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http://www.nba.com/pistons/news/truebluepistons_100304_1.html
If Joe D hadn't spent last summer,
Pistons would be farther behind the curve today
A Cautionary Tale
by Keith Langlois
From the time Joe Dumars traded Chauncey Billups to create cap space for the
chance to reinvent the Pistons, there was a faction of support for the notion
he hoard the money for a year to position himself to strike in the Summer of
LeBron.
It was a fairly nonsensical position even at the time, but one that became
downright laughable last July when the NBA released figures for the 2009-10
NBA salary cap, which came down by $1 million from the previous year, while
simultaneously issuing an ominous warning that the cap number for 2010-11
would plummet much more dramatically.
The Pistons had just days earlier come to agreements in principle with Ben
Gordon and Charlie Villanueva, which struck some Pistons fans with visions of
LeBron James and Chris Bosh donning Pistons blue as deflating news.
Now that Gordon and Villanueva are bumping along at numbers not only well off
their career norms, but in many cases approaching or undercutting career
lows, the view that Dumars should have sat on his money last July is gaining
steam.
On NBA TV’s telecast of the Pistons-Celtics game on Tuesday, Kevin McHale –
who could write the book on cap mismanagement – apparently jumped on the
pile: “A cautionary tale of all GMs that have a few bucks in their pocket,”
McHale is reported to have said. “Sometimes it’s better not to spend it.
They spent it on Ben Gordon and Charlie Villanueva, two nice players but not
players who are going to be able to carry your team. They are nice
complementary players.”
We’ll analyze the merits of Gordon and Villanueva’s signings in a moment,
but let’s get this out of the way first: Hoarding the money would not –
N-O-T – have resulted in the Pistons getting in on the LeBron sweepstakes
this summer.
Not unless Dumars spent the rest of last summer and all of this season up to
the February trade deadline doing what the Knicks, Nets, Heat, Bulls and
others did – looking for avenues to further dump contracts and pare down to
the bone.
Let’s pretend Dumars did just that last summer, after trading Billups and
sending away Amir Johnson, Walter Sharpe and Arron Afflalo to create further
cap room. Let’s pretend he signed no one – not Gordon, not Villanueva, not
Chris Wilcox, not even Ben Wallace.
The Pistons still would be on the hook for roughly $35 million in contracts
to seven players for next season: Rip Hamilton ($12.7 million), Tayshaun
Prince ($11.1 million), Jason Maxiell ($5 million), Rodney Stuckey ($2.7
million), Austin Daye ($1.8 million) and Jonas Jerebko and DaJuan Summers
(about $1.5 million combined). Now let’s project the Pistons to be picking
somewhere in the middle of the lottery and give them a cap hold of $2 million
for their first-round pick. Add another $2 million for the four
minimum-salary slots needed to bring the roster to the minimum of 12 for
computing the cap space they would have.
We’re up to $39 million – and that’s assuming the Pistons renounce their
rights to Will Bynum, which they surely do not intend to do.
So no Gordon, no Villanueva, no Bynum and the Pistons would have about $14
million under the projected 2010-11 cap of $53 million. You need more than
$16 million to be able to offer a max contract to the premier free agents.
We can all agree that LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh are the three
no-brainers who’ll command max dollars – though I’ll allow for some
sentiment that if Bosh is going to take up one-third of a team’s salary-cap
allotment, you’d better have a bunch of players outperforming their
contracts in order to be a serious contender.
The next wave of free agents includes Joe Johnson, Amare Stoudemire and
Carlos Boozer. With as many as seven teams with the space to offer max
contracts, two of them likely having the wherewithal for two such deals,
there are nine potential max contract offers lurking this summer. That would
have put the Pistons in position to secure no better than the No. 10 free
agent available.
