2) if joe can find a team who will take daye and charlie v off our hands in exchange for a low post threat, i’ll offer myself to him sexually. and i’ll put that in writing. because joe can’t do it.

as it is, we certainly drafted a POTENTIAL answer at PG. and we needed a PG badly. i don’t think you could say the same thing about either of the morris kids. next year there will be better big man options.

and “getting to the playoffs” should not be a goal for anyone outside the organization if all you’re going to do is get swept out in the first round. tom gores wants to get into the playoffs because it means he gets to sell playoff tickets. dumars and the team want to get into the playoffs so they’re not so damned embarrassed to be associated with this franchise. fans should not be remotely interested in the playoffs until the team has at least SOME chance of making noise once they get there. at a minimum, they need to be a team that other teams want to avoid in the first round. and, like i said, we’re probably 2-3 years from that in a perfect world. this team is nothing but holes. we have no use for a veteran big man to come in and give us some post scoring and get us into the playoffs in the short term before leaving in free agency. we’re better off building through the draft, because then we’ll end up with players peaking when they can actually do some good.

better to be in the lottery and get a real chance at significant, prolonged improvement than to miss the lottery just so we can get embarrassed by a top seed and barely justify trading a future pick on the basis that we’re just barely out of the lottery. we need a formula for sustained success around here, not a quick fix trip to the playoffs. and with the roster being the mess that it is, that means we need to stay in the lottery for a while.

2) the size of our backcourt would be a tremendous problem. (A) like it or not, will bynum and ben gordon are no jason terry and jj barea. not even that close, really. and (B) those guys back up a pretty big starting backcourt. deshawn stevenson is big and strong. jason kidd has great size for a PG and can easily defend opposing SGs. so dallas has the luxury of mixing and matching their combinations and being selective about when they play terry and jj together. if the pistons trade rip, they will be left with a backcourt consisting size-wise of one shooting guard (stuckey), two point guards (knight and BG), one undersized point guard (bynum). i suppose you could slide daye in as a fifth guard when you like the match-up, but we’re thin at SF as it is, and knight/stuckey/gordon are all going to warrant/demand starters’ minutes, so the logjam is going to be as bad as it ever was, and the team’s going to suffer. bynum and gordon, unlike terry and barea, just aren’t good enough to compensate for their lack of size, AND we can’t compensate by rotating them with two bigger guards unless we keep or replace rip. we don’t have to guess at it either. we’ve got two seasons of evidence to prove this. if i haven’t made my point, there’s no way you’ll ever get it. but you seem like a nice guy, so hopefully you do. also, gordon is the worst contract on our books by a wide margin.

you seem to be looking at this team through rose-colored glasses. you were probably surprised and disappointed by the team’s performance last year, and you’re setting yourself up for more disappointment. we’re not going to be able to make a truly beneficial trade here (unless we can find a good taker for tayshaun and pull off a lucky sign-and-trade). we have very VERY few trade chips; all of the players who are truly expendable are attached to horrendous contracts, and we can’t really afford to part with any of the players other teams might covet. stuckey might be the only guy who has value and is basically expendable, but i don’t think dumars is going to let him go. dumars would marry stuckey if it were legal in michigan. he said so in a press conference once.

maybe there’s a ghost of a chance that we could package rip and stuckey for whomever the utah jazz care about the least, but i still think any team in the league can beat that offer, and we’d be left with a guard core consisting of three undersized dudes and plenty of work to do.

you’d be better off if you had more realistic expectations about this team’s options, because none of them are particularly good right now. and not because karen davidson tied joe’s hands. joe tied his own hands by giving our four most expendable players (rip, gordon, charlie, max) our four worst contracts. nobody wants these guys, period. we’re not going to be able to trade any of them easily, and certainly not for anything that’s going to make the team better.

you’d also be better off if you got off the “rip’s gotta go” bandwagon. gordon is a much bigger problem on this roster with that contract. much, much bigger problem.

kid’s a project for sure, but i’d feel comfortable starting him at the point from day one and letting him learn on the job. he’ll be far from perfect, he’ll make a lot of mistakes, but he’ll instantly be a better option than stuckey.