As “bad” as Wade has been in the playoffs, he’s still a top5 shooting guard and his defense is still top notch. There’s no reason the Heat looks to dump him. Bosh is less safe because his defense at the C spot is suspect. The big 3 is still safe as a whole though. If they were to make roster changes, it’d be to tweak it. Extending Birdman, and going after another active big man to man the middle. Dalembert maybe.
Klay Thompson - $2.3 million. He’ll be a restricted free agent in the summer of 2015.
JJ Redick - $6.19 million. He’s a free agent this summer, and will get a nice payday.
Tyreke Evans - $4.152 million. He’s a restricted free agent this summer.
Redick has really improved his defense and passing, has turned into a nice player, and is a natural swingman. I think he’d be great on the Heat as part of a Chalmers-Wade-Redick-James-Bosh lineup, but I doubt they will be able to afford his free-agent salary.
Evans has been a mess in Sacramento, but it’s hard to say how much of it is him, and how much is Sacramento. They started him at point, then 2-guard, then the 3. He gets a new coach every year. Their defense is a mess with no clear scheme. They have no pass-first players on the roster. It’s a pickup team from hell. I think a smart, stable team like the Celtics, Spurs, or Mavericks will make a modest offer to Sacramento this summer, and have a decent chance of landing a great talent cheaply and developing him into a valuable player.
I could maybe see Golden State trading Thompson for Wade if they thought they could contend for a title next year, and if Wade didn’t look so gimpy and past it right now. That said, even if G-State said yes, since they are over the salary cap, they have to comply with the 125% rule, meaning they have to send about $12 million in salary to Miami to trade for Wade’s roughly $14.5 million salary. So, Miami wouldn’t actually be saving much unless they were able to waive whoever they got along with Thompson.
That’s a big question. Wade, James, and Bosh all took substantially less than max deals to play together. If they no longer want to do that, then Miami probably won’t be able to keep a championship-level supporting cast around them. But, why should they all decide they want huge raises? They got together to contend for championships, and it’s working. And if that does happen, you can sign-and-trade or just let somebody walk as a free agent.
I think that’s the smart play. Use the Rashard Lewis / James Jones / Juwan Howard money to pick up a post defender. Emeka Okafor is a nice interior defender, and will be a free agent this summer, but he’s coming off a $12 million salary and will probably not want to take much less than that, so the Heat won’t be able to afford him.
As said, shooting guard is a very thin position right now.
You’ve got some old guys: Kobe Bryant, Manu Ginobili, Joe Johnson, Jason Terry, Ray Allen
Some up-and-comers and spot-up shooters: Klay Thompson, JJ Redick, OJ Mayo, Kevin Martin, Tyreke Evans, Bradley Beal.
Some defensive specialists: Avery Bradley, Arron Afflalo, Wesley Matthews, Iman Shumpert, Thabo Sefolosha, Tony Allen
And just a handful of young-ish, elite, versatile players: Wade, Monta Ellis, and James Harden.
Eric Gordon’s injury problems and Brandon Roy’s sudden retirement haven’t helped.
Several teams have been using crunch-time lineups with 2 point guards: Memphis with Conley and Bayless, Golden State with Curry and Jack, Denver with Lawson and Miller, New York with Felton and Kidd, for instance. In part this to have another ballhandler to shift from one pick-and-roll directly into another, but another part is the lack of good offensive shooting guards.
This also highlights what a disaster it was for OKC to trade Harden. Not only is he a top-12 player, he’s a top-12 player at a thin position.
I’ll say I did underrate Redick, but he’s a free agent and you wouldn’t even think of him as a potential replacement for Wade.
As I said, it makes sense if they can save money to improve in other areas as well.
Maybe, but then you run the risk of everything imploding. Remember, they don’t have to opt out. What if Bosh and Wade decide the 20 or so million they will get is great, but Lebron would rather try his fortune elsewhere. Then you are really screwed.
Do you honestly think a Wade-less Heat team are not gonna be extremely good regardless? No, you cannot guarantee championships, but if play over the last few years reveals a fatal flaw which you do not have the means to fix as you are presently constituted, you have to try something new. As I said, it’s less of an issue now that they are in the finals, but it’s still something to think about.
The bigger questions are these: how much longer do you think Wade can be an effective player? How much longer can you afford to pay him superstar money? How much money, and how long of a contract will he want? If you foresee a problem in any of these areas in the near-ish future, it might make sense to trade him.
Yeah, the Thunder were really stupid to make Westbrook get hurt :dubious:. They traded Harden, went from winning 71.2% of their game to winning 73.2%. Yes, having Harden once Westbrook went down would have made things easier, but they could not afford to have expensive underutilized spare parts. The same is true for the Heat.
