The New King of Slime (?)

[garbageman]

The New King of Slime (?)
A Garbageman Production


Many seasons ago, I dubbed IamQuailman the king of slime. It was in good fun, but it caught on like wildfire and grew out of control. In reality, I can't remember a Doug deal that was lopsided enough to stick in my brain. Sure, he traded with digiskunk, and a lot of the trades with wildcard GMs can definitely set off some red flags. Another thing that can be said about those trades with wildcard GMs is that they're fairer in a vacuum without the context that the trades require the less decorated GM to make followup moves that they rarely act upon.

But with Quail, it was more the way he'd squirm into deals (like getting De'Aaron Fox from a GM who was for many PBSL teams, otherwise impossible to get a hold of). I don't remember a specifically imbalanced deal like I do with Charlie's Raiquan Gray/Hintz deal. Or any of BSH's blatant friendship salary dumps to TrayWithAnA (see Andrew Bynum). And I even participated in deals back in the days before I had the ultimate power of commissioning that I would never do now (like getting the namesake of my division, Silky Johnson). The point is, most of us here have agreed to deals that weren't very balanced, many of us on both sides of the coin. It's part of being a GM, and if you don't learn from it, it ends up affecting your reputation.

There have been plenty of bad trades. It happens every season, often multiple times to varying degrees. And in most cases, it's in the eye of the beholder. There's a lot of leeway and arguments you can make to try and justify moves that are considered lopsided. And whenever any trade happens, there is always some grumbling from the peanut gallery. While nobody thought it was unfair, a lot of folks questioned whether Gary Rockwell would fit in with a Warriors team that's still so young. A few people grumbled about Banchero going to the Suns for Widener even though Banchero's athleticism took a major hit that is usually seen as debilitating to wings (kucoach7 wrote a pretty good article once about the interaction between QKN, INS, and stats), but I'll get to that later on in this article since it came up. The Magic have done more deals than I can count. Families on vacation to Disney World spent more time in Orlando than Ebbe Clauer did last year before the Magic shipped him off for Sanford Benfield and five points, and that's still a deal that hasn't caused nearly as much of a ruckus as the deals I'm about to talk about.

So let's get to the point. Why did the Mavs deals cause such an uproar?

FIRST, PRETEXT

Now, I don't want to pile on LazyTitan too much. This is his 10th season as GM, and that's about the time I consider a turning point for most GMs. They've been able to see how players grow and decline over 10 seasons. They've had the opportunity to give out regrettable UFA deals and move on. They've had a decent amount of time to see how trades worked out for them and against them, but maybe not quite enough time to properly forecast trends with any statistical significance. So in a league where a lot of folks have put in over five realtime years...50, 60, 70 seasons or more...10 seasons is still arguably new. I'd say he's been here long enough to know a little better, but maybe not here long enough to know that when he's trying to win a deal, how much some of his offers are actually going to win by.

In fact, a better measure for where I think he is in his GM career is that he knows what a good deal is and a bad deal is, but maybe he's not quite sure what an even deal is. LTS is one of the more active GMs in throwing out offers for big players, and word gets around because GMs talk to each other that the value hasn't necessarily been there, at least among seasoned GMs. For example, I have a McClung offer from last season that didn't make me reconsider for a split second that Mac should be untouchable, but you can't fault a guy for trying. And when your offers get rejected time and time again, you have a couple of options:

1) Try to send even stronger offers at the risk of sending too much

2) Try to send the same kind of offers to less discerning GMs


SO THAT BRINGS US TO THIS YEAR...SEASON 69...OH HELL YEAH

Now, I'm going to start this out by talking about how the Bucks are a stewarded team, and I have historically HATED having stewards run a team. I think every GM knows that temporary stewards aren't going to run a team with the same judgment they would for their team...except for maybe the stewards. As fair as you think you are, I don't think it's the same, and I recognize as a steward, there's no way to neutralize any biases. So with stewarded teams, my theory has always been to just make sure the team's not in bad financial shape for the next guy that takes over. Fill out the roster so it's not a skeleton of a team, but also you're not trying to win any championships.

If a team's open for a while, it's no fun to have an unhelmed team constantly getting the best draft picks, and it's no fun for a team with no real GM to auto-pilot through the playoffs. I want real GMs doing that with their teams.

