I guess the one thing that will decide how I feel in the end is the one thing that we don’t know for sure. Did Boozer say he was going to resign with the Cavs or not? If he did, then he should have confronted Paxon and Gund straight away and honored the last year of the contract he was under and taken his chances as a FA next summer, IMO. If the Cavs thought that Boozer had agreed to resign when he didn’t, well to bad for them.
The last question I have on this, is everyone certain that there was no tampering on the part of the Jazz?
Cheesesteak:
So why didn’t the Cavaliers go ahead and give Boozer a new contract before his option expired? Why did they let the option expire at all?
Why? Because they didn’t want to sign him to a new contract until after the Olympics. They wanted Boozer alone to bear the risk that he might be injured (or worse) in Athens. And if Boozer had been injured, do you think the Cavs still would have shown up at his doorstep with a $41 million contract in hand? Do you really? :dubious:
Oh yes, the Cleveland brass are really a noble, selfless bunch.
Boozer did the right thing to ensure his family’s financial security.
If I am reading you correctly you are saying that Carlos Boozer is not a liar, is not greedy, and is not unprincipled. Although this has nothing to do with the OP, I agree with you.
By letting the contract expire, Boozer became a free agent, then the Cavs could sign him for the “mid level exception” and give him $42M over 6 years. Since they are already over the cap, they could not just restructure his deal. To put a finer point on it… the only way the Cavs could give him more money was to release him and sign him as a free agent. In addition, this deal would have used up their mid level exception, so the team would have been unable to pursue OTHER free agents. Basically, take a guy making nothing, resign him to a much higher pay rate AND pull yourself out of the free agent game, so you can’t improve your team. Yeah, sounds like the Cavs were trying to screw Boozer.
If any statement in this thread requires a cite, it’s this one. Free agent signings were not allowed to begin until July 14th, at which time it was “expected” that Boozer would resign with Cleveland, of course he signed with Utah instead. From day one, Boozer’s agent was in negotiations with Cleveland.
I suppose $42 mil isn’t financial security? Just to cap it off, let’s get a quote from Mr. Boozer from July 1, the day his contract expired
Nope. They could have picked up the option for the current year and exposed him to the market next year and paid the market price. They did not want to do that, so they tried to use this year’s salary as a bargaining chip. At the sametime, given how fickle the NBA is, Boozer also wanted to sign a long-term contract this year as opposed to the next.
IOW, both of them had a motive to verbally discuss this. But, once Boozer was released from the contract, he realized that he was being paid far less than market price. So, he took the Utah offer.
He might have screwed the Cavs but there was NO altruism in what the Cavs were doing.
That’s standard free-agent cliche stuff. He said he wants and hopes to stay in Cleveland, not that he promises to or won’t listen to other offers- it doesn’t strike me as proof he’s dishonest.
You want to say that this kind of cheapshot negotiation is acceptable? Fine. Guaranteed the next time a Boozer has a year left with a crappy contract, he won’t have the option of getting his big contract locked in. Nobody in that negotiating room had their hands tied, each side had the option to engage in this release/sign or not, depending on what they felt about the deal. Now that option is gone.
Next time, the player WILL be locked in to his current deal and if his value should suddenly change for the worse, he can thank Mr. Boozer for poisoning any possibility to pull in the big money through a deal like this.
I tried digging up the cite for you but the Plain Dealer’s search function only goes back 14 days. This issue came up in the day or two after the Cavs declined to exercise their option. I remember it because it struck me what a shabby thing it was for the Cavs to do, to delay signing Boozer until after the Olympics (and thereby to put the risk of injury, or worse, on Boozer).
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I suppose $42 mil isn’t financial security?
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It’s not if you don’t get the contraact until after the Olympics.
Yeah, but then the players can start acting like Alexi Yashin. Which is not a good thing.
spoke- if the Cavs did try and delay the signing until after the Olympics, then I’m right with you on them being a bunch of creeps who got exactly what they deserved. You want to do a deal like this, everything gets signed on the 14th, not delayed and delayed.
Adam, what Yashin thing are you thinking of? I didn’t know anything about him (it being Hockey and all) and only saw a contract dispute where he refused to play the last year of his contract and was then denied free agency, being required to play a full year with the team. Given how it seemed to work out, I don’t think anyone would want to follow in his footseps.
Yashin held out and refused to play under his valid contract three times. The Senators caved and re-negotiated the first two times. What you describe is from the third time he welched.