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-

NBA Offseason Review Part 1: Lakers Show Uneven Direction

This is part one of a six part series reviewing the NBA offseason, taking an individual look at all the title contenders (Lakers, Magic, Spurs, Celtic and Cavaliers) and then the rest of the league as a whole. Because they won the championship, we start with the Los Angeles Lakers.

All the talk surrounding the Los Angeles Lakers following their championship season was whether they could keep two important cogs to their championship formula: free agents Trevor Ariza and Lamar Odom.

What was most surprising is not that they chose to only keep one, but who they chose to keep and who they got to replace the departing. They chose to keep Lamar Odom instead of Ariza (who departed to Houston) and replace Ariza with the colorful Ron Artest (departing Houston).

Here’s where the decision-making looks to be uneven. If you want to choose Lamar Odom over Ariza, I get it. The financials of today’s NBA, especially with the salary cap shrinking like David Ortiz’s power numbers, just make it really difficult to keep all your guys and take a huge luxury tax hit. On the court, though I have never been the biggest of Odom fans, his length and comparative athleticism paired with Pau Gasol on the frontline, not to forget the potential frontline of Odom, Gasol and Andrew Bynum is scary to say the least. It’s very difficult to defend, especially with the offensive polish Gasol and Odom both have. They can create their own shot and be playmakers for others. And though Odom is six years older than Ariza, he was always the barometer of whether the Lakers would win or not. His ability to dominate the glass at times, particularly at the offensive end and the three point shot he discovered at some point in the playoffs really helped to drive the Lakers to the title. And while he isn’t as athletic as Ariza, play as good defense or have the signature playoff moments that Ariza did (though I still and will always blame George Karl for this. How can you, in the Western Conference Finals, be beat by two of the simplest plays in basketball by not having an adequate inbounds play and having Kenyon Martin and Anthony Carter pass it in, especially when you have a good passer and true playmaker in Chauncey Billups. There was plenty of time on the clock, you didn’t need to pass it in and have Chauncey shoot it, so he could have easily passed it in and got it back and run a play. Absolutely bewildering but I digress.), his ability to play and defend multiple positions make his upside to the Lakers winning another championship in the near future more likely. When he’s on, his impact on the game is more than Ariza’s probably could be.

Where it gets confusing is why they would trade Trevor Ariza, who is on the upswing of his career for Ron Artest, who is on the downswing. Contrary to popular belief, Artest is not the defensive player he once was. He’s lost a lot of athleticism and cannot stay in front of anyone with any kind of quickness. He can body up bigger, slower guys like Paul Pierce but other than that, he will struggle. When the Rockets played the Lakers in the Western Semis last year, Shane Battier did the best job anyone has done on Kobe. Kobe was forced to take contested jumper after contested jumper and while he is Kobe, and going to make that more often than a Dwight Howard free-throw, it is all you can ask him to do. When Battier needed a break, Artest would take over and Kobe would go to the rim over and over and over again. Meanwhile, Ariza was defending dynamic scorers like Carmelo and if you watched game 5 and 6 of the Nuggets-Lakers series, you would see that he does that pretty well.

Offensively though is where the trade loses me. In the playoffs last year, Ariza developed into tremendous 3-point shooter, where he shot 47% from three. In the playoffs last year, Artest developed into the ultimate me-first guy, Houston’s version of Monta Ellis, becoming a virtual black hole on offense: if the ball touched his hand, it was never going to be seen again. He jacked up bad shot after bad shot, fading from three, turning it over, anything he could to be a detriment to his team. In game 7, 80% of the time he was the worst player on the floor, disrupting any kind of flow on offense, floating to the three-point line at every opportunity and refusing to get down low and post up Luke Walton (why did I just describe Rasheed Wallace circa 2007). Not only that, I don’t know how he’ll fit into a supplementary role. Kobe, Gasol, Odom and maybe Bynum are all guys who will get offense before him. That’s never happened to him. How will he react to almost never having plays run for him? Ariza was fine with this because he never needed to dominate the ball to be effective on offense. You could swing it to him off a Gasol double team and he could drain the angle three with lethal effectiveness. And with his athleticism, he could finish a fast break than Artest can at his stage of his career.

Then there’s that knucklehead factor that just can’t be ignored. Though I know Kobe and Phil Jackson is a strong pair, Artest just seems like a different breed of human. He may be a good teammate and good guy to be around, I don’t know because I’ve never been around, but it seems like time and again, he just does crazy stuff. Just all around, there’s a lot of risk and not a lot of reward for the same money that they could have gotten Ariza for.

Other than that, it was a pretty quiet offseason for the Lakers. They kept Shannon Brown, which is a good move. He’s athletic, has developed a nice jumper and defends well (now if they could only play him instead of Sasha Vujacic who has been mistake prone and ineffective since this). I would have liked to see them try to get a point guard of the future because even though Derek Fisher made the two biggest shots of the playoffs, there were many points in the playoffs where he didn’t look like he should be a starting point guard for much longer. They do have Jordan Farmar and I like him as a player but I don’t know if you can win a championship with him or not. But considering point guards weren’t out there to be had (you can’t win a championship with Ramon Sessions) there’s no need to bash them there.