But if there are no stewards, a team is going to crumble to dust. You can't hit recommended on everything...well, you can, but if you do that in UFA, for example, an unmanned team could suffer a fate worse than crumbling to dust. When the Rockets foolishly went recommended for UFA, they were saddled with long, big contracts on guys at the end of their primes that they couldn't move and had to just kind of wait it out for four or five seasons.

Thus, you need stewards, but when there's a stewarded team, there are plenty of vulturous GMs out there who are going to try to get a sweet deal from stewards before having to actually deal with a real GM who gives a shit about their team and their players. That's why stewarded teams are run by multiple GMs, and I'm always trying to ensure that at least one of the stewards is a seasoned vet. I like pairing a more seasoned GM with a newer GM because it exposes the newer GM to the thought processes of a wily vet and provides hopeful learning opportunities. BUt even the most seasoned GM can make a bad decision once in a while, which is why there's a built in commissioner veto on top of needing approval of BOTH stewards. And PBSL is lucky to have several folks who have and will act as commissioner as some point so that there can be a whole committee of people who know how the game works behind the curtain.

So before we get to the Mavs/Bucks Kel'el Ware deal, I will say that it probably was the best offer that I'd heard the Mavs get for Ware in two seasons. But it was still bad enough that several folks with commissioning powers agreed that it was veto worthy. If you're not the Mavs and you made an offer for Kel'el Ware--especially AFTER the whole debacle went down--rest assured that your offer was absolute dogshit and you should be ashamed.

But anyway, the Kel'el Ware offer from the Mavs was:

Candice Parker and Caitlin Clark for Kel'el Ware.

You've got a green/blue 25 year old wing on her second contract in Candice Parker and a yellow/blue rookie contract wing in Caitlin Clark for a 29 year old purple/purple Center with three (well, 2.9) years left on his contract. So is that really that bad an offer? It's definitely not the most lopsided deal in league history. So what makes it veto-worthy?


1. KEL'EL WARE IS HELLA GOOD: Purple current players are supposed to be bona-fide superstars. Thanks to the proliferation of information and the ease of training, there are 7 purple currents (which is more than there used to be purple potential players TOTAL when I joined) and around 20 purple potentials (including the currents). It's easy to make a player purple...just train their athleticism enough, and if they've got decent size, they'll probably pop purple, even if they've got holes in their game. That's why there are so many purple potential players that are just tall wings with revved up QKN.

You don't see many purple potential players that play C, and when you do, you don't see many of them ever get to purple current. This is because most of these Centers have big man skill sets with potential ratings over 100 in the big man skill categories. So while they have a purple ceiling, the league rule is that we cap current attributes at 100, meaning if a player has a 110 potential in INS, DRB, and BLK, they can never actually reach their maximum future potential rating and a lot of the few bigs who have purple potential actually get capped at blue potential.

Now, with Kel'el Ware, he's kind of a unicorn in that he reached his purple potential. His QKN is 17, and his JMP is 27, so that's not earning him his color. And even if you ran his QKN down to 0, he'd still be purple current because that's not as important of an attribute for Centers, so he could take an athletic decimation next TC, and it won't really faze him. Through the rest of Ware's contract, he's going to be playing at an extremely high caliber...even if he shades below purple in the final year of his contract. He is arguably the best player in the league at his position in a close race with Charley Quick and a distant gulf between whoever's in 3rd.

If you look at his stats (at the time of me editing this section of the article), he's putting up 25 PPG, 11 boards, almost 3 blocks, and shooting .405 from beyond the arc. He's on the leaderboard in all four categories. While he won't get as many shots on a more crowded team, I don't see much of a dropoff for what he'll be capable of putting up.


2. DEEP BLUE POTENTIAL: Now, color isn't everything, and that's a super important thing to note. There are some blue players I think are more valuable than purple players. A dominant blue PG (read: Mac McClung) or C has a little more value to me than a SF who's 6'8 and purple potential by way of incredible athleticism. But there's no denying that a purple player is a superstar and capable of being the number one option on any team.

