Outside of Carl Landry, who do people propose we replace him with? That, to me, is the question. If it's an upgrade, beautiful. However, to get rid of a player just for the sake of getting rid of him isn't always a good idea. Again, see, e.g., Tony Allen.
So we should give him a long term deal knowing he wants to start and take a ton of shots, and knowing it will hurt our cap space in 2012, just because there is no one better that we can get? I am also offended at his lack of effort to stay in NBA shape at his age in a contract year.
As we (should have) all learned as fans from the Tony Allen situation, just because we personally don't like a player doesn't mean he can't help our team.
I tend to agree with Who: there are only a small handful of guys on the market who can offer as much as Baby. If our goal is to compete next year, it makes sense to attempt to sign him to a reasonable deal if we can't get one of the upgrades.
Much like with when we signed JO last year, I think some are a bit too focused on the playoffs, and are forgetting what the player (in this case, BBD) contributed during the season.
I think he effectively played himself out of a big contract in the playoffs, so he may be available for cheap. However, if he suffers from the TA syndrome, he may sign elsewhere regardless.
To me it is definitely ll about the money and I agree that he probably lost a lot of value during the playoffs (and even the last couple months of the season).
If he gets big money and years somewhere of course we shouldn't match but at this point I expect him to get very reasonable offers and I think Baby could certainly be had at good value.
It's the same situation with TA but the opposite in a way. TA was pretty terrible for couple years and then did ok during his final season here and very well during the playoffs. After his playoff run I thought there was a good chance of teams over paying for him but I'm sure teams looked at the whole history of TA and decided that would be too much of a risk. If TA was going to get big money and years last year of course I wouldn't match, it just wouldn't be reasonable. After seeing what Memphis gave him though I was extremely dissapointing that we didn't match or even really make a concerted effort to keep him.
Now switching to Baby. He has improved every year and has been a good rotation player the last couple years. This year he was a leading 6th man of the year candidate for much of the year and if he continued that trend and it continued through the playoffs, there is no reason to believe that he wouldn't be getting big money and years right now from teams. I think people around here were assuming he was gonna be gone during the season (or at least I was) because I know he wants the money and since he was playing well I thought someone would overpay for him and I wouldn't want to match that.
Since Baby's season faded pretty drastically toward the end of the season and the playoffs I'm thinking and hoping that teams will stay away from him so much so that his value will drop to TA level type numbers.
If people don't want to pay Baby a bunch of money I can understand but people that don't want him act like they wouldn't take him for the minimum. He had a bad few month's and is still very young. We've seen A LOT more good from Baby than bad and we've seen some very good moments from him during playoff runs (excluding this playoffs).
At the beginning of the year I'm sure people still didn't want him back next year even when he was playing well. But isn't that because he wouldn't be worth the money that we were assuming he was going to get? At this point if Baby's stock has dropped a ton isn't it worth getting good value?
Topic: Let's not be so quick to run Baby out of town... (Read 15423 times)