Suns News: 2019 Off-Season

[djy2j]

Thus commences the lip service we’ll be getting from the front office about how good the rookies look in practice despite riding continuous pine during an actual game

[Split T]

[da_suns_fan]

Cam Johnson looks like he's about ready to go to junior prom.

Maybe Im just getting older. Maybe both?

[da_suns_fan]

1. Suns are again paying people not to play here.

2. They're spending $19M on a guy that shouldn't be playing here (Tyler Johnson)

3. The Suns now have six guys under contract who are PGs (Rubio Okobo Jerome Carter Evans Lecque), and seven if you count Johnson. Of these, one is NBA quality, two are rookies, one isn't really a PG, and three are G-league material at best.

Talk about throwing **** at a wall and hoping something sticks.

I was thinking about that. How did they have a 108 MILLION dollar payroll last year? Booker is still on his rookie contract for heavens sake. During 2015 season, their payroll was only 58 million.

Answer: 50 million of it was spent on Tyler Johnson, Austin Rivers and Tyson Chandler.

So how are they paying Tyler Johnson and Austin Rivers so much?

Answer: Those are contracts we acquired in a desperate attempts to get rid of the contracts of Eric Bledsoe, Brandon Knight and Jared Dudley.

So McDonough did okay with bringing in talent, but he seemed incapable of getting decent returns for the Morrii, Dragic, IT, Bledsoe, Brandon Knight and Dudley. I think the reason he probably got fired was Sarver looked at the payroll and noticed half the salary was for guys who didnt even play on the team anymore.

[Split T]

1. Suns are again paying people not to play here.

2. They're spending $19M on a guy that shouldn't be playing here (Tyler Johnson)

3. The Suns now have six guys under contract who are PGs (Rubio Okobo Jerome Carter Evans Lecque), and seven if you count Johnson. Of these, one is NBA quality, two are rookies, one isn't really a PG, and three are G-league material at best.

Talk about throwing **** at a wall and hoping something sticks.

I was thinking about that. How did they have a 108 MILLION dollar payroll last year? Booker is still on his rookie contract for heavens sake. During 2015 season, their payroll was only 58 million.

Answer: 50 million of it was spent on Tyler Johnson, Austin Rivers and Tyson Chandler.

So how are they paying Tyler Johnson and Austin Rivers so much?

Answer: Those are contracts we acquired in a desperate attempts to get rid of the contracts of Eric Bledsoe, Brandon Knight and Jared Dudley.

So McDonough did okay with bringing in talent, but he seemed incapable of getting decent returns for the Morrii, Dragic, IT, Bledsoe, Brandon Knight and Dudley. I think the reason he probably got fired was Sarver looked at the payroll and noticed half the salary was for guys who didnt even play on the team anymore.

Rivers was a result of the Ariza contract and that netted us Oubre, so I’m ok with that.

Dudley was for some guy I can’t remember that we also waived and we payed him for the year. We weren’t paying for anything from the Bledsoe trade last year.

So last year we were done in by the Knight, Dudley, Ariza, and Chandler contracts. That was close to 60 million of salary.

Knight-Anderson-Tyler Johnson
Dudley - That guy we waived(Did allow us to get Richaun Holmes)
Ariza -Rivers(waived)
Chandler(Waived)

Could be why we didn’t want to waive and stretch Tyler. We’ve spent too much money on players playing for other teams. Tyler is at least a decent basketball player, even if he’s overpaid by 12 million.

As for the trades:

Dragic - 2 1sts which we used to acquire Bridges. Decent return

Marcus was dumped to have space to sign Aldridge. We also got Bullock, who we dumped pretty quickly. Meh.

Markieff/IT - Gonna combine these because I believe we used both picks and Bogdonavic to trade up for Chriss. Don’t remember how we got Bogdonavic. Pretty bad in retrospect.

Bledsoe - 1st that we traded for Baynes and Ty Jerome. Decent

Knight - Turned into Tyler Johnson. Tyler is better. Also decent.

Dudley allowed us to get Holmes. Decent.

So a lot of bad original contracts, but the returns were decent. Funny, the better contracts(morri, IT) are where we did poor in return.