With the moves that they made, the Lakers didn’t seem to have a real direction. While Odom keeps them in that top tier because the potential impact he can have on games, trading Ariza for Artest brings them back to the pack a little bit, especially considering some of the moves other teams made.

Grade: C+

Eagles Make Right Decision on Two Fronts

It has been a long, turbulent road for Michael Vick’s NFL career. We last saw him in an NFL uniform New Year’s Eve 2006 in Philadelphia, playing (and losing) to the Eagles at Lincoln Financial Field. And while he didn’t have his best game ever that winter evening (8-14, 81 yards, 1 TD, 3 carries, 17 yards in the 24-17 loss) apparently, Andy Reid and the Eagles saw something that they liked.

With the announcement midway through the second quarter during Thursday's preseason opener that the Philadelphia Eagles had signed Michael Vick to a one year deal with an option for a second season, a long, ferocious circle had finally been completed. Michael Vick would finally be back to doing what he should be doing.

But before we can delve into the football implications, the mostly negative reaction by Philadelphia fans must be addressed. Flipping through the local news stations Thursday night and watching them get the average fan reaction as they walked out of Lincoln Financial Field, I can't say I was too surprised by the average fan reaction. One woman was near tears as she described her love for dogs and her utter disappointment in her Philadelphia Eagles that she might give up season tickets (unlikely considering it’s easier to get yellow cake uranium than Eagles season tickets). Another man was so angry about the signing, he would have been better suited yelling at his local congressman about health care reform (and let’s not forget the classy headline the Daily News had Friday).

That leaves us in the very rare situation where someone’s fame has completely worked against him. His public stature has put a face, his, on something faceless, something that was never at the forefront of many minds outside of those fervently involved with animal rights. Therefore, he has little chance of regaining a lot of peoples trust because they can’t forgive him, no matter what he does. He has created an undeniable link between Mike Vick and dog drowning and those are the moments that will stand out in a lot of fans minds. That is what has made it so difficult for Vick as opposed to other crimes. Murder doesn’t shock us this much. Drunk driving obviously doesn’t shock us as much considering we all do it at least once (I’m looking at you Bronson Arroyo). Individuals receiving insider tips to beat the stock market, bending the rules at the expense of the average American, we as a people barely blink an eye (cough Martha Stewart). So when Martha gets her daytime talk show back on and it’s like she was never in jail. I guess it’s the benefits of following Enron.

So Vick gets the distinguished honor of facing all of the negative fervor because he is the only guy you and I know who’s been involved in dogfighting. And that is not fair. Vick should not have his second chance rejected because of the novelty that is a dogfighting offender. No person deserves to have their entire life marginalized through a single period of time where they were not making their best decisions. He hasn’t been a guy who has time and again gotten into trouble with a girlfriend or hung out with “Pacman” Jones at the strip club. He’s not even like Christopher Columbus, who is celebrated with his own day by the way for "discovering" a land that already existed with inhabitants, despite the fact he forced labor and intentionally gave smallpox to those inhabitants of the New World. I just think we should be fair here.

That’s not saying that Vick should just be given free reign or anything remotely like that. Accountability needs to be a major aspect of this. He’s got a tremendous opportunity and if he continues to do the things that he has been going since May, namely listening to the Humane Society and Tony Dungy, he deserves the second chance. And I’m perfectly ok with the Eagles giving him one.

Now, to the football side of things, where it becomes, at least to me, more interesting than some second baseman’s wife not endorsing the signing.

First, Andy Reid said that they didn’t work out Vick which is interesting to me. I would think that you would work the guy out first but that’s neither here nor there. So just for a point of reference, let’s say he’s 70% of what he was in 2006. The amount of possibilities for things to do on offense could be mindboggling.

70% of 2006 Michael Vick is still faster, quicker, more agile that 97% of NFL players. Consider putting Vick and McNabb in the backfield at the same time and all the trick plays you could run. The kinds of things Kordell Stewart did as the original slash or Antwaan Randal-El did as the second slash in Pittsburgh are all things Vick can do, only better.

He can give you a little bit of slot receiver, maybe some tailback and the overused (but mandatory for anything concerning Vick) excuse of the Wildcat. But what would make me most excited would be McNabb in the shotgun, flanked with Vick and Brian Westbrook on each side with Desean Jackson lined up on the outside. Can you spell speed?

But even in my excitement there is cause for concern because he was in jail for almost two years (insert jail soap joke here) and since Reid hasn’t worked him out, I can’t say that Reid worked him out so he’s got to have something. It’s a real possibility that he comes back average and makes minimal to no impact considering he’s not going to take meaningful snaps at quarterback.

But, that’s ok. It’s the kind of calculated risk that won’t cost much if it fails but could make a magnificent impact if it succeeds. Considering what else this move is doing (someone’s getting a second chance at life), I’d call it a win-win.