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Wednesday, March 28, 2007
How much do you love your own?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
How much do you love your own?
It’s probably the greatest dilemma facing any NBA team, having to decide which of your young players is a part of your future (and which ones are not)?
That issue was at the heart of the story about Josh Smith that hit the paper and ajc.com today. How much do you pay to keep your own assets? And how do you decide which ones to keep?
The Hawks will have some tough choices to make over the next three years. Smith and Josh Childress are eligible for extensions this summer. Marvin Williams is eligible next summer. Conventional wisdom says you can’t keep them all. Not with Joe Johnson eating up minutes at the same positions as at least two of those guys.
You’d you have to part with one of them knowing full well that they could blossom into the player you imagined elsewhere. But when you have other needs that need to be addressed (young PG and a quality big man), needs that you might not be able to address through the draft or free agency, then you have to trade away someone valuable to get someone valuable in return. (The risk you run in building a team through the draft is that these young talents you draft and cultivate could see their best basketball elsewhere, strictly for financial reasons. And feel free to use Joe Johnson’s departure from Phoenix as Exhibit A.)
I’ve haggled over this with people I respect(it’s all hypothetical anyway since someone else is going to make the call) and we never seem to agree on who stays and who goes. Were it me making the call, I’d be partial to all of these young guys for different reasons.
Smith can do things the other two (and just about anybody else his size in the league) cannot do. He’s a physical freak. He’s also a hometown kid and is one of the most exciting players in the league with a legitimate chance to be an All-Star.
Childress is the blue-collar guy who does all those little things that don’t show up on the stat sheet. And he’s the one guy who you already know can fit into whatever system you play and be effective as a role player or starter.
Williams is the best pure shooter of the bunch and at 20 and a year behind the other two, has more room to grow. He could wind up being the best player of the bunch. Right now you just don’t know because he’s so young and so inexperienced.
You can’t afford to pay all of them what the market will demand (and believe me when I say that there is a market demand for all three of these guys). So you’ll almost be forced to deal one of them so you don’t have all of your available salary tied up in the same positions.
Play GM for a minute (we all do it everyday anyway). Who stays and who goes (and remember that your payroll goes through the roof the minute you start handing out extensions)? Feel free to explain your thinking. We’ve got all the room in the world to accommodate you.
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