No, they are not GOOD, they just tipped the scales more in the favor of plowing ahead. Regardless, simplifying things to a soundbite like, “it’s just one game” is dumb. All Lebron cares about is winning championships. If they fall short of that, especially if they do so in spectacular fashion, it’s a cause for concern. Lebron recently said having to personally take over the game felt like he was going back to “my Cleveland days.” I don’t want him to feel unhappy just because we might get burned on a trade for Wade or Bash.
And then you’ve got Dwyane Wade, who is 7th all time in PER and who just this season was one of nine guys in the history of the league to go 21/5/5 at 52% shooting or above.
I agree with that, but my understanding was that this whole discussion is in the context of replacing Wade and/or Bosh. With the exception of Bradley Beal, who you certainly aren’t going to trade a 30+ year old with balky god-knows-whats for, none of the players whose names have been bandied about can aspire to ever be half the player Dwyane Wade is now, and if Wade has a correctible/restable health issue, he’s going to be even better than that next year.
Klay Thompson’s a nice player and will get better, but the broken-down shitty version of Wade that has brought on this little rush to judgment is still a better player than Klay Thompson, or Tyreke Evans, or Ellis, or whoever else you got who isn’t one of the top ten players in the league.
Human Action, fair enough about him as a player in general; you’re entitled to like his game, of course. As I recall his scoring leapt way up after Pierce went down with an injury and he blew up, which is how he got his ticket punched out of town. Which is kind of what I’m saying, and again, I’m only talking in light of the suggestion that the Heat need to dump what they have to get better. They’re getting elite production from elite players who are already comfortable deferring and still picking spots enough to give you great numbers. If Bosh and Wade were on these other teams, they wouldn’t be averaging “about” 20 points. We’ve seen what they can do as number one options. There are no reasonable replacements out there, and you can’t make their production up in volume and depth. World class players are the thing everyone’s out to get their hands on. That’s why the Heat are the best team in the league where the Cavs weren’t going to be.
The IFs continue to pile up.
He could try his fortune elsewhere anyway. By any sensible analysis, that’s more likely if they trade one of the core members of the team. In that case you’d have Wade or Bosh and that’s it - hooray.
Yes, they should be very good anyway. Still not seeing the justification for taking a step backward.
And if it doesn’t, you don’t. Guess what? A game seven loss doesn’t prove you’re fatally flawed any more than a win proves you’re fine. The fact that they’ve been as good as they have for three years is the best case for not trying some random and undefined new thing.
It would have been worlds better than having Kevin Martin in there. It turned out that replacing him with a cheaper option didn’t work out so well.
The problem is the reasoning you are using.
Yup. And in game seven, he didn’t do that and they won easily.
This makes no sense at all. Which is more likely to make him unhappy: keeping Wade and Bosh, who he likes and wins a lot with, or trading one of them for [nobody knows what]?
About restricted free agents, maybe you guys can help me out here.
As I understand it, a RFA can get offers from any other team, but his current team has the capacity to match the offer (but not exceed it). And that’s the justification everyone uses to say RFAs are difficult to pry away.
However, just because a team can match, couldn’t the player still choose to leave the team? If a team matches the offer, can’t the player still elect to go? In that sense, an RFA is just like any other free agent in that you have to convince him to leave
No. If the original team chooses to match, he gets that contract with that team. Maybe you remember a year or two ago when Eric Gordon signed an offer sheet with the Suns and publicly asked the Hornets not to match. They ignored him and matched the Suns’ offer.
Yeah, Wade and Bosh and 10 others are a mediocre team pure and simple.
First, it’s not necessarily gonna be a step backwards in the long run, or maybe even in the short run. If the new normal for Wade is his performance in this playoff run, are the Heat really getting a good value or an irreplaceable player in any sense? The idea that they can rebuild later on, or trade Wade/Bosh once they are clearly on the downswing is much harder than trading them with a little gas in the tank. Granted, Wade is still a top 20 or so player now, but what will he be next year and the year after that? That’s what the worry is. Once he becomes just another guy, he is basically untradeable as his contract makes him a terrible value.
The reality is that, if the big 3 all want superstar money, they will not be able to afford even the Ray Allens and Birdmans of the NBA. There is simply no money left, and even if they can use some obscure rule to pay someone, the luxury tax will be a crazy amount. Micky is rich, but he doesn’t want to be losing money on the Heat for the foreseeable future with no championships to show for it. They will have this problem even next season, so the option of doing nothing is not really on the table. Yes, they can coast for the next year and see what happens, but that is not really a responsible way to do things. Unless you have some assurance that the Big 3 will cost less or be more effective in 2015 and onward, I am not sure it makes sense to just wait it out.