Who might that be? After the top six, David Lee will get his. Rudy Gay, as a
restricted free agent who plays for a franchise (Memphis) not believed to
want to spend, could be the rare RFA who switches teams. There are some
players with early termination options, including Kobe Bryant, Paul Pierce,
Dirk Nowitzki and Yao Ming, but they are either highly unlikely to exercise
them or highly improbable candidates to switch teams.
The point is, the Pistons would have had significantly less money to spend
this summer than last had they sat on their cap space in 2009, and the
competition to land free agents would have been exponentially more fierce.
Now, there is this grain of truth to McHale’s point: You don’t just spend
money because you have the ability to do so.
But Villanueva is 25 and Gordon is 26, both were high lottery picks and both
have been consistent producers throughout their careers. McHale’s other
point – that they’re nice complementary players, but not
strap-a-team-on-their-back superstars – is valid, as well, though Gordon
surely carried the Bulls valiantly in their seven-game series with the
Celtics last spring.
But if you wait for those players to come around before venturing into the
free-agent pool, you’ll never get wet.
Gordon averaged 18.5 points a game and shot 40 percent from the 3-point line
every one of his five years in Chicago, during which time he missed a grand
total of 12 games due to injury. He’s missed 19 with two separate
significant injuries this year and he’s shooting 30 percent from the arc.
You think there might be a connection there? You think that when he comes
back healthy next year, the Pistons aren’t likely to have one of the league’
s 10 most dangerous perimeter scorers instead of the pale facsimile they’ve
had so far?
I don’t care what you call him – franchise player, star, complementary
player – that’s a player any team in the league would love to have with
this caveat: at the right price. The Pistons paid him handsomely, but look
around at players that age with his history of production and see what the
going rate is.
Villanueva is never going to be mistaken for Ben Wallace. He’s not a bundle
of energy, he’s not a defensive stopper and he’s not the bully of the
block. What he can be is a player very much like Orlando’s Rashard Lewis,
who's in the third year of a six-year, $118 million deal – a finesse big man
who causes matchup problems with his inside-out scoring ability, a capable
rebounder and a defender who’ll win some, lose some.
Everybody understood they weren’t stars of the LeBron-Kobe-Wade magnitude,
which explains why Dumars was able to get both of them for a combined
first-year salary that will be roughly equal to what the players signing max
deals will get this summer.
For Dumars, it was a choice of spending money to acquire assets while they
were available, or not spending the money and seeing his buying power
decrease dramatically. Gordon and Villanueva have had seasons no one could
have projected, but to judge them on what they are right now – as opposed to
what they showed prior to this season and where their career arcs project
them – is abject foolishness.
It’s been a season of distortion for the Pistons. McHale is right – Gordon
and Villanueva are nice complementary players. But they’ve spent the bulk of
this season unable to complement others while fighting injuries of their own,
or not having the teammates they expected to complement because of injuries
to others, or spending the last three weeks figuring out who complements who
else best.
The Pistons have one-quarter of the season left to answer questions they’d
hope to address months ago. As frustrating as all that’s conspired against
them has been, from Joe D to John Kuester they know this much: What they’ve
seen so far is less than the sum of their parts, and no two parts have more
to offer than they’ve shown than Ben Gordon and Charlie Villanueva.
So Joe D could have sat on his money last summer, sure. And you know what?
He'd be going into this summer wishing he had a way to land two young players
with career resumes as attractive as Gordon and Villanueva’s.
Add the lottery pick they’ll get as minor compensation for the suffering
inflicted by this season of misfortune, throw in the unexpected experience
gained by rookies of great promise like Jerebko and Daye and Summers,
sprinkle another useful veteran or two into the mix when free agents looking
for a big payday get passed over by the teams looking to snag bigger fish,
and the 2010-11 Pistons are going to strike a far different profile than the
team that hasn’t regained its equilibrium since Rip Hamilton rolled his
ankle in that smashing season-opening win at Memphis 61 games ago.
Next year, I’m guessing Kevin McHale and his ilk will be dishing out
compliments to a group that has a much more complementary feel to it.
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