GM Roy: Welcome everyone, sorry for getting this out a bit late, we were still going through the results of TC and finishing up internal interviews that resulted in Free Agency not going as smoothly as planned. We'll get to that in a bit, but first we'll briefly talk about last season. It was ugly from a win loss standpoint, but hey at least Alonzo Mourning was scoring champion. He has always been a team player and I know he'd trade all of those points for just a few more wins, but it was fun to watch him play night in and night out. It also resulted in us landing our Point Guard of the future Steve Francis.
We weren't thrilled with the lottery results but knew we would be getting a solid player with the fourth pick, we tried to move around some and had a few sources letting us know who would be selecting who and we basically could tell Francis was out of our reach and we'd be selecting Shawn Marion, then lo and behold a trade was struck in the middle of the night and we awoke to Francis sitting there in our laps, it was a nice surprise. We tried like crazy to get back into the draft to select Richard Hamilton to solidify a dynamic backcourt for the forseeable future but in the end we didn't have the assets.
Then came RFA complete swing and a miss, I don't even want to talk about it. Then came Doug Christie, we had been in negotiations with the Sonics since before the draft even. Once we knew the Sonics were shopping him, he became priority #1 a defensive player of his caliber do not come along very often and we were thrilled to get him and hope to use this season to talk him into staying longterm and finishing his career with Zo forming a fantastic defensive duo.
Finally came Free Agency we knew we needed a difference maker, but we also need to round out our starting 5. We had plenty of money to spend, Steve is going to be a fantasic point guard in this league and we think he'll be able to score right out of the gate. But it will take some time to learn how to be a PG in this league, so Terrell Brandon was high on our list. A defensive minded veteran who can teach Steve the ropes. We may have overpaid Michael Doleac a project center that hasn't seen many (maybe not any) minutes, but we think he can grow into a solid player. We messed up though by signing him we used the money too soon to sign another starter that we desperately needed. And after seeing what a few of our targets signed for, we could have had a much better offseason, but regardless we are extremely excited to see how the team comes together this year. Any Questions?