Re: The Ratliff/Mutombo rumor

[Alexander Wang <awang@MIT.EDU>]

At 04:57 PM 2/22/01 +0100, Hironaka wrote:
>    My main concern is to see if we can trade Anderson's contract, not any of
>our centers. I like Anderson, but we have a chance to actually have cap space
>this summer if we can trade him for some expiring contracts and its hard to
>argue that losing him would affect chemistry, since he's had practically
nothing
>to do with any of our wins under Obie. 

We can't get useful cap room by trading Anderson or Potapenko for expiring
contracts. We would have to get under the cap by over $4.5M to make it
worthwhile, because that is supposed to be the size of next year's middle
class exception. I don't think that dumping either Anderson or Potapenko
would do that because we are significantly over the projected cap already -
plus you have to add in the contracts of the three first round draft picks,
assuming that we don't spend them all on foreigners who won't play for us
next year. And to really benefit from being under the cap, you have to be
closer to $10M under, to get a shot at a high quality player -- and I don't
even mean Chris Webber-type talents, but rather guys on the order of Tim
Thomas and Austin Croshere. Look at the guys who went for less than that:
Ron Mercer, Brad Miller, Tariq Abdul Wahad, etc. I don't think it's
possible for us to get into the free agent market in any significant way.

Alex