My esteemed Hoop Diary colleague, Paul Henderson, has a running series on the free agent signings with analysis on each deal (part 1/part 2). As is typically the case, Paul and I don’t see eye to eye on a lot of these deals so I wanted to take some time to look at several of these deals through a different set of eyes.
Paul has some great insight into the free agent signings, so I’ll just highlight where I think he’s missed the point.
Brook Lopez agrees to a four-year, $61 million deal with Brooklyn
I find it funny that the people who think this deal is terrible have typically have positive impressions when asked about the Roy Hibbert deal. They are basically the same money, and the players are opposite sides of the same coin. Both are dinosaur centers who have no place in a modern game. The big difference is Hibbert is reasonably strong in half court defense while Lopez is an offensive force. Both are useless when playing a team like the Heat or Thunder (or likely the new look Lakers) who like to run. That said, I don’t mind this deal for the Nets for several reasons. 1) They needed to sign him to protect their asset and retain the ability to get Howard later in the year. 2) Lopez will likely gain more trade value even if it’s not for Howard. He won’t live up to this contract, but they weren’t finding equal value anywhere else. There is a false economy once you get to a max contract deal and all things are not always equal. Bottom line: Lopez won the lottery, but his reward is likely to be playing somewhere with zero chance of winning anything in a few months. Luckily he has lots of experience at losing.
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Kris Humphries agrees to a two-year, $24 million deal with Brooklyn
Who would have thought something positive could come of association with a Kardashian? Kris Humphries amazing surge in confidence saw his play improve to the point that this is overpaid, but not outrageous. In fact, the Humphries signing has a lot in common with the Lopez signing (for the same reasons). The main difference is this is a limited time deal for a productive guy who has real and immediate value around the league. By retaining him the Nets get to play him in the short/medium term and flip him when the right offer comes along.
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Raymond Felton agrees to a three-year, $10 million deal with New York
If there was a giant scale with Raymond Felton, Marcus Camby and Jason Kidd on one side and Jeremy Lin on the other, let’s just say it wouldn’t be terribly well balanced. Felton is a horrid point guard who played well under Mike D’Antoni. Mike’s gone and so is Felton’s ability to run a team effectively. This is a bad deal strictly from a basketball perspective as the Knicks now have the worst backcourt in the league, but from a business perspective it was apocalyptic.
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Roy Hibbert agrees to a four-year, $58 million deal with Indiana
Hard to justify that Hibbert is good value at this price when the Pacers have the assets to go find a big man who is more versatile at a lower price (eg. Chris Kaman for half the money). The Pacers are currently going through that awkward phase where they are a young team with lots of low price value assets to a capped out small market team who has no ability to improve. We’ve seen how this ends before. The Nets has to secure as asset, in Brook Lopez, because they had no other way to move forward, but the same can’t be said for Indiana.
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