In defense of Paxson

While yeah it would stink if Luol got hurt and his career ended this summer or next season…. $4.5M plus all he’s earned to date are more than enough for him, his kids and family to live more than comfortably for the rest of their lives….

But I understand your point, it would stink for him to end at $4.5M when he could have earned $50-60M more guaranteed, I just wish folks wouldn’t lose sight of that.

I mean Aaron Gray will earn something like $800K this year…..that’s a VERY good salary, yet folks try to act like it’s nothing (and many of these folks are probably earning significantly less than that)....

Sorry, I just get sensitive to those kind of comments: “he suffers a serious injury that 4.5 million could be all the money he makes playing basketball for the rest of his life. Sure it’s not likely, but it is risk”

Summer/2007 Conversation:

AGENT – Luol, I understand you like the Bulls 5year/$57M offer and think its enough money to feed Sudan for the next millenium. But don’t you see the Bulls are disrespecting you.
LUOL – They are?
AGENT – I can name a dozens max contracts out there for lesser players than you.
LUOL – But they were signed based on potential when supply of good players was at a premium. The environment has changed and owners have to spend more judiciously to avoid the luxury tax.
AGENT – Luol you are going to be a superstar! You are only 23 and have improved every year. Do the math yo will be averaging at least 30PPG and 15 REB and 10 ASSISTS by the time you reach 27. You are a max contract canidate if I have ever seen one.
LUOL – Do you really think so? I am not really a very athletic forward.
AGENT – LUOL TRUST ME!

Summer/2008 Conversation:

LUOL – I just talked to VDN and I think he has some great ideas how to turn our team around. He sure is a breath of fresh air and he actually listened to me. And I checked out that Rose kid – AWESOME! This team has a hell of a future and I want you to get me signed up right away – I need to focus on basketball.
AGENT – WHOA kid – the Bulls are still offering basically the same deal as last year.
LUOL – Well I did have an off year.
AGENT – The Bulls are disrespecting you. Skiles and Boylan misused you last year and everyone knows it. You deserve MAX money!
LUOL – So what our the other teams saying?
AGENT – Luol, the other teams LOVE YOU!
LUOL – What kind of contracts are they offering?
AGENT – Well uh, Cap space is tight right now but they all have max contracts available in 2009 and 2010.
LUOL – But what do we do in 2008? I might get hurt and I want to play with Rose.
AGENT – You are going to the olympics when …..

The following has been a dramitization. Had the this been an actual emergency, the Bulls would have done something by now.

::rolls eyes::

Isiah was so bad he never even had the opportunity to pay someone of Luol’s caliber. The Bulls flaking out on re-signing their own young, good talent is not the same thing as the Jerome James memorial MLE-bust of the year.

Maybe it makes more sense to let both guys go, and have cap space available in 2010 when Hughes is off the books as well. The question really becomes are the bulls a championship level team by resigning Deng and Gordon, or are they better served into waiting it out until they can land a true superstar. Deng and Gordon are good players, but they are not superstars, so however much I would hate to lose them for nothing next year, I know that we can get better players in 2010. Look at this list:

Joe Johnson
Ray Allen
Ben Wallace
LeBron James (player option, likely)
Dirk Nowitzki (player option, unlikely)
Josh Howard (player option, likely)
Marcus Camby
Rip Hamilton
Stephen Jackson
Tracy McGrady
Shaquille O’Neal
Dwyane Wade (player option for 10/11, unlikely)
Michael Redd (player option for 10/11, likely)
Tyson Chandler (player option for 10/11 – 50/50)
Eddy Curry (player option for 10/11 – 50/50)
Amare Stoudemire (player option for 10/11, unlikely)
Brad Miller
Manu Ginobili
Chris Bosh (player option for 10/11, unlikely)

Then you have the expiring rookie contracts of Rudy Gay, Brandon Roy, LaMarcus Aldridge, and Adam Morrison the Bulls should at least be able to get a comparable player then. Deng and Gordon may be worth more, but let someone else pay them more, rather than hurt ourselves for the future.

People talk about how sports are a business. The business concepts at play here are leverage and risk. Paxson has played his cards patiently and is in position where all the leverage is on his side.

First, Paxson hasn’t played any cards. Gar Foreman and Jerry Reinsdorf are doing the negotiation.

This brings us back to the agent, Levien. His options for Luol are accept the bulls long term offer, sign a contract with a non nba team, retire from basketball, work out a sign and trade, or take the one year qualifying offer and become an unrestricted free agent. I don’t think he’s a smooth enough talker to get luol to take that josh Childress route, and sign and trade deals are complicated deals where the gm ultimately has the final say.

Have you met Lou’s agent? Give us the run-down. Surely there’s something more we need to know about his lack of loquaciousness. He must be pretty tonuge-tied if he can’t suggest a guy who grew up in Europe might consider going and playing in Europe for more money than he’s getting here.

