It's tough seeing a team that made such strides over the past 2 years go down the toilet so quickly.
The blame, in my opinion, lies 100% on the front office. Trading for Okafor was just awful. It scrambled up their whole offense. They are well over the luxury tax and are overpaying for guys like Peja (14million), Okafor (10 million), Mo Peterson (6 million) and Darius Songaila (4.5million). They signed james posey for 6 million thinking it would put them over the top but it only put them over the luxury tax.
They are just a poorly structured basketball team and like i said, the blame is on the front office. Byron Scott could only do so much, and it seems as if they are using him as a scapegoat. Shame on them.
Terrible front office, they were doomed before then, too.
Last game of 05/06:
Marc Jackson
Des Mason
PJ Brown
Rasual Butler
Chris Paul
Moochie Norris
Brandon Bass
Marcus Fizer
Linton Johnson
David West
Arvydas Macijauskas
JR Smith
Kirk Snyder
Speedy Claxton
Aaron Williams
They had 3 promising youngsters (Paul, West, Smith) and a diamond in the rough type (Bass). They had cap room. And they had a major trade chip with PJ Brown.
They also had a coach (Byron Scott) with a questionable-at-best reputation for developing youth and a well-deserved reputation for playing favorites and weird doghouse rules (i.e. the Smith situation).
Despite Paul being cost-controlled for 3 more years with no leverage, they decide to go all in in a lousy 2006 free agency, way overpaying for Peja. They then used the trade chip in Chandler, whom Chicago was dying to give away. Smith, by the way, was included in the deal for chandler.
OF course they could have been patient. The very next free agency included Rashard Lewis, Vince Carter, Mo Williams, and Gerald Wallace. All better options than Peja for similar money. Had they saved PJ and let him expire, they possibly could have gotten two of those players and kept JR smith. So they could have had something like CP, JR, Wallace, Rashard, and had David West as a trade chip, instead of getting rid of a deep scoring threat and saddling themselves with terrible deals killing their flexibility.
Let's not mention the fact that, even after the Peja/Chandler deals, they took draft dud Cedric Simmons and one-year-wonder Hilton Armstrong (maybe we hadn't heard of him for his first three years at UCONN for a reason?) ahead of Thabo Sefalosha and Ronnie Brewer (not that the Hornets lack wing defense or anything, right?) and Josh Boone (only Armstrong's better teammate at UCONN and an infinitely more useful NBA player). Not to mention several others, but those ones were obvious at the time.
