okariza trade. That pick could have gotten us Kyle O'Quinn (a guy I wanted really badly for the Wiz).
If you trade R2 picks for cash, you don't get to take swings like that, take a chance on guys many of whom do turn out. & it's a pattern Ernie repeats often.
A draft pick is a chance to acquire an asset at no cost. Don't have to trade for him. A R2 pick means the guy costs you next to nothing. Jordan Clarkson came in and had an outstanding rookie year. At the end of that year, he had become a high value asset. The Lakers didn't trade him, they kept him. But at that point they certainly could have traded him -- and gotten a lot more value than he'd cost them.
Making sub-optimal use of your assets & opportunities is a straight line to failure. It's what defines Ernie Grunfeld's management style. No different in this case than the other times he's wasted assets.
