Comments on: Joe Dumars gives wide-ranging interview with The Detroit News

By: frankie d

frankie d — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 19:17:26 +0000

i don’t think it was a straight salary dump. i actually think that joe d thought AI could provide that little spark to get the team back to the nba finals. it was a latter day sheed-type trade: high risk/high reward.
that last year in denver is weird, because the numbers don’t show the clear decline in his play.
as i said, i watched lots of nuggets ball that year. i’d been a huge melo fan – ever since he won the ncaa title and the pistons spurned him. and i’d been an AI fan since his high school troubles. (i had a professional interest in his case, as i was doing that kind of law at the time he went through his trouble and i was dealing with many of the same issues that were present in his case.) and the nuggets games came on at a weird time because they are one of the only teams, if not the only team, in mountain standard time. so i watched as much nuggets basketball as possible. and AI just wasn’t the same guy, no matter what the numbers indicated.
its like an animal is getting ready to die, when its been injured, and it is very manic at the end, running around furiously, until it just drops. that is sort of what AI was like that last year in denver.
he was using lots of vet tricks to get to the line, literally just throwing himself into a defender and walking to the line for his FTs. using the threat of his drive to get that little mid-range fadeaway, rather than just going up and into and sometimes over guys to get his shot off. lots of little things, but it was clear when you watched him that he was through as a big time player. he’d lost that elite speed and quickness and athleticism.
i’m sure denver knew it, could see it and that played into them wanting to get rid of him when they did.
(i also wonder is his late night lifestyle was finally catching up to him.)
so, yea, i hated the deal from the moment it happened and told anyone i spoke to how much i hated it.
i agreed with hollinger’s take at the time of the trade.http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/columns/story?columnist=hollinger_john&page=IversonTrade-Nuggets-081103
hollinger was one of the few guys who got it right at the time the trade happened. though even he did not realize how catastrophic it would be for detroit.

By: Max

Max — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 05:11:49 +0000

I agree, but Gordon, Charlie V and RIP’s contract are on the books and those deals were all consummated years ago so it’s irritating when people whine about cap space. Most teams are over the cap.

By: Patrick Hayes

Patrick Hayes — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 04:13:03 +0000

Fair enough. The advanced stat community and advanced stat secret admirer Frankie D saw it coming.

Just to note, Iverson got to the line 10 times per game his final season in Denver. He also shot 45 percent that year. I'm not arguing he was still in his prime or anything, but he was still clearly producing around an All-Star level. I refuse to buy the hindsight that the trade was made strictly to be a salary dump. It wasn't and all of the evidence available at the time suggests it wasn't. Time, obviously, has judged it harshly and proven it to be an uneven trade. At the time though? It was far from lopsided.

By: Patrick Hayes

Patrick Hayes — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 04:08:21 +0000

Well, I’m not talking about those specific players. I’m just saying that having cap room to be able to make deals to absorb contracts like that is a valuable thing in and of itself. Those very simple deals were easy to make and they all impacted their respective teams. I’m not going to cry myself to sleep because the Pistons missed out on Maynor or Mullens, but if they had the ability to make deals like that, it would be another tool they could use to add assets. Having a modest sum of money just in case something comes up is better than having a large sum of your money tied up in two players with negative trade value right now (V/Gordon) and one who isn’t even on the roster (Hamilton).

By: frankie d

frankie d — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 03:29:02 +0000

hey, i’m not in the advanced stat community, though i do keep tabs on lots of their work.
but i did see lots of nugget BB the year before iverson got traded. (living in the suburbs, league pass, easy job, a girlfriend with insomnia.)
it was clear that he’d taken a huge step back, that he’d lost something important. he just wasn’t exploding the way he used to explode and he was basically getting by on veteran tricks that let him get his shots off.
also, he was not getting to the line the way he used to get to the line. he spent a lot of time crying to refs. there was a rumor that the refs had, collectively, decided to punish him for something that had happened.
whatever the reason, it was clear that something had happened and he just was not being given the superstar benefit of the doubt anymore.
without that, and without his explosion, he was a shell of himself.
i seriously wonder just how many of his games joe d saw before he traded for him. if he’d seen as many games as i’d seen- probably 20 to 25 – no way he trades for him. he was nowhere near the same player.