It’s not just that game. They consistently have interior issues. If that prevents them from winning championships, they they can’t just hope for good matchups that don’t expose their flaws.
Yes, it likely would have. Or maybe he plays like shit like he did during most of last years’ playoffs, and they end up in the same spot they are in now, only millions poorer. Even with Harden playing well, they still wouldn’t have won the championship. And, they would have either lost Harden for nothing after this season, and/or likely lost Ibaka. They would have also had to put off extending Westbrook and/or Durant. That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, nor did it to the OKC decision makers. OKC got better on both offense and defense without Harden. Just because he would have been a good filler after a freak injury doesn’t mean it made sense to keep him.
Winning makes him happy. If you do something that allows them to win for longer, he will be happier. PERIOD.
They’re in the Finals. They won it last year. On the one hand, the only thing you seem to be interested in is the prospect of championships. On the other, you seem to be discounting the present value of having the best team in the league right now.
As I have said SEVERAL TIMES now, I would likely not make any moves at this point regardless of the outcome (within reason) against the Spurs. My initial point was that they should investigate trades IF they lost to the Pacers. The reason I said that is because despite arguably having the BEST team, they couldn’t beat an pretty good Pacers team because they are a bad matchup for them. Thinking they could expect better results from an older, more expensive team next year strains credibility.
You’ll have to excuse me- I keep hearing about how Wade is decaying before our eyes and Bosh is a wimp. And yes, that’d be a good team. Does it compare well with the team that exists now? No, it’s not even close. Does it match up well with the other teams around them and look like a championship contender compared to Indiana and Chicago or San Antonio and Oklahoma City? Not really. Of course there are a lot blank spots but it sounds like a better version of the Nets with Lopez and Williams.
You can pretty much pretend it’s anything you like since nobody has come up with a halfway sensible trade proposal. But the reality is that, yes, if you trade a guy that good, you take a step back in the short term and hope it’s more sustainable in the long term. You don’t ship out a Wade and then not skip a beat.
Bosh is not on the downswing as far as I can tell. He’s taken a specific role on the team and it’s affected his stats, and so has his sprained ankle the last couple of weeks. I’ve agreed a couple of times that Wade’s injury history is a concern, but the general idea of trading them now in case they decline later and cause a problem doesn’t make a lot of sense when this is already a championship team.
They agreed to take less than the maximum to come to Miami. That was the point. Why are we pretending they’re all going to ask for a raise now?
I’m pretty sure they won one last year.
Matchups that expose their flaws: Indiana, maybe San Antonio. Matchup that don’t: pretty much everyone else. You can’t address every flaw. The question is if you get better overall.
How would they have been poorer? Harden was already under contract. The trade was about his future contract and they didn’t save much money this year by trading him.
They signed Ibaka well before the dispute with Harden, essentially choosing him instead of Harden.
They extended them long ago. Durant is under contract until 2015-16 and Westbrook is under contract through 2016-17.
Did they get better as a team this year as part of their own evolution, or did they get better because they traded Harden? I don’t think it’s the second one. And yes, this it’s somewhat unfair to bring up the injury even though it’s true they probably would’ve responded better with Harden. The thing that matters to me is that it’s a similar move to the one you’re proposing the Heat make: a very successful team trades an important piece because they’re trying to keep an eye on the long term. It didn’t work for the Thunder this year and I’m not sure it’s going to pay off in the longer term either. Do you think the Thunder are going to be a better team with either Kevin Martin or whoever they replace him with than they were with Harden a year ago? They’re not about to turn into crap, but it’s an open question at this point.
Right. Except he’s winning right now and nobody seems sure what you can really do to allow him to win longer- and if you trade one of his guys for someone else and take a step back, then he’s a free agent and you’re asking him to come back to a team that’s not as good.
I apologize. I didn’t mean to sound like I hadn’t read what you’ve already written. I just think both Marley and I have already addressed the game seven win vs. game seven loss distinction, and we’ve sort of moved on. It’s a bad distinction, really. It isn’t one that I would have expected you to hang a hat on in any appreciable way.
I think the only reasonable way to have a discussion about this is to pretend we’re still in Schrodinger’s game seven mode. I figure Indiana would have won that game somewhere between 20 and 50 percent of the time. I’m not doing the math on it, but I reckon that means they’d win 4 out of 7 somewhat less often than that. So it could have happened. I don’t believe that’s a reflection of a flaw in Miami’s roster. I believe it’s a reflection of the fact that shit happens. If you can hit one jumper, you can hit five in a row. It’s silly to suggest that if they lose game 7 to the Pacers then it becomes incredible to imagine that they could win the title next year. The team is still the team. They went to seven games last year, too. If they had lost it and still had the same roster this year, what’s the problem from this year’s perspective?