[Shabazz]

Zach Lowe's Offseason Winners and Losers. Rips the Suns a new one.

https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/271 ... -week-ever

Loser: Phoenix Suns
Phone rings at league office.

NBA cap nerd: Hello, Phoenix Suns. Do you have a trade?

Suns: Baaaah baaa baaah! Baaah.

Nerd: What's that? You're trading Josh Jackson, the No. 4 pick two years ago, to the Memphis Grizzlies for Kyle Korver and Jevon Carter -- and you're going to waive Korver?

Suns: /plaintive bleating

Nerd: Wait -- you're throwing in De'Anthony Melton and two second-round picks? Are you sure you aren't getting another player or something?

Suns: BAAAAA BAAAH BAAAAAAA! /sound of hooves smashing random buttons

Nerd: Kelly Oubre Jr.'s cap hold? Is that what you're trying to say? You're doing this to fit Oubre's cap hold?

Rationalize it all if you want. Before the draft, Phoenix had only about $9 million in cap space -- not enough to sign a real point guard, and the Suns made the startling discovery last season that having a real point guard helps. They dumped Warren, a decent player on a good contract, and paid the giddy Pacers the No. 32 pick for taking him. Sure.

After subsequent trades and signings, the Suns on July 3 found themselves about $2 million short of being able to squeeze in Oubre's $9.6 million cap hold -- and re-sign him. The Memphis trade rectified that.

Jackson had been available for nothing. The Suns decided they didn't want him for reasons that had little to do with his on-court performance -- which was mostly frenzied and unproductive anyway.

But incentivizing another team to take him in part because you screwed up your cap sheet is a disaster. It borders on malpractice. Like, why is Aron Baynes and his $5.45 million salary on this team? The Suns acquired Baynes in a draft-day trade in which they swapped roughly equivalent first-round picks with Boston: Phoenix got No. 24, which it used on Ty Jerome, in exchange for Milwaukee's top-seven protected pick in 2020. There is no way the pick Phoenix got was worth $5.45 million more than the one it gave up. It wanted Baynes.

The Suns already had full Bird rights on Richaun Holmes, another center who carried a teensy $1.62 million cap hold, per an estimate by ESPN's Bobby Marks. Boom, there's almost $4 million in savings -- eliminating any need for the Memphis robbery. They later signed Frank Kaminsky, another backup center, with the room exception.

Did it really require $17 million per season to sign Rubio? What was Rubio's market once Indiana pivoted to Brogdon? Is Rubio a good fit next to Devin Booker? Is Oubre worth all this trouble? He looks like a 3-and-D guy. He's a long-armed menace defending the ball. He's still just 23. But he's a 32% career shooter from deep who daydreams away from the ball on defense. Seriously: Count the backdoor cuts.

You can't criticize the Suns for signing Booker to a max extension a year ago instead of waiting until restricted free agency this summer -- a move that added $17 million to their cap sheet. Phoenix is trying to repair its image with top players. Holding Booker in limbo does the opposite.

But the rest? It's just a mess.

[JeremyG]

I did think they could have offered Rubio $500,000 less starting salary or whatever to stay under the cap. It’s almost like they calculated it wrong. Who knows.

But maybe they wanted Jackson gone from the team.

[wpmiller42]

I'm not really one to defend our front office, especially Sarver, but that take by Lowe is way more harsh than necessary.

I completely agree that the TJ Warren deal was horrible, but after that? I think there are reasonable pro-Suns arguments to be made.

Baynes is definitely better than Holmes. And I really liked Holmes. But Baynes is just a better player.

Jackson needed to be gone, and I used to really like Jackson. I don't care about the second rounders, and Carter might turn into something. But Jackson has had every opportunity to be something on the court and he hasn't. And his off-court stuff just made it all the more clear that he had to go.

Did we overpay for Rubio? Maybe. But I don't think we overpaid by much. And I think he's going to do wonders for the development of our younger guys especially.

And he totally leaves out the Minnesota trade, which, before we drafted Cam Johnson, I thought we won. If we had taken someone like Clarke, people would be saying what a great trade it was. And who knows, maybe Johnson is the next Ray Allen. But the trade itself was a good one.

Anyways, the Suns front office is a mess, but this piece is just kind of lazy writing/reporting/analysis to me.

