Pick and Scroll
Nathan Begley | Tuesday, February 23, 2010 at 9:44AM Your daily (Mon-Fri) roundup of links from around the blogosphere, typically Trail Blazers related.
• Who’s ready to forget the last two games ever happened? Well tonight Portland plays New Jersey, where a win will cheer the Blazers faithful up, and a loss will be the worst defeat of the season. No pressure, boys. A loss here might not cost Portland a playoff spot, but it could endanger them needlessly and (at best) possibly seal Portland into a first round date with the Lakers. Including tonight, Portland has 14 remaining games against teams who currently have a lower win percentage than they do. The Blazers also have 15 road games and only nine home games left. Portland really needs to take care of business and consistently beat the teams they are supposed to beat if they want to avoid the lottery.
• Geoffrey C. Arnold of The Oregonian thinks that the Nets are just the tonic to help wash the bad taste out of our collective mouths.
• Check out TrueHoop Network sister blog Nets are Scorching for the New Jersey gallows humor perspective.
• Matt Scheelar of Bust a Bucket thinks the Blazers have got this one.
• Checking in on how our dearly departed duo is doing: Both Read Between the Baselines and TrueHoop Network sister site ClipperBlog are liking what they see from Steve Blake and Travis Outlaw. Kevin Pelton adds his thoughts on the Clippers’ recent acquisitions.
• Brandon Roy is one of only 11 players to ever post an offensive rating of 122 or better with a usage rate of 25% or higher. This is a good thing.
• I got the above statistic from this article by Neil Paine talking about how good Anfernee Hardaway was. Like Roy, Penny was a big guard who could play the point who started having some hamstring trouble. We can only hope that Roy doesn’t face the avalanche of injuries that Hardaway did. Or, worse, become as forgotten as ‘Lil Penny.
• Dwight Jaynes defends criticizing Nate McMillan.
• The Invisible Ninja has a data blog with some pretty moving charts (warning, may not work in Google Chrome). You can fiddle with the variables, but if you press play with the presets you can witness just how offensively impressive the Phoenix Suns used to be.
• We’ve been telling you about the advantages of drafting and stashing talent overseas, however, there are risks. For instance, right now the Spurs hold the rights to Tiago Splitter, a mobile big that they would love to have come over as soon as possible. Bringing Splitter over is tricky because under the rookie scale Splitter would make $836,000. Right now, Splitter makes around 2.3 million, so he’d be taking a pretty massive pay cut to wear a Spurs jersey. However, there is hope for San Antonio, Article VIII, Section 2 of the CBA basically says that after being drafted, if a player doesn’t go to the team that selected him within three years, the team can then circumvent the rookie scale and try to sign him like a free agent using cap room or (according to Larry Coon’s FAQ #42) an exception like the MLE. That means that next year the Spurs can try to sign Splitter as they would any other free agent, but it may cost them a chance at a normal free agent. The Spurs had an issue like this with Luis Scola as well, but Scola had a difficult buyout issue and felt he wouldn’t get much playing time with the Spurs, so San Antonio traded him to the Rockets for basically nothing.
• Portland will be in similar situations with Joel Freeland, Petteri Koponen, and Victor Claver. In an interview with BlazersEdge, Pritchard stated that Portland had helped to structure Freeland’s contract so that he could be brought over when Portland is ready. Koponen apparently really wants to come play in the NBA next season, so he may either get brought in, or have his rights traded. Claver is still under contract to his current team and wants to wait to be brought over. Now, here is where things might get dicey. See, the 2011 CBA negotiations are not going so well right now, but under the league’s proposal, there would be no MLE type exceptions, so if a team doesn’t have cap room, they would be unable to sign stashed players for above the rookie scale. Of course, prior picks could be grandfathered in somehow, but other than that, successful teams picking foreign players to stash would be a thing of the past. Now some might say that forcing teams to stick to a rookie scale is a good thing since the rookie scale was put into place to prevent rookies from holding out for a better contract. If the MLE and similar exceptions were eliminated and no other changes were made to the rookie scale rules, foreign players would hypothetically only place themselves in the draft when they were ready to come over and felt that they would be drafted high enough to made the transition financially viable.
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