dougthonus wrote:Title of the thread is pretty misleading. Luol didn't unload on Gar. He just described his version of events:
Luol's version:
1: Gar wanted him to take a team friendly deal.
2: Thibs wanted Luol to stay and was pushing the Bulls to make an extension
3: The Bulls offered 3/30 or told Luol they were going to trade him.
4: Luol said he wouldn't take 3/30.
Nothing was really unloading here, though he clearly was a bit annoyed by the Bulls posture.
Left unsaid is that after the season, Luol could only find 2/20 on the open market, 10m less than what the Bulls offered him. Fortunately for Luol, that made him a FA in 2016 when the cap went bananas and hten the Lakers famously gave him about 60M to play badly for about half a year.
Now I love Luol Deng, but the problem with management in this situation was that they considered paying Deng 3/30 for the next three years, not that they didn't go even higher. I totally get why Luol wanted more money and felt disrespected by the org or whatever, because it's not his job to decide his skills are degrading and he's no longer worth the money, but this was a good move by the org not a bad one, and there was probably no way it was going to be a move that made Luol happy.
in a vacuum obviously the bulls were right to not overpay , but in hindsight the move proved very costly to their on court product as they didn't have a good small forward after they dealt Deng, if they had kept him with Butler , they would have had one of the better wing combos in the league with Butler emerging the way he did .But even with Butler's improvement , if the bulls had a better team , it would have meant fewer touches for Jimmy thus lowering the amount of money he could have garnered the following offseason.
in addition they spent draft capital on Deng's supposed replacement Doug Mcdermott , who did not work out at all.That could have been used fortify other positions .
with Butler on a less expensive contract the bulls could have gotten an even better trade package when they dealt him .