1. You just described why Gooden is upper middle class. He’s middle of the road for a starter, but the NBA is composed of a more than simply starters. So he’s the 30th best big in the league, and the league contains somewhere north of 120 of them, upper middle class seems like a pretty accurate term. Folks like to rag on him, but if they looked closely they’d realize he’s quite a bit less replaceable than people seem to think. Unless, of course, you prefer to see Aaron Gray trundling up the court more than you prefer winning basketball games. I don’t have a tall, chunky man fetish or a he’s oozing with potential he’ll probably never realize fetish. I want guys that will win games for us.

2. What lottery picks are you talking about? Derrick Rose doesn’t seem to have any problems getting minutes. There are plenty of minutes there for the taking up front but our current young players just haven’t played well given ample minutes. More importantly, I categorically reject the idea that we need to be giving them minutes “to develop”. Tyrus and Thabo are the guys who this would seem to apply most to, and their failure to produce so far hardly looks attributable to not having game experience. Game experience might count for something, but it’s not a cure all. And honestly, I don’t see how it cures the flaws in Tyrus’ game, especially. The mistakes he generally makes out there have absolutely nothing to do with experience.

3. Our roster is not “too deep already”. We have maybe 6 starting or better quality NBA players. Rose, Deng, Gordon, Gooden, Hinrich, Noc. We have one, maybe two guys who will become that in Noah and Tyrus. That’s not some raging amount of depth. It especially isn’t when you couple trading away Hinrich and Noc, even if you bring back one player to replace them. If you trade away those picks with Kirk and Noc, then even if you get one player back, you have only 5 good players and two or three prospects. Which sounds fine, except that two of those prospects will quickly be wanting raises and two of those prospects haven’t shown that they’re going to be much more than prospects, let alone deserving of significant raises. The draft picks, on the other hand, aren’t going to be early lottery picks. They’re likely to develop, if at all, into role player types anyway, which is exactly what we need to fill out our roster. So moving in one young player a year, on a reasonable contract, is an absolute necessity.

4. I’ve studies the cap numbers pretty extensively and I don’t see much basis for your belief that there wouldn’t be enough room to sign a max player under the plan I laid out. I worked through the numbers using a Deng-sized contract for Gordon, which is significantly higher than he was willing to settle for with the Bulls. Gooden could make $8M or so on top of that and we’d still likely be fine for signing a max player. Obviously circumstances could change (such as the salary cap declining by a lot) but there’s no way to predict that and more importantly, if that happens, it’s just as likely to negatively affect player salaries as it is the cap (ie, if the cap goes down next year, it’s harder on the Bulls, but it’s harder on everyone else too, so perhaps Gordon can be resigned for $60M instead of $66M, meaning we only pay him $10M instead of, say, $10.5M in 2010). In any case, I’ve worked out the numbers and the numbers work. And if they don’t, you readjust. If you can’t extend Gooden at the right price, you offer the full MLE to Milsap. There are some fallback options.

5. I’m not sure what you mean by “proven commodities”, but the basic idea, I guess, would be to trade Kirk and Noc for some sort of star player. OK, I’m on board with that. Even if you add in some draft picks, however, I find it pretty unlikely you’re really going to get a star for those guys. Certainly we’d be a able to get an AK-47 or Zach Randolph type, but I don’t really see how that helps us. I think I’d rather roll the dice on 2010. And even if we did, we’d still want to execute the other parts of the plan. If we trade for Zach Randoph, we’re closing off the 2010 FA option pretty clearly. So that would only make it more important to keep our draft picks and re-sign our current players. Because if they left, there’d be no replacing them.