[Mori Chu]

I'm not really one to defend our front office, especially Sarver, but that take by Lowe is way more harsh than necessary.

I completely agree that the TJ Warren deal was horrible, but after that? I think there are reasonable pro-Suns arguments to be made.

Baynes is definitely better than Holmes. And I really liked Holmes. But Baynes is just a better player.

Jackson needed to be gone, and I used to really like Jackson. I don't care about the second rounders, and Carter might turn into something. But Jackson has had every opportunity to be something on the court and he hasn't. And his off-court stuff just made it all the more clear that he had to go.

Did we overpay for Rubio? Maybe. But I don't think we overpaid by much. And I think he's going to do wonders for the development of our younger guys especially.

And he totally leaves out the Minnesota trade, which, before we drafted Cam Johnson, I thought we won. If we had taken someone like Clarke, people would be saying what a great trade it was. And who knows, maybe Johnson is the next Ray Allen. But the trade itself was a good one.

Anyways, the Suns front office is a mess, but this piece is just kind of lazy writing/reporting/analysis to me.

I agree with you here. I don't love everything about our offseason, such as the giving away a pick to get rid of Warren and the drafting of Johnson. But overall Lowe is being unfair. Rubio will be huge for us. Oubre is a good starting SF to retain. Getting rid of Jackson and Warren overall is likely to be addition by subtraction. Holmes was a nice piece but is not a crucial loss. We have built a roster that generally makes sense around our core star players.

I think Lowe is thinking a bit too much like a Morey or a Presti here, looking at assets and balance sheets more than the actual roster composition and asking whether it makes sense. I think a fair take on this offseason is, "Team looks better and makes much more sense than last year's, but they squandered too many assets to get it to this point and should have done better in their trades." Not, "What a dumpster fire organization that should be relegated to the G-League," as folks like Simmons and Lowe seem to be saying.

[Split T]

I did think they could have offered Rubio $500,000 less starting salary or whatever to stay under the cap. It’s almost like they calculated it wrong. Who knows.

But maybe they wanted Jackson gone from the team.

Would have needed to be about 3 million less per season. 3/42 was about what we could give Rubio before the Jackson trade. I would have felt a lot better if that was the deal.

[JeremyG]

I did think they could have offered Rubio $500,000 less starting salary or whatever to stay under the cap. It’s almost like they calculated it wrong. Who knows.

But maybe they wanted Jackson gone from the team.

Would have needed to be about 3 million less per season. 3/42 was about what we could give Rubio before the Jackson trade. I would have felt a lot better if that was the deal.

I meant dumping Melton and Okobo instead of Jackson and Melton.

[Split T]

Gotcha, I think we wanted to dump Jackson regardless of salary cap stuff though

[Singh]

I know it's hard to remember what we all do IRL but I'm disabled (no income) so just going to a sports medicine specialist is easier said than done because of my lack of resources. I will see what I can do though and rest him the next week in the meanwhile to see if that helps.

I’m also disabled and on Medicare, and as recently as a few years ago had a sports medicine specialist as my PCP. Not that I needed it, he just happened to be the closest doctor to my home. So my guess is that it is possible. Only way to know is to contact your insurance company. Do you have a Medicare Advantage or Medigap plan, or just the bare bones?

He is on Medicaid not Medicare. It's also his own plan. Not under me or his mom. I'm going to have to check what they cover.

Singh (doesn't post much anymore) is a doc (I think internal medicine?) and Saucy is a doc (emergency med?).


Singh doesn't post much anymore, but perhaps he lurks.

I think saucy is around a bit more often.

I’m a lazy poster but a lurker. I’m a gastro guy. No idea about fractures

[Superbone]

Cam Johnson is a smart guy:

[Superbone]

[Mori Chu]

How do you pronounce "Lecque"? Is it "Lekk"? "Luh-Q"?

[In2ition]

How do you pronounce "Lecque"? Is it "Lekk"? "Luh-Q"?

I thought it was Luh-Q, but then I heard something different each time someone says his name.

[O_Gardino]

LEEK-ewe

[carey]

How do you pronounce "Lecque"? Is it "Lekk"? "Luh-Q"?

Lay-cue.

[gosuns]

How do you pronounce "Lecque"? Is it "Lekk"? "Luh-Q"?

Lay-cue.

No-clue