Seeing that Orlando got a 17.8 million trade exception in the Howard trade, I am now a little more hesitant to write them off. I think it is most likely that they will tank the season, and wait until next summer to use that, after they have added a high lottery pick...but it is not out of the realm of possibility that they attempt to reload on the fly, using the TPE, and some of the other assets they collected, to build a quality team for next year.
Question... How long do teams keep their trade exceptions?
Based on the deal they settled on for Howard, I have little faith in the new regime to get creative and retool. They are going to have to get worse, draft no-brainers, and let their awful contracts walk.
They should be a bottom 5-10 team the next 3 seasons. Depending in how the lottery plays out for them, it could be longer.
1 year.
And until I heard about this TPE, I would have agreed, however, it was actually a very clever move to get that.
I agree that they are going to have trouble not being a bottom of the lottery team, but that little, tiny, morsel of creativity gives me hope that perhaps their new GM is smarter than I originally thought.
But what can they do with it other than take on players that other teams no longer want? They have such few assets to include with their bad contracts to entice a team, that they can only use it to take on overpaid and/or underperforming players.
Orlando did nothing to accelerate the rebuild with this deal, but convincing Howard to invoke the player option last year made the probability of a decent haul unlikely.
I don't know what's going on in Orlando. If it wasn't for lottery luck (Penny, Shaq, Howard), they'd be an absolute joke (as if they aren't already). They threw a ton of money at Hill and McGrady, but we all know how that panned out.
No matter the GM, they always find a way to screw things up.
Topic: How does Orlando rank next year? (Read 6013 times)