There’s some level of “good” that they actually are, and whether they win or lose depends on that and luck, but mostly that, so you can mostly but not entirely tell how good a team is by how often they win. So, whether they win or lose any one individual game, isn’t the main question whether or not you can make that level go up by getting rid of the, I don’t know, 8th best guard of all time? That’s the question I’m interested in. I guess this is a different conversation to you because you think they’d be a different team if they lost game seven - that you really learn something about the team’s quality based on whether it wins that game - and I don’t.
You wouldn’t, unless you were desperate for 3-point shooting, and also convinced that Wade was going to decline sharply over the next two seasons. That’s not where Miami is, unless they know something about Wade’s knee that we don’t.
That said, Redick is the kind of sneaky signing that can turn a contender into a title favorite, like Tyson Chandler for the Mavs in 2010 or James Posey for the Celtics in 2007. If a playoff team that needs shooting, like Chicago or Memphis, could snag him for something under $8 mil / season, that could change the championship picture. But, more likely, he gets overpaid by a lottery team with cap space and no plan, like Sacramento.
Oh, was Pierce hurt that year? I didn’t recall that. To be fair to Al, his weight has been fine for quite a while, and I don’t think he’s ever played with a backcourt that was even the 25th best in the league. The guards he’s been saddled with are absolute dreck.
I’m in the Heat-should-tinker-around-their-three-man-core camp. They could use a post defender and replacements for Battier and maybe Allen, but there’s no reason to blow up their core. I listed the free-agent centers to illustrate this, unless they want to roll the dice with Dwight Howard or Andrew Bynum, there’s nobody good enough to justify losing Wade or Bosh, and the really good centers, the Gasols, Lopez’s, Noahs, and Hibberts, are too good to be had for Wade or Bosh.
I tend to look at contending teams as having a window. You’re right, luck is a huge factor: who’s healthy, who you get matched up with. If Rose doesn’t blow out his knee, the Bulls might win the East in 2011. If Fisher doesn’t hit a miracle shot, or Ginobili doesn’t commit a stupid, stupid foul, the Spurs might win 5 straight titles. As an organization, you have to balance keeping your window open for as long as possible, and maximizing your odds of winning it all in any one season.
That’s what makes the Harden trade inexcusable: it both threatens OKC’s title window, because Kevin Martin is a free agent, and lowered their odds of winning this season.
That’s gotta endear a person to their team…:rolleyes:
Yup. But large amounts of money are a great healer. Uh, of feelings, anyway, not so much Gordon’s other injuries.
On a different note, I’m not sure what’s going on with Lionel Hollins. The Grizzlies seem to have no interest in keeping him. He says he wants to come back but they either disagree about salary or the direction of the team or they just think they’ll be better off with another coach. They negotiated briefly but I don’t think they’ve talked for a while. The Nets want to interview Hollins about their head coaching job, but the Grizzlies won’t give them permission since Hollins is still under contract until the end of this month. The Clippers are supposedly interested, too. I don’t know if the Grizzlies still might want to keep him but at a lower price, or if they’re just screwing him out of other jobs. Reports say the Clippers want to interview him, too. And I think the Grizzlies are making the wrong call here. Hollins should’ve been quicker to give more minutes to his shooters during the Spurs series but I thought he did a good job with the team and that they’d be smart to keep him.
Joe Johnson did the same thing back in '05, and asked Phoenix not to match Atlanta’s offer. They complied, and lost him for nothing. The Pelicans can always trade Gordon if he can’t get over it, so that’s the smarter approach. Never lose an asset for nothing.
Yes, that saga has been odd, but not altogether unpredictable. Memphis’ new ownership installed a front office that’s very forward-thinking and modern with analytics, and Hollins is a very old-school coach. A clash was probably inevitable, though I am surprised that it happened so soon, in a season where Hollins had to re-scheme to replace his leading scorer, and his bench, and still reached the conference finals. Makes me suspect that Hollins ignored some ideas from the front office about lineups and tactics.
If I were Hollins, I’d want nothing to do with Nets, and would tell Memphis that. The roster is capped out, and their owner is mercurial, demanding, and unrealistic.
The Clippers have a higher ceiling, but have an even worse owner. Hope Hollins sticks in Memphis, and I hope he gets his fingers corrected surgically, they creep me out.
Very. Most of the champions since the Shaq-Kobe Lakers have been complete teams with HOF big men. I’d think it’d be very tough for Miami to beat most of them, except like I said maybe the Pistons. And maybe the '06 Heat…although we know even ancient on the cusp of retiring Shaq could still destroy prime Bosh.
Cleveland had two 60+ win seasons. Even a 66 win year with a higher efficiency differential than anything this Miami team has done yet.