I generally don’t entertain trade speculation because I don’t find it all that fun as a parlor game. But there are enough reputable voices now suggesting that the Clippers are in serious conversations to acquire Zach Randolph for Tim Thomas and Cuttino Mobley.
Randolph coming to the Clippers would be a colossal mistake. Let’s enumerate why:
- However you feel about Tim Thomas and Cuttino Mobley, their contracts have one extremely favorable feature: They expire the summer of 2010, when a slew of high profile free agents hit the market. When Thomas and Mobley come off the books, the Clippers will inherit a combined $16.27 million in cap space to pursue one of those prized free agents.
- Zach Randolph, on the other hand, stands to make $17.33 million in 2010-2011. Forget, for a second, that this is an exorbitant amount of money to pay a cancer like Randolph to play basketball. Even if you love Randolph’s game, his contract effectively takes the Clippers out of the 2010 sweepstakes.
- It isn’t as if the Clippers’ pressing need is frontcourt help. Right now, the Clippers are one of the league’s worst defensive teams, and they need some help on the wings. In Randolph, they’d be inheriting a player who would make that inexplicably poor defense ranking pretty damn explicable. In his seven-plus seasons in the NBA, Randolph has demonstrated neither a desire nor the aptitude to play defense. It’s also fair to say that Randolph doesn’t begin to address the team’s issues on the perimeter.
If Randolph is on his way in, does this mean Kaman is on his way out?
That’s the only possible rationale I can see for obtaining Randolph. The term of Kaman’s salary extends a year longer than Randolph’s, into 2011-2012 . If the Clippers truly believe that they’ll never win with Chris Kaman — and there are reasonable arguments that can be constructed to that effect — then I guess swapping him for, say, a Gerald Wallace, starts to at least make sense. Because a frontcourt rotation at the 4-5 of Kaman, Randolph, and Camby offers no logic, particularly when you consider the first two will make a combined $28.67 in 2010-11, the year you’d like to put a nice offer on the table for the services of someone like Chris Bosh.
ADDENDUM: Kelly Dwyer captures it perfectly in discussing the Knicks’ maneuvers: “If [the Knicks] can find some sucker to take Zach Randolph’s contract in exchange for expiring deals, that number goes down over $17 million.”
Who might that sucker be?
5 Responses
totally agree. DONT DO IT DUNLEAVY
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Posted on November 21st, 2008 at 12:54 pm
http://www.insidesocal.com/clippers/2008/11/randolph-trade-should-be-done.html
game over.
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Posted on November 21st, 2008 at 12:57 pm
If you guys are looking for a better team this year, then this trade accomplishes that.
1. We replace 30 minutes a night of Tim Thomas/Brian Skinner/Novak/etc. with 30 minutes of Zach Randolph. Randolph is leading the Knicks in Roland Rating under Mike D’Antoni’s fast paced system:
http://www.82games.com/0809/0809NYK.HTM
Dunleavy is trying to implement a fast paced system here, Randolph fits in well with that.
2. We replace 30-35 minutes a night of Cat Mobley with 30-35 minutes a night of Eric Gordon. Gordon is a much better fit for a higher tempo system than Cat was. There will be some growing pains from time to time, but again, that is going to be an upgrade for us:
http://www.82games.com/0809/0809LAC.HTM
3. Yes, we lose cap space in 2010, but we just delay it by a year to 2011, where there are still plenty of good players available and probably a lot less competition for them. On top of that, there is no guarantee that we could’ve landed anyone significant in 2010 with so many other teams positioning for cap space that off-season (someone noted that there are 18 teams positioning for max contract cap space in 2010). We very likely could’ve walked away with nothing.
4. If we want to trade Kaman after Dec 15th, we now have much more flexibility to do so.
As long as Dunleavy gives Mobley’s minutes to Gordon and not to Ricky Davis, this is a good trade IMO.
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Posted on November 21st, 2008 at 1:23 pm
we’re the suckers…done deal!
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Posted on November 21st, 2008 at 1:24 pm
a few things for me;
regardless of it being L.A. / Hollywood, I just have this feeling that not one of the major FA’s is gonna consider the Clips; especially if we don’t sniff the playoffs and have Baron rolling an effective show before then.
Zach’s numbers will be most welcome. I haven’t watched much Knicks action over the years and don’t know much about him. But if he’s avg a dbl dbl, he can’t be mailing it in too badly.
there was a recent vidclip of Al T in the locker room talking about Chris like he was from another planet. no disrespect to CK, especially when he’s ‘on’, but I’d like to believe that G. Wallace would be a much better fit in the locker room with the others and can’t minimize the importance of that.
it’s be one thing if we were playing .500 ball and looking alive in the losses, but……
let’s do this.
[Reply]
Posted on November 21st, 2008 at 1:46 pm
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