Our off-season salary cap situation
- Thread starter Primetime
- Start date
freakazoid
Well-Known Member
Yeah, I posted it so you could check it against yours. His figure for max cap space takes into account every possible thing we could do, including trading away our pick. I haven't looked at it to find the discrepancy, but this guy puts a lot of time into doing this for every team, so he's usually pretty reliable.
NAOS
Well-Known Member
This might come off as nitpicky, but this oft-repeated phrase is baffling to me. What is a player worth?? He's worth what's being offered for him. Seeing that (a) we traded Kanter within our division (something that is sometimes avoided for competition reasons -- the sending team will accept a lesser offer to send the player further from their competitive niche), that (b) Lindsey appears to be a smart man, and that (c) we weren't accepting a deal that financially hamstrung future movements, then we can assume that this trade is the high-water mark of Kanter's current value.
I think it is reasonable to assume that Kanter could not bring back a productive player that the jazz FO liked, and whose contract was a fit with the FO's portfolio of contracts. That was never part of the discussion; Kanter doesn't (currently) have that value.
I think it is also very reasonable to claim that his value would have dropped going forward. If he accepts the QO, and given the previous point, then he becomes a 1-season or half-season rental (which is a late-first round pick, max). We also have enough flexibility with Booker and Millsap's contract (and any others like it we add before the end of this season), that I don't think we've lost some key ingredient for this upcoming period of asset acquisition.
Then, you also have to account for how keeping Kanter could have reduced the value of the other players (or prevented their increasing in value). It isn't hard to imagine an uncommitted Kanter going out there, breaking the offensive and defensive flows, putting up empty stats, and blocking the finer development of Q's schemes.
Anywhoo, we got what Kanter was worth. Fans have very little idea what the true value of players are in advance of a trade, because they are kept out of the war/negotiation rooms. There are some fans who have better, educated hypotheses, but they absolutely lack critical information.
Stifle Tower
Punch Bowl Re-Filler
Define market value. That was the reason we couldn't keep him. His idea of fair value was a max contract. I'm sure DL's idea was in the $10M range. But we would have been on the hook for his cap hold right up until the time he signed his QO. That would have still left us with our exceptions to sign FA's. As far as I know (GVC will correct me if I'm wrong), there's no deadline for signing the QO. Enes could keep negotiating with other teams right up until training camp.
If I had been in Enes' position and the Jazz didn't trade me, I'd try to go to "Team X" on a 1 year deal for as much as I could get over the QO. That guarantees I'm an UFA in 2016. At worst, I have to return to the Jazz on the QO and I just go out there and look for my shot everytime I touch the ball so I can pad my stats.
GVC
Well-Known Member
Why/how?
DL keeps talking about flexibility, and looking at these numbers, it doesn't look like we had much flexibility at all. I just never carefully examined the salaries before. This makes me wonder about the wisdom of paying Burks as much as they did. Or if we even ever seriously considered keeping Kanter (since we would have had to get rid of someone to retain him).
GVC
Well-Known Member
A couple things:
1. You can go over the cap to re-sign your own players. The Jazz could have kept Booker, all their minimum/unguaranteed guys, and still signed Kanter for up to the maximum salary. In that case, the Jazz would also have had the Mid-level exception and Bi-annual exception to sign free agents.
2. The Jazz would still have been well below the luxury tax if they re-signed Kanter and kept everyone else.
Was Dirk Nowitzki (and Pat Garrity) worth Robert Traylor? Was Scottie Pippen worth Olden Polynice? Was Julius Erving worth $3 million in cash? Was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (and Walt Wesley) worth Dave Meyers, Junior Bridgeman and Brian Winters?
I think it is a good debate as to whether the Jazz's strategy was best or not. My view is that they should have ridden him out for the rest of the year, gambled that he gets and reasonable offer ($10mm plus/minus) and they match. Then, assuming he is on a reasonable salary scale, trade him opportunistically to a team in need. In my opinion, they had a better opportunity to extract more value with this strategy. And, I do agree there are scenarios where this strategy could go south, such as him signing the QO and he walks for nothing.
So I disagree with those who say "stupidest trade ever" and I disagree with those who say "trade him for a bag of potato chips"
We'll look back in 5 years and be able to tell if it was a good deal or not. Today, impossible to tell.
I think this underestimates the sophistication of most front offices of evaluating personnel. The average fan looks at PPG and RPG and makes conclusions on player value. Perhaps some of the weaker teams do the same. But most have far more sophistication.
True, but teams can withdraw a QO at any time.