Benedict Miller wrote:TheSuzerain wrote:Benedict Miller wrote:I'll try to keep an open mind. It always hurts losing talent for nothing.
We wouldn't have lost him for nothing. We would have kept $20 million in cap room. That's not nothing.
I hear you. Cap room for who though? Not everyone is lined up to come play for the Bulls.
In truth, it only matters if we want to try to compete in the next year or two (which is almost certainly way, way too soon unless all of the pieces line up and we can persuade Jimmy to come back for a non-supermax and to bring Kyrie with him rather than Jimmy just joining Kyrie in Boston after they move a piece or two). Otherwise, we need to stay bad for quite a while. I could respect us trying to stay bad for quite a while. True, the league has taken an anti-tanking stance with regard to the lottery balls that the Bulls front office should have seen coming before they decided to trade Butler, dump everyone else, and tank. But we still need to take our medicine and get really bad for a long time before we can hope to become
really good. (And after all, wasn't that the standard that made many fans support trading Butler? The notion that if we can't be a title contender we're nothing?)
Retaining Lavine at $20M/year for a 4-year period just contributes to a culture of mediocrity. He could score enough points to win a few games, but is very unlikely to be great in the way that would win MANY games. And that kind of mediocrity will prevent us from being bad enough to improve slowly but surely, a la Sam Hinkie (even if the rules have-- predictably-- changed). He's like Ron Mercer. Do you want to rebuild around Ron Mercer? Do you want to bet that another GM will take Ron Mercer off your hands once he's shown himself to be, well, Ron Mercer?
I would much rather use up our capspace on a bunch of solid guys on solid, short term contracts, who are likely to be tradeable or simply to expire, than to fall prey to "sunk cost" mentality and match on a $20M guy who's not solid, who's long term, and who's therefore all the less likely to be tradable.
Of course you know that I'll be here eating crow if Zach proves me wrong a year or more down the line. It's about the team much more than it's about me. But while I would much rather be happy than right, I suspect that a year or two down the line I'll be unhappily right along with my like-minded homies.
