Rating Pitino's moves

[Alex Wang <awang@mit.edu>]

K. Kveraga is being overly harsh when he lists only a few Pitino successes 
against a "long list of failures". Here are my evaluations:

1) Buying out Radja: a good move. Clearly no other team thought he was worth the
money either or else they would have taken him off waivers.

2) Drafting Billups: pretty good considering that Daniels and Battie were also
options at this spot. Billups did not make All-Rookie but my guess is that he
had better trade value than Brevin Knight would have, for instance. With the
trade at the deadline, the overall judgement is the #3 pick for Anderson, cap 
space, and cash which looks pretty good at this point.

3) Drafting Mercer: good move.

4) Signing Knight: poor. He will cost us $2.4M in cap space for the upcoming
year and hasn't shown much to warrant that. I think we're jumping to conclusions
by assuming that he'll be traded with the pick for nothing. (Has anyone ever
traded a lottery pick with a contract for nothing or a worse pick?) Saying that
Knight cost us Fox (rather than cap space) isn't really accurate though, because
Fox would have required a larger contract (per-year) than Knight. Yes, he signed
with the Lakers for $1M but those were much different circumstances.

5) Signing DeClercq was a minor success. Signing Bruce Bowen was also a success.
Massenburg was a mistake and trading him was making the best of it.

6) Signing Edney was an OK move. I separate this from the Williams trade because
we could have signed Edney without trading Williams.

7) Trading Williams and cap space for Mills and the ensuing trades. Overall the
result of the whole dealing here was to give us McCarty (verdict is still out),
Dontae Jones (salary cap minus), and Thomas (useful in the Anderson trade) for 
Williams and cap space. This is a minus. One thing is that Williams would have
required a large contract this season to keep.

Alex