Monday, August 17, 2009

NBA Offseason Review Part 2: Orlando Spends Away Their Advantage

This is part two of a six part series reviewing the NBA offseason, taking an individual look at all the title contenders (Lakers, Magic, Cavaliers, Celtics and Spurs) and then the rest of the league as a whole. The first part took a look at the NBA champion Lakers. Today, the focus is on NBA runner-up, the Orlando Magic.

Orlando really traversed the line of brilliant and idiotic this offseason. One of their moves, their trade for Vince Carter, really screamed we are for real. It looked as if they wanted to win it immediately and they were willing to pay a good price (up and coming 2-guard Courtney Lee) for it. But then GM Otis Smith went into spend money with no reason mode, kind of like Joe Dumars tried to do this year (more on this later in the week), inking Marcin Gortat and Brandon Bass at inflated values, while letting Hedo Turkoglu walk away to Toronto.

Let’s start with the addition of Vince Carter. Vince Carter is not the same guy he was 4 years ago. That said, he still possesses top-flight athleticism and has a knack for putting the ball in the basket. An area where Orlando was exploited last year was that a lot of their guys are most effective as spot up jump shooters (Lee, Mickael Pietrus, Rashard Lewis on most nights) and they needed a guy like Turkoglu or Jameer Nelson (when healthy) to set them up in their preferred spots. A guy like Vince can create his own offense, especially when he’s got the mindset of getting to the basket and not falling in love with the jump shot. Defensively, he’s not the player that Courtney Lee was for Orlando, but it’s possible that with his height and length that they may not lose much on that front (after all, Paul Pierce became a very good defensive player with the Celtics once he stopped having to carry the weight of the offense on his back). Where they really lose in getting Carter and losing Turkoglu is the playmaking ability that Turkoglu brought. In today’s NBA, you cannot have enough guys who can make plays for themselves and others. Carter is not a guy who can create offense for other guys. He mostly creates offense for himself, which is not a problem if they kept Turkoglu, but they didn’t. That leaves them with only one playmaker (Nelson) which isn’t a formula for championships.

Now if they had kept Turkoglu, we would be having a different discussion. A starting five with Nelson, Carter, Turkoglu, Lewis and Dwight Howard with Pietrus off the bench would be the most potent offense in the league because with Carter, their offense would be less reliant on the jump shot. But instead of keeping Turkoglu at $50 million for five years, they combined for $52 million for Brandon Bass ($18 million over four years) and Marcin Gortat ($34 million over five years). Now, choosing to let go of Turkoglu is not necessarily a bad move in itself. At points in the playoffs, especially in the finals, he had a tendency to get lost in the shuffle or come up small in the big moment (like the 3 missed free throws at the tail end of the decisive game four of the finals). Especially with him getting up in age, if they didn’t want to make a five year commitment to a guy who is only going to get worse, that’s fine. Or, if they had made the decision that they just didn’t have the money within the budget to go another $50 million, given the current economic climate, that also would have been fine. But to go out and sign $52 million in backups, especially Gortat makes zero sense. Bringing in Brandon Bass to have another power forward was reasonable because they had traded Tony Battie in the Carter deal. Bass is a productive player who can rebound a little bit and score given some opportunities. An off-season that stops there is productive and keeps Orlando within the NBA’s elite with a legit chance at a championship. But then to go out and match Gortat’s offer sheet to play maybe 15 minutes a game is illogical. You already have Dwight Howard; your fifth highest paid player should not be his backup. If you’re going to run up that much payroll on guys who aren’t going to impact the game that much, you might as well sign Turkoglu and give yourself a solid two year window as a prohibitive favorite for the title.

Instead, they make themselves a worse basketball team than they were last year because now they will be forced to play more conventional. They no longer can illuminate the mismatches a guy like Lewis creates because he’s probably going to play small forward. They could start Pietrus at the 3 and destroy their firepower off the bench and considering today’s NBA (Jason Terry, Manu Ginobili when healthy, Lamar Odom) you got to have firepower off the bench. So their left losing their advantage that really won them the Eastern Conference (Cleveland’s inability to guard an athletic, jump shooting power forward) and didn’t get any better because of it. And they bloated their payroll.

Considering the position that the Magic left themselves in at the end of last season, they looked to be a scoring shooting guard away from being champions. But instead, they unwisely spent their money on low impact guys and let a potential championship get away in the process.

Grade: C-

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