By: Max

Max — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 03:07:50 +0000

You edit?

By: Max

Max — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 03:06:42 +0000

Getting those players were all good moves but talking about them in the context of the Pistons is nitpicking.

By: frankie d

frankie d — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 02:38:28 +0000

hindsight on my part? hardly.
i hated the two signings when they were just rumors.
CV?
that was easy. his own team didn’t want him. they let an almost seven foot guy with 3 point range walk for a relatively modest contract. that was all you needed to know about CV.
he’d been traded for a little guy – tj ford, which hardly ever happens, trading a big guy for a little guy, especially one with a bad neck – and then his own team cut him loose. he’d put up some good numbers for a few months in a contract year, but everything else was a huge red flag.
my position on his signing was that they would be trying to ditch him as soon as they signed him to a contract.
BG?
when i read the chicago papers and they were printing rumors of detroit signing him, i thought they were joking.
signing BG when they already had rip and had just signed him to an expensive extension… it was crazy.
the only way it would have made sense was if joe d had a trade ready to go, getting rid of rip, the moment the ink was dry on BG’s signing. otherwise, signing BG was just as dumb as signing CV.
also, chicago had only offered gordon about 5-8 million dollars less, and they’d pulled their offer off the table, which is one reason BG was pissed at them.
no, the two signings were just absolutely stupid and i said that from the beginning.
(and there are posters who post here from another forum who know that is exactly what i was writing over there, at the time of the signings. so no, this is not hindsight. i’ve said this all along.)
what should they have done?
easy. basically maintain the status quo.
hold on to the money.
hold onto amir.
hold onto afflalo.
go forward with a lot of cap flexibility, and go after the better free agents who were coming out the next year.
and in the meantime, anytime a team needed a third team to do a deal, where a team needed to absorb a big contract, detroit would have been there, stealing young players for nothing.
that is what i wanted them to do.
that would have been the smart thing to have done.
obviously, joe d took another path.
and it is obvious which course would have been smarter.

By: frankie d

frankie d — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 01:42:35 +0000

unhhh…who said anything about comparing chauncey to maynor?
i sure didn’t.
i said he had point guard skills and that detroit had not had a guard with those kind of skills since chauncey.
absolutely nothing about comparing the two players.
and who said anything about starting maynor for 82 games?
i sure didn’t.
maynor is a nice young point guard who works well as a change of pace to westbrook in OKC’s offense. when westbrook gets a little to focused on his shot, maynor would come in and run the offense and settle everyone down. every team that goes anywhere in the playoffs has to have that kind of guard.
can he start for a team for 82 games?
who knows. but that is not what i ever claimed.
he’s a nice young point guard that OKC picked up for nothing because their GM was smart enough to keep salary cap space so that when utah needed a trading partner, he was there.
those trades happen every year, and the smart GMs keep space available, if they can, in order to facillitate exactly that kind of trade.
and would i rather have eric maynor, young point guard, first round draft choice, instead of CV?
the answer to that question is so obvious, i’m sure you can answer it.

By: Patrick Hayes

Patrick Hayes — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 19:02:09 +0000

I don't care about any of that stuff. It's stupid and pointless.

What is clear is the front office, namely Dumars, believed that Hamilton was too big of a problem in the locker room to keep. Because Hamilton played bad and was injury prone for three straight years, he had no trade value right now. So, as the decision maker, he made the decision to get rid of a player who was clearly unhappy and who clearly contributed to maybe the worst locker room in the league last year.

At the end of the day, Dumars has more information behind the scenes to make that decision than anyone. So you can think it's wrong and Hamilton is totally a standup guy and not a baby and still an All-Star caliber player. I'd still probably trust that Dumars is better equipped to evaluate just how disruptive Hamilton was behind the scenes last year than you or I or anyone else on the outside.