Junk Drawer - July 22, 2008

It was the “give me a G Greg” stuff and the sort of disparaging interchange with the blond ESPN interviewer. I dunno, I’m probably being overly sensitive. I’ll have to force myself to watch again to re-evaluate. Hmm. Maybe not. I’ll just go with my initial response and live with it if I’m mistaken.

DC aint no joke

I love the bullets.. wizards suck.. michael adams is turning over in his grave

I picked up on it.

PA has thrown a lot of money around in the past on teams with perhaps less potential. Didn’t Portland have the highest payroll for a couple years, somewhere around the Detlef Schrempf (Shremp? Schfremp? Ssvrmpff?) era?

If these guys produce, and if they demand it, I think PA will pay them. If ever Portland has had a team that would be profitable in a pure business sense (discard billionaire basketball hobbiest strategy) this is it. And if PA is not running a deficit, why would he balk at paying the guys that have returned the team to glory?

(Just making up some numbers here) Is a $65 million payroll profitable, but a $85 million payroll isn’t? Or is PA running a $20 million deficit already and won’t go to $40?

We’ll have to approach those players with fair market value salaries, unless they wanna stay on a championship level team and get paid just a little bit less. I don’t expect a Joe Johnson situation to happen, because if, say, Martell or Bayless become that good, we’d likely pay it (provided they fit with the team and all that, of course).

As you probably know, one of the reasons this upcoming cap space is so enticing is because it will be the last time we have cap space for the entirety of Roy/LMA/Oden’s career as a Blazer. The Luxury Tax will be unavoidable, and that might be death for other small markets it won’t be as big of a problem for Paul Allen as long as the team is good.

So, let’s say the Big 3 are worth ~15 million, the max after the rookie deal. Luxury tax land is north of 70 million right now. After the big 3, you got 25+ to play with. If any of Trout, Rudy, Bayless, Martell are worth big money, you got room to pay them, or room to pay the better players out of those good players and afford to let someone who wants a bigger role on another team go.

Now, I tend to ignore the “penalties” for going over the luxury tax because Paul Allen can easily afford it and there is no penalty beyond the dollar for dollar tax. He’ll just have to build one less personal privately funded space ship each year to afford the tax.

How we’ll pay for our non-Big 3 players is just by owning their Bird rights, and thus can match or be ‘allowed’ to go over the cap and all that. Since they project to be good, they’ll have to be paid Fair Market Value (plus perhaps a lil’ extra to make up for the fact their stats will suffer for being on a good team) to keep them out of other team’s hands.

All of this means we’re just over the cap like we’ve always been as long as Paul Allen has been the owner. It’s actually kinda easier to sign the type of free agent we’ll be looking for (role players) if you’re over the cap, since you’ll have access to the mid-level exception. Teams under the cap can’t use that.

So, we’ll be allowed to pay our good players whatever we want, often bidding against ourselves for the first several years because they’ll be restricted, and can get role players using the MLE and bi-annual exception, and have a owner who can afford it easier than any other owner in SPORTS.

The Blazers will never make that much money, but that isn’t their purpose anyways.

As long as Paul Allen is writing the checks, keeping the good players on the roster will be easy, provided they don’t wanna jump ship to lead their own team (perhaps Martell or Bayless will wanna be a top dogg somewhere).

Mortimer

As you probably know, it’s not a hard salary cap we’re working with. We can pay players we own the Bird rights to as much as we want, within the ‘max deal or less’ restrictions agreed upon by the CBA.

So as long as Paul Allen is a billionaire and we have players who want to win, we can easily sign all of our good players.

Other small markets don’t have this freedom because they are owned by millionaires, not billionaires, and thus are huge financial sinkholes that those owners can’t afford. Even a big market like the Lakers are affected by this, as their owner is only worth a few hundred million. He can’t afford 3 max players, but small market Portland can.

So, our situation is a lil’ different, and we are allowed to pay our players we want to keep as much as we want (basically).

I am not a cap expert either.

Mortimer

and paul allen is not their owner

And they did that because the players are good people who care about winning, and have an owner who isn’t that rich—definitely not as rich as Paul Allen.

I hope our Big 3 are good people like that as well, but if not, well, our owner is different.

I don’t think the situation is that different really; the biggest difference is that they only gotta pay 1 big man while we’ll have to pay 2, which is always expensive, and they locked up 2 out of the 3 before they were superstar-esque.

And, Duncan agreed to less so the owner would be willing to make other moves.

Mortimer

up Parker and Ginobilli before they broke out and got some sweet deals.

1. Duncan
2. Tie, Amare, KG
4. Dirk
5. Chris Bosh
6. Carlos Boozer
7. Elton Brand
8. Gasol
9. LMA
10. Al Jefferson

Gasol and LMA aren’t too far off already (LMA dominated him each time we played LA) Duncan, Dirk, and Garnett are going to decline soon. Brand and Boozer are good players but will always be limited by their lack of size. By next year or the year after, be might be as good or better than these two players. In his prime he will be competition with Bosh, Amare, and possibly Horford (if Atlanta’s FO isn’t retarded and keeps him at center) or Beasley (looking kind of iffy) as best power forward. Now there will probably be some good power forward prospects in the future, but he’ll definitely be a high caliber player.

while it is undeniable that Zach put up good numbers, the Blazers sucked SUCKED while he played for us.
It is not a great loss that he is gone. Please accept this.

................................ No player garners more “homer value inflation” than LMA. Aldridge is a VERY GOOD player, for sure, but he’s no superstar nor even an All Star at this stage in his career. He’s just a VERY GOOD young player with some potential upside remaining.

t

...for laughin outside…out loud…alone…. at 1 in the morning. lol

...for laughin outside…out loud…alone…. at 1 in the morning. lol

http://www.paulallen.com/?contentId=1

http://www.pgafoundations.com/

I work for an ins co… basically

Zbo wasn’t Ruben Patterson by any stretch of the imagination.

That video is just kind of creepy.

Especially at the beginning
“Can I play….heheheheheheheh”

The team likes to get ‘um young and coach ‘em up!

at least the jersey was 25% off

If you ever need a dog sitter destrukteresses are my fave;-)

you never know, there could have been two cool kids here. People look at me funny if I wear my jersey out, its pretty puke and gold down here.

your son looks like he either going to hug chip/dale, or form tackle him. Im praying for the latter..

And trade exceptions are nice, but expire after one year if you don’t use them (see Golden State who did nothing with the exception they got for fan favorite Jason Richardson).

I think Martell is actually the most likely candidate. If he doesn’t break out, look out. He’ll be in every BlazersEdge CP3 trade proposal by Thanksgiving.

I was watching it on DVR and I was afraid to go to the game thread and see the comments. lol