Add that to the fact that Luol likes the team and wants to play in Chicago and Levien is left with only one card he can play.

Prove it.

Threaten to take the qualifying offer. Make it a little more pressing with an imaginary deadline; through out a couple teams who would pay top dollar next year and you have a carefully built bluff to try to steal some of paxon’s patiently built leverage.

Did John Paxson author the CBA’s restricted free agency provisions? Because aside from that bit of leverage, which simply comes from extending the QO, I don’t see any for the Bulls. So quit with the fawning nonsense.

Here’s the downside. Luol would make 4.5m next year. If during that year, or in the off-season while he’s representing England in the Olympics, he suffers a serious injury that 4.5 million could be all the money he makes playing basketball for the rest of his life.
.... ...
But let’s say Luol takes the injury risk on himself and signs a one year deal to become an unrestricted free agent. Next season the free agent class includes Shawn Marion, Mike Bibby, Wally Szczerbiak, Jason Kidd, Allen Iverson, Rasheed Wallace, Lamar Odom, Andre Miller, Grant Hill, Ron Artest, as unrestricted; Marvin Williams, Linas Kleiza, Jason Maxiell, Danny Granger, Hakim Warrick, Rashad Mccants, Martell Webster, Francisco Garcia, Jamario Moon, and Paul Milsap as restricted; and Kobe Bryant, Richard Hamilton, Al Harrington, Jamal Crawford, Quentin Richardson, Hedo Turkoglu, Jermaine Oneal, Carlos Boozer who have the option of becoming unrestricted free agents. Not to mention the other guys currently in the same restricted negotiation boat as Luol like Omeka Okafor, Josh Smith, Andre Iguodola, Monta Ellis, Sasha Vujacic, Andris Biedrins , Nenad Kristic, JR Smith, and Delonte West.

Did you type all those names?!?

Also not to mention the fact that teams might be a little tight with big long term deals considering the following year the free agent class could consist of Lebron James, Dwayne Wade, Chris Bosh, Amare Stoudemire, Ray Allen, Manu Ginobili, Joe Johnson, Tracy McGrady, Yao Ming, Steve Nash, Dirk Novitzki, Brandon Roy, Kenyon Martin, Stephen Jackson, TJ Ford, Richard Jefferson, Peja Stojakovic, Tyson Chandler, Andrea Bargnami, Lemarcus Aldridge and Michael Redd.

Don’t forget Aaron Gray!

If Luol thought this off-season was like a bad dream, next year could be a nightmare. With a less than stellar year statistically, playing with a new coach and rookie point guard, a strong year by anyone of Portland’s small forward group of Webster, Travis Outlaw, and rookie Nicolas Batum, Luol could be looking at taking a midlevel deal or re-signing with the bulls. Although at that point, they might rather be a player in the monster free agent market, where they’ll have some cap space to play with if they don’t take on multi year commitments with Deng and or Gordon this off-season. Again, I’m not saying that he will have a down year or that the depth of free agents will quickly dry up the cap space money, but it could, which makes it a risk. And again it is risk Luol will be holding all by himself with his one year deal.

Another insteresting business concept is expected value. What’s the actual risk this some of this stuff happens and screws him?

Well, there’s the risk he gets hurt. This risk has to be quite small. Hell, Elton Brand suffered an injury that, to my knowledge, no NBA player has successfully recovered from to play at a high level. So the odds are quite small. I think I’m being generous to the idea when I give it a 5% chance that he’s hurt in a way that destroys his career.

Likewise I think the chance of him playing himself out of a bigger deal is quite low. Most of that Yellow Pages you just typed in sucks. So put the chance of him taking the MLE (maybe $40M) next year at about 10%. Sure, it’s possible, but unlikely.

That leaves about an 85% chance Deng collects his $4.4M next season and then goes on to sign something like a 5yr $70M contract (that will start his salary at $12M… the Blazers or Heat could easily do that next year, for example).

So add up the expected values:
5% chance of $4.4M
+10% chance of $44.4M
+85% chance of $70M

Deng’s expected return is something on the order of $68M if he accepts the QO. Which would seem to be, ya know, about $10-20M than the Bulls have apparently offered him.

But lets say it does all go they way Levien lays it out. Luol makes his 4.5m this year, has a great year statistically playing with Derrick Rose who draws the defense’s attention to allow a cutter like Luol to move without the ball and get himself easy baskets. Let’s say Portland or Miami decide that Luol will be even better taking passes from Brandon Roy or Dwayne wade and he’s a better fit than the other free agents available. Let’s say they offer him 60 to 72 million for the maximum five years. And let’s say Luol accepts it and leaves Chicago with nothing for the 7th pick in the draft,

Actually, he could potentially get $13-$14M to start, which would result in a $75-$80M contract.

which it swindled from the phoenix suns in 2004. In this scenario, Luol makes an average of 12 to 14 million a year for 5 years. The bull’s most recent published offer was 57m for 5 years. Rumor has it they have shortened it to three or four years in the 9 to 11 million dollar range. So that means, best case scenario, year 1, Luol forges 4.5 to 6.5m for the chance of making 1 to 5 million more a year for two or three years, after which he would have been an unrestricted free agent anyway at the ripe age of 27 when he’ll likely scoff at 14m a year. And all he has to do to earn this impressive return on a 4.5 to 6.5m dollar investment, is take on injury risk, and hope that he puts up numbers good enough to outshine the rest of the free agent class?

