Re: Rating Pitino's moves

[Josh Ozersky <josh_ozersky@yahoo.com>]

good points.  Williams for Chris Mills was a mistake in on-court
terms, but I think it was meant to put the fear of god into the other
players.  Williams was goofing around, as he and others had in the ML
era, and Rick swapped him for a bag of funyons.  As for Chris Mills
vs. Walter straight up, I love it.  The other guys are great
throw-ins, esp. Thomas, who I was sorry to see go.  Massenburg for
Rogers was terrific, and I think the organization was pretty high on
Rogers, and sorry to see him go.

What no one has mentioned is that it looks likely or at least possible
that Dino will come back to the NBA this season, thus relieving us of
a couple of million dollars in salary cap burden.  I find it hard to
believe that we can't at least acquire a defensive center like Mike
Stewart this offseason; if we could get he and Corliss Williamson I
would be pretty pleased, I think.  I actually think Walter could be
our scoring center if we could just get him to slow down a little.  I
think he is far underrated in terms of what he can do on the offensive
end.  The truth is, I think he could be our solution at three if he
pans out, but then I tend to fall for players with flashy offensive
games.  Still, how many seven-foot track stars start at three in the
NBA?

Center is key, as is adding muscle and speed on the bench.  Who will
be this year's Bo Outlaw?  That may be more important to us than this
year's Ike Austin.

Josh





---Alex Wang  wrote:
>
> 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
> 
> 

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