However, while you know even the weakest purple player is still going to play at the highest caliber (it's hard to think of a purple current who didn't put up massive numbers, even if they were disappointing for a purple), you don't know that about blue players. Some blue players are glorified greens and some are pretty much purple players save for a few missing inches of height or a bit of quickness. The gulf between those blues is pretty wide...the difference between the fakest blue and the blue closest to purple is about the difference between that same fakest blue and the most mid yellow. And while performance doesn't correlate to overall rating, the gulf in stats between the blue player with the best stats and the blue player with the worst stats is equally wide, if not. more so.

Furthermore, because of things like height factoring into overall ratings, it's hard for a true PG to have an off the charts overall/color rating even if their skills are A's and B's across the board and their production is elite level. With bigs, the skillset is much narrower. To be effective and put up monster numbers, they only need to be good at 4 or 5 things. So a Center who ranks mid blue can still be a player that carries a team.

Wings, on the other hand, are kind of tweeners in terms of what skills they should have. They tend to have to do a little bit of everything across the board, which is why guys like Charles Jarrett peaked right on the border of blue and purple and still didn't have the same impact as a mid-blue Center or PG (or both, like Cassius Winston whose potential was mid blue because he was a 6' point guard who played Center on the backwards-ass championship 76ers).

OK, GARBAGEMAN, GET TO THE POINT

Back to the trade. From a purely numerical rating standpoint, trading Kel'el Ware for Candice Parker and Caitlin Clark would be the same as trading Candice Parker for two random names off the free agents list if one of them was on a rookie contract and the other was making max money for 3 seasons.

Sure, it's not that simple. There are way more yellow players than blue players. Regardless of color, though you should look at production more than color. With younger players, however, it's a little harder to project what their stats are going to be at their peaks. You can look at similar players, but no two players are exactly the same. I'm looking at players like Gradey Dick, Jaylen Forbes, Baba Miller, Joseph Ford, Allie Quigley, and even some best case scenario folks like present-day Percy Miller, post-prime Lenz Durrenberger, second contract Trey Murphy III, and most generously, Ron Harper Jr. (but three inches shorter and with slightly better defense traded for significantly worse three point shooting). None of these a direct comparison. Parker has good speed, really good JMP, and a high potential INS. On the flip side, she's an average at best shooter. There are a lot of players who have slightly worse athleticism but better shooting or equal athleticism and better shooting but worse INS, and in the comparatives, I looked at some players who have better athleticism and better shooting (Trey Murphy III).

If there's a lot of points poured into Parker's shooting (say, 25 to turn JPS and another 25 into 3PS both to B's...and that's only gettng her halfway to purple potential), she may project to be like those best-case scenario prospects, but that's a lot of points and it's something that won't happen until after her contract's up. The realistic targets (with no training and no TC bumps) project slightly better than average projections by the end of this current contract, and nothing you couldn't replicate with a rotating cast of low value contracts (or even the right greens on a min).

That's not to say Parker won't be solid and definitely turn out to be a player worth a look in her next contract, but that's an even more expensive max, so getting her back for a decent value is far from guaranteed. You'd rather have a player on a third contract max be a guaranteed number one or two options on a competing team, and I don't see a competing team with their Jordan or Pippen being a wing player without a shot or elite defense.

Anyway, since Parker actually got moved, we'll talk about her fit with the Hawks later. Let's move onto Caitlin Clark.


3. When you're looking at blue potential rookies, there are rookies that you can look to build around and there are rookies who are going to be projects. Caitlin Clark is the latter. At 6'4 with less athleticism than Candice Parker (but a better JPS), Clark projects to me to be worse than Parker without bumps or boosts. The pipe dream best case scenarios are Ayo Dosunmu or Ebbe Clauer (both players who weren't producing great stats until their third contracts) offensively without the athleticism of Ayo, the three point shooting ability of Ebbe, or the defensive eliteness of either player. I'd put her realistically halfway between Gary Payton II and Sanford Benfield (who, I guess was 5 points shy of being worth Ebbe Clauer so go figure).

I'm not knocking Clark, there's a place for rookie contracts like her, but if you look at the value the Lakers got for pretty much every piece on their championship team, they got a more interesting rookie contract prospect for guys later in their careers than Ware with less time on their contracts (Hub and Davis are expiring, Banchero and Harper aren't, but are both older than Ware and noticeably below his skill level) without having to take on a bad, multi-year max. They took on lesser contracts