Anybody got a fork lying around?
If you do, feel free to stick it in Ray Allen. Dude is done. Dead as a dial-up connection.
Oh, he might snap out of his current shooting slump and find his way back into double figures in scoring -- something he's failed to do five times in these playoffs -- but Jesus Shuttlesworth isn't going to resurrect his All-Star status again. The biggest difference right now between Allen and Wally Szczerbiak is that Wally will be making more than $10 million for only one more season. You're on the hook for two more years with Allen.
Which means that Sam Presti deserves a tip of the cap. He got out from under Ray Allen's deal while the getting was good. He did it when he could even get an asset for him, the fifth pick used to take Jeff Green. You probably couldn't get a bag of hammers in exchange for Ray Allen at this point given how much money he's going to make in the next two seasons.
Presti wriggled the Sonics free of what would have been the No. 1 thing holding back this franchise in the future: Dead money. Every NBA team's got someone whose paycheck vastly outweighs his production and basically creates a situation that has the franchise in a full-nelson. Sometimes, the player becomes a nagging hangnail (See: Fortson, Danny). Sometimes, he becomes an infection that must be excised (See: Baker, Vin). In either case, an NBA team faces three options:
a) Bite the bullet, and keep the player until the contract runs out, then flush him and hope he doesn't leave skid marks.
b) Trade him, but because this is the NBA and trades require the salaries to match up, well, you get the option of taking either worse players or a larger outstanding salary balance. Seattle was able to trade Baker only because they accepted Kenny Anderson, Vitaly Potapenko and Joseph Forte in return.
That's why the timing of trading Allen was so important for the Sonics. Seattle was able to acquire an asset (the No. 5 pick) and a player with a lower outstanding balance (Szczerbiak). A year later, there's no way Boston could get either one of those things in exchange for Allen.
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1 comment:
This is a good reminder that you need at least a year to fully evaluate a trade. At the time, it seemed like Seattle was getting turds on the dollar. Now, with a season's worth of perspective, we have a promising young talent, we found a sucker for wally world and we've got financial freedom.
Now if we only had a team that wasn't leaving...
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