Anthony Johnson Trade Poll

[exodus]

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A S&T with Varejao is still very much an option because the Hawks will be one of the few teams in the league who can "absorb" what will most definitely be

BYC status for him.

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Huh? I thought BYC was for base year players and as far as i know he hasn't resigned.

[Lascar78]

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So again, let's hear your name of realistic FAs at the PG or C that we'll be getting this summer

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Mihm and Verajao are possibilities. They are both RFAs and both on teams that need veteran help at the point.

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My point exactly. If anything, having AJ increases our odds of getting any of those players because a SNT is way more likely than just signing them outright, and any team would take a cheap, expiring contract for a PG as a throw in.

[Lascar78]

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If you think there are any significant real impact free agents at the PG or the C that we could have and would have signed this summer with our capspace,

I dare you to name them

(bearing in mind that we can only take players for 4 years or less otherwise Belkin has to approve) .

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Still waiting Bdawg.

[bfwolf]

First of all, you make the assumption that our ownership situation will preclude us from making any long-term deals this Summer, which may or may not be true. This ownership struggle is not going to last forever ya know.

Second of all, you have it in your head that Anthony Johnson is tradable anytime we want, which isn't true. He's trash and other teams are not going to want to pick up our trash, even if he only has one more year left on his contract. Think we can deal Lo Wright right now? It's not just salary caps that matter. Teams also have a bottom line to manage to. In the end, they are businesses. Teams that are looking to trade a top-level player in an effort to get younger are not going to want to pick up an additional $3MM liability to their bottom line just to make the trade work. So now if we want to go after somebody like Gasol, we not only have to offer young players the Grizzlies WANT, we've also got to throw in trash like AJ to get us under the cap, and that makes it that much harder for us to make that trade.

Third of all, Anthony Johnson does NOTHING for this team. WE ARE NOT GOING TO MAKE THE PLAYOFFS THIS YEAR. This is as close to a fact as you can get in this world. And he's the 3rd best PG we have on the team anyway.

We just made a trade that doesn't make us any better, eats up cap space, and gives up a pick which at least had an outside shot of acquiring somebody useful.

I wouldn't have taken AJ for FREE. If we were in a free agent situation, and somebody said "Hey, you can sign Anthony Johnson to a 1 year contract for $2.6MM," I would have said thanks but no thanks. The fact that we gave up a 2nd round pick is just adding insult to injury.

[Lascar78]

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If you think there are any significant real impact free agents at the PG or the C that we could have and would have signed this summer with our capspace,

I dare you to name them

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[bfwolf]

You are a nutjob. I'm not going to go through the list of every PG and C that is a free agent at the end of the year. I'm quite certain there will be several who are better than Anthony frickin Johnson.

But it's entirely beside the point.

WE ARE NOT A MEANINGFULLY BETTER TEAM. WE HAVE NO CHANCE TO MAKE THE PLAYOFFS. Why make a quick fix move for a team that doesn't need a quick fix?

What if we want to really make a run at Gasol? Before, we could've offered Childress, Zaza, and a 1st for Gasol. That no longer works under the cap. We'd have to throw in trash like AJ to make the trade work. And why would Memphis want to pick up that kind of trash?

The one cardinal rule for a young, crappy team like the Hawks is preserve your cap space for signing/trading for truly meaningful players. We just broke the cardinal rule.

[Lascar78]

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You are a nutjob. I'm not going to go through the list of every PG and C that is a free agent at the end of the year. I'm quite certain there will be several who are better than Anthony frickin Johnson.

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Right because you'd rather pop off as if this one-offseason contract is going to cost us big players when the reality is it is not. The full list of available PGs (UFAs) this summer as far as I can tell is:

Steve Blake

Chauncey Billups (ETO)

Darrell Armstrong

Smush Parker

Chucky Atkins

Earl Boykins

Mo Williams

Jannero Pargo

Keyon Dooling

Mike Bibby

Jason Hart

Jacque Vaughn

Mike Wilks

We're not going to go after Billups or Bibby. Other than that, there are a bunch of scrubs, or marginal players that are only a little better than AJ that you would end up having to overpay by a ton to get here to atlanta and likely would prefer to go elsewhere. It's easy to say that we'd go get good point guards. It took BK 4 years to get speedy claxton at 25 mil, because he was worried about still having nobody at the position. If we didn't have AJ and were looking for a point, odds are we'd either end up with a bum like Vaughn or Wilks, unless we wanted to give a speedy claxton like deal to players like Blake or Smush, which I doubt.