Did you forget how you built up the risk of injury and poor performance when you started talking up a short-term deal?

Because if it’s 5% and 10% over one year, it’s bound to be higher over the course of two, three or four.

Which is why, of course, players would rather sign 5 year deals, in general, than 2-3 year deals.

The question then falls back to the probabilities. Again.

Is he better taking, say, a 100% chance of $30M from the Bulls for three years, or by taking:
7% chance of 4.4M
15% chance of, say $16.4M ($4.4M plus two years of MLE)
77% chance of $35.4M ($4.4M plus two years starting at $15M – you said he’d likely scoff at $14M).

That brings us to $30.38M, so if he’s purely rational, Deng still stands to gain by signing the QO vs. taking a short term deal with the Bulls, although that scenario does close the gap a lot.

Sure he takes on some injury risk by taking a three or four year deal instead of a five year deal, but the recent trend has been that players are willing to take that risk for the right to maintain flexibility, which is why the 2009 and 2010 free agent classes have so many stars that are unrestricted.

So he should just do the trendy thing, eh? :)

Paxson, in his first ever front office job, has done an amazing job of transforming a team that featured Marcus Fizer, Eddie Robinson, Jalen Rose, and Eddy Curry into a perennial playoff contender.

OMG!

But for some reason, fans seem like they would rather blame him because his first career top rated free agent acquisition\didn’t work out the way people hoped, or blast him for not making short sited trades, or doubt him for not giving the players as much money as they ask for.

Double OMG!

Personally, I would love to enter contract negotiations opposing those types of fans who have the give-him-what-he-wants and don’t-be-so-cheep attitudes. Maybe-and this will go against everything that our expert columnists like Marriotti and Sam Smith stand for-we need to give him some credit for building from a team of rejects and making the team relevant and realize that the man knows what he’s doing. Paxson is being patient to give him self the chance to make a move when Hughes $13.7m comes off the books in what might be the best free agent year in the history of basketball. The more he spends now on Luol and Ben now the less he has to spend to add a player to a team that includes derrick rose going into his third season along with a mix of smart veterans and developing young guys still playing on their rookie deals. Any trades he makes will keep that idea in mind. And unlike the last time he had cap room, in 2010, there will be quality players at all positions. I know patient and frugal isn’t as much fun, but it works in the nba and will continue to work.

But, if you still don’t agree with his patient strategy and like to see a team overpay for big names and lock itself into long term contracts and take massive risk and mortgage the future and live in the luxury tax, maybe your just a closet New York Knicks fan. An Isiah-Thomas-led New York Knicks fan. I hear he’s not that busy, maybe drop him a line and have him toss out some trade ideas. Just a thought.

The “don’t be that type of fan” appeal! Classic as limburger cheese on your head.

Is this a new way of “leaking” arguments to fans these days?

i dont get it. why all this hinrich and noc hate. both deng and gordon had bad years last year (just like hinrich and to some extent noc) and all we want to do is sign deng(who is not worth more than 5yrs 57) and gordon who i hope is gone soon. both these guys are not worth anything more than last years contract and they should just be allowed to leave if they want more. it is very easy to get a small forward replacement in the nba and we should not panick over that loss. i love deng and he is part of the core of kids i grew to love so much but he is not anything better than a third option and hence should only be payed accordingly. deng is injury prone gordon is just lucky he ended up on a rebuilding bulls team at the right time so that his only talent of shooting stood out more. but honestly he is not an iverson who can hold a franchise. i bet alot of good players end up getting cut because they just did not fit into the team that drafted them.

did pax overpay noc yes i agree a bit he did but i think noc will have a much better year and if deng leaves he will have an even better year. gordon i just dont like him on this team anymore. we end up depending on him alot and we live and die with his shots. i would rather sign a proven veteran.

Today’s Chicago Tribune has bulls business’s summary look prophetic.

The Bulls and Luol Deng’s representative continue to negotiate and occasionally make progress toward a long-term extension,

Deng also has said he wants to remain with the Bulls, and negotiations remain cordial and professional. Proposals have been exchanged, with one source saying three-, four- and six-year deals still are being discussed.

This sounds to me like Levien/Deng blinked and a deal likely will be done. Paxson/Reinsdorf may come across the winner on this one.