My contract source isn’t within the Bulls organization, I have access to all contract information.

Secondly, I never said Gordon can’t stand Rose, that’s an order of magnitude worse than what I said. I said Gordon wanted nothing to do with him while Kirk was trying to help Rose. This was in reference to developing Rose’s game, not in reference to any kind of personal hatred. I even pointed it out that this may have been directly related to his status as a one year player who didn’t plan on coming back and had his own axe to grind against the team. Ie, Gordon was just trying to do his job and get off the team, which he did his job (quite well) and then left.

I was told Kirk Hinrich was going to be traded, it didn’t happen yet, and I may get burned on that one. On the other hand, his name is bandied about in Boozer rumors nearly every day, so I very well may not get burned on it. I view a lot of the information I get with skepticism myself, but I still write about it, because I figure people are interested.

As it turns out, $11.6M/yr and $10M next year is the upper bound we have to consider.

And yes, if it’s a question of paying Gordon $10M next season and $10.8M the year after, I’m down with that. Especially if the alternative is paying Kirk $9.5M and $9M.

Under all but the most drastic and absolute worst case salary cap scenarios, it that amount won’t matter. If we have to trade off Taj Gibson to make up the difference, so the F what.

Beyond that, I think your “process” for thinking it out – by comparing his contract to Deng, Nocioni, and Hinrich is dead wrong. What makes a contract good or bad?

• Whether he’s moveable down the road? You’re throwing out the “if his value goes down” or “if he gets hurt” lines, but that’s be true when anyone signs a big deal. It doesn’t matter much whether he signs for $50M or $60M… if he gets majorly hurt, we’d be majorly screwed. But really, the weakest part of that argument is that, unlike those other players, Gordon has a better demonstrated record of health and had no obvious challenger for minutes. Ultimately you seem to be arguing that the Bulls should just never give out long term deals. In fairness, this might well be how the Bulls think as well.
• I don’t really think Hinrich is a “bad” contract. My impression is that he’s very movable but the Bulls prefer to pay him to be a 25mpg backup. His contract is certainly bad in that context, but in the context of where he could be playing (starting PG for a team like Portland, Houston, etc) it’s not so bad.
• Nocioni was older and had pretty obviously had his role superceded when he signed that contract. He was vastly overpaid from the moment he signed it because he was obviously going to play a lesser role.
• Deng is maybe the example of not overpaying, but in practice, the Bulls freaking signed him up to a $72M uninsured contract. To suddenly declaim signing a guy who’s hardly missed a game after signing up a guy the league wouldn’t even fully insure is pretty weak.

Even then, what makes Deng hard to trade (if he really is) is that risk of injury. My sense is that he’s considered otherwise valuable, young, and perhaps redeemable from the generally shit coaching he’s received.

Which all sort of gets us to the point. The talk about numbers and injury potential and all that is clarifying, because it demonstrates exactly the sort of things people get hung up on when they end up making stupid decisions. I mean, this is pretty much the sort of stuff you here coming from the Bulls themselves:

• Oh no! We can’t have to manage the cap. Gordon at $9.5M would be cool, but at $10M would be way too much! In the meantime, we’re paying the guy who backed him up (and who will continue, apparently, to back up his replacement) just as much.

• Oh no! Those long term contracts are bad news. Huge injury risk there! Just look at our past bad contracts, like Luol Deng. I mean hell, that guy’s contract isn’t even insured! Oh wait, we gave him that contract? Hrmph… we won’t make the same mistake twice. By the way, did I mention that Luol is working out 3x a day and will be back and better than ever?!

• Never mind, forget all that! At then end of the day, we just don’t like the quiet guy who we probably would have been suspicious of had he frequently talked to Rose too much after we stiffed him in contract negotiations last year. I mean, he didn’t give enough pointers to the rookie, while the other guy did. That makes Gordon a much worse player to keep, even though, when push came to shove, we actually played him quite a bit more than we played the guy we’d need to get rid of. But really, we only played him that much because we were trying to sneak into the playoffs, and we thought it might matter. In reality, Kirk’s our guy, and we know he won’t put on that much of a sad clown face even though he knows he’s being wasted sitting on the bench behind Derrick Rose.

Sorry, but this is all so convoluted. Good teams have a consistent vision for what they’re trying to do. Play your best players and keep your best players. The Bulls showed who the best player was when they were busting their ass to make the playoffs and get those extra revenues.

Never mind how badly they fucked up the prior summer (though they did), but then when it came time to pay, they hemmed, hawed, bullshitted, and did everything they could do to pretend it was the opposite. How much is too much? Too much would have been so much that it totally screws the ability to swing a deal next summer, even though the Bulls are probably not really interested in paying someone too much then anyway. But anyway, Gordon didn’t get that much this summer, and he wouldn’t have gotten that much last summer either.

So it’s pretty irrelevant. What is relevant is bad decision making and bad evaluation of talent.

If you are correct and the Bulls saw it as a Gordon vs. Hinrich choice, and decided Hinrich at $9.5M was better than Gordon at $10M (despite the fact they actually played Gordon more!), then that was a poor judgement on the Bulls part.
If the Bulls think having Hinrich as an expensive backup, wasting away his best years behind Rose, is an effective use of their asset, that’s bad evaluation of talent.
If the Bulls thought pulling an offer instead of signing up Gordon for actually less than Hinrich last year was a smart move, it was a bad evaluation of talent.
And (bonus) if the Bulls really think Taj Gibson was the right pick, they made a crummy evaluation. And Jannero Pargo to boot.

In the end, it’s all about talent, and everything else is pretty much window dressing. The Bulls picked a similarly priced lesser talent over a greater one.