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But it's entirely beside the point.

WE ARE NOT A MEANINGFULLY BETTER TEAM. WE HAVE NO CHANCE TO MAKE THE PLAYOFFS. Why make a quick fix move for a team that doesn't need a quick fix?

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No no no. Don't change your point now. Your point was:

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Walter, many people

(Lascar included) are incapable of understanding the impact of salaries on a team.

These are the same people who call on the Braves to re-sign Andruw Jones to a $20MM/year contract even when the team's total budget is $80MM. They say "Andruw is great, why would we ever let him go?" When the obvious answer to anybody who can think critically is:

Because you can do a lot of other things with that money.

In this case, Lascar is saying that Anthony Johnson is likely to play better than a high 2nd round pick (which is hugely debatable), but what

he DOESN'T take into account is that a 2nd round pick is going to make about $700M vs. the $2.5MM for AJ. As you pointed out, it just puts us further away from being able to get somebody impactful.

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So don't go changing your point now from "this trade hurts us a lot" to "this trade doesn't really help."

But to answer your question, the obvious reason is that both of our PGs have been crippled by injuries and we are an NBA team trying to compete. When you can help your team out while hardly giving anything up, it helps.

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What if we want to really make a run at Gasol? Before, we could've offered Childress, Zaza, and a 1st for Gasol. That no longer works under the cap. We'd have to throw in trash like AJ to make the trade work. And why would Memphis want to pick up that kind of trash?

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First of all, we already had a chance, and BK and/or Memphis didn't go for it. Secondly, the capspace given up by signing AJ is easily overcome by including AJ or Lue, which any team would be glad to take as cheap veteran PGs with expiring contracts. Hell that particular trade works by just adding Salim if we want to. Here are some examples of salaries on Memphis' roster next year:

Mike Miller $8,250,000

Brian Cardinal $5,850,000

Stromile Swift $5,800,000

Damon Stoudamire $4,350,000

But suddenly they're going to freak out for a veteran PG like Lue or AJ at 2.5 for 1 year that they could easily trade at the deadline if he's not working out? Please. In the realm of bloated NBA contract AJ's deal is about as good as it gets for a veteran PG: cheap and expiring. Just because you say he's trash doesn't make him so. He's an ok backup veteran PG with a small expiring contract. That's easy to move.

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The one cardinal rule for a young, crappy team like the Hawks is preserve your cap space for signing/trading for truly meaningful players. We just broke the cardinal rule.

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That only applies until the cap catches up with you. We are already getting to that point and are about to have to re-sign our players and will be going over the cap soon enough. Meanwhile this summer there are very few FA's that we could actually go after. Any progress we make is likely to be accomplished through trade, and guys like AJ with expiring deals are great throw ins for trades to even out the salaries and number of players traded.

The real cardinal is not to give bad deals. You can take on as big a deal as you want if it's fair value for the player, because that ensures that he can be traded for a better fit if necessary. So far our only "bad" contract is Speedy, with a little bloated contract for Lorenzen. We're well ahead of the curve in this area.

[bfwolf]

I apologize for saying you don't understand the impact of salaries. You do. You're still wrong about the AJ trade, though, because 2 of your assumptions are wrong:

1) That we're an NBA team trying to compete, and Anthony Johnson makes us better. You still have dreams of making the playoffs this year. That's a mistake. We are not going to make the playoffs. Nor does Anthony Johnson make us any better.

2) That Anthony Johnson is a good value at his salary and is easily movable. Anthony Johnson is a 33 year old PG with a PER of under 10 this year. Steve Nash aside, most PGs don't get better into their 30s. They dramatically fall off in production. AJ is pretty much done. He is, at this point, a 3rd string PG. Those can be had for under $1MM. We will have trouble moving him if we want to, especially when you consider how hard it is to make ANY deals in the NBA (look how few deals went down at the trading deadline).

Then when you throw on top of that the high 2nd round pick we are giving up in a deep draft, I really don't like this trade. Is it devastating? Of course not, it involves a 2nd round pick and an under $3MM expiring contract. In the grand scheme of things, it's small potatoes. But it's still bad.

Now, if Anthony Johnson goes on a tear and the Hawks make the playoffs, you can come back here and call me out and I'll eat my crow.

[drzachary]

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2 of your assumptions are wrong:

1) That we're an NBA team trying to compete, and Anthony Johnson makes us better.

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Why are those assumptions wrong? We have depth problems at PG, and clearly the team is trying to compete.

[bfwolf]

I don't see how AJ improves our PG issues. He's worse than Lue. He's at best as good as Claxton. He's negligibly better than Ivey. Hell, I prefer Childress at PG to AJ. Seems to me that the guys he will take minutes from are pretty much as good as he is. So I don't see how this is going to get even a single more win for the Hawks.

And even under the dubious assumption that AJ gets another win for us this season: so what? That's not going to be the difference between us making the playoffs and not making the playoffs.

[Lascar78]

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I apologize for saying you don't understand the impact of salaries. You do.

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Fair enough.

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1) That we're an NBA team trying to compete, and Anthony Johnson makes us better. You still have dreams of making the playoffs this year. That's a mistake.

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Look, when you're a professional team, you're basically always doing one of two things: either trying to compete, or you're trying to tank. Either you're trying to win, or you're trying to lose. We're clearly not trying to lose, so where does that leave us? It looked to me like we were trying to compete on the floor last night.

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We are not going to make the playoffs.

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I don't think we're going to either, but we're trying to. Every team but maybe 2-3 are trying to win, and only 16 get into the playoffs. If you're trying to win, you make moves in that direction, regardless of whether it works or not. We weren't going to make the playoffs the year we got Joe either, but we still got him because the goal was to work towards winning. Not that AJ is 1/1000th as talented as JJ but you get the point.

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Nor does Anthony Johnson make us any better.

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Well that's debatable. He's no star for sure, but he's a better PG that Royal Ivey or Josh Childress, which means he will help in my opinion. He can play D and score a little, and allow Lue and Speedy to rest as necessary. No one is claiming that he makes us way better. Just that he might help out a little given our PG injuries.

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2) That Anthony Johnson is a good value at his salary and is easily movable. Anthony Johnson is a 33 year old PG with a PER of under 10 this year. Steve Nash aside, most PGs don't get better into their 30s. They dramatically fall off in production... We will have trouble moving him if we want to, especially when you consider how hard it is to make ANY deals in the NBA (look how few deals went down at the trading deadline).

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First of all he's only 32, and this contract only goes through next year. Teams who will take him back won't look at him as an investment guy that they can re-sign to a 5 year Nash-like deal. He'll be a guy who can help for the season for pretty cheap, and then comes off the books. Teams won't be vying for him, but he's no deal breaker, and teams wouldn't think twice about taking him on as a throw in in a bigger deal. Also this year was atypical for some reason. Most years there are a ton of deadline deals, many of which involve a possible contender trying to get a veteran big man or PG to provide some depth, preferably with expiring contracts that can be off the books by the offseason. He fits the mold.

Hell Miami tried to get him this year and we beat them to it. That's exactly the kind of team we could easily send him to next year.

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Then when you throw on top of that the high 2nd round pick we are giving up in a deep draft, I really don't like this trade.

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The thing is we only have 15 roster spots. Este is already not playing, Solomon is not playing, Slava is not playing, Ivey is barely playing. We'll be signing a first rounder too. You can't expect to add a 1st and 2nd rounder every year and keep them. It seems like we got pretty lucky with Solomon last year, but it seems extremely unlikely that the pick would help as much as AJ next year, and equally unlikely that he would develop into a solid player that still plays here 2-3 years down the line. Only teams like us worry about 2nd rounders. Unless they're top 2-3, 2nd rounders are basically freebies you can gamble on but should basically expect no return on. They are basically the smallest thing you can possibly give up in a trade.

Also while this is one of the most talented drafts ever (potentially) at the top, I'm not so sure that it's really as deep as many people think.

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Is it devastating? Of course not, it involves a 2nd round pick and an under $3MM expiring contract. In the grand scheme of things, it's small potatoes. But it's still bad.

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I can respect that opinion. But if you look at the threads that were made, there are plenty of people acting as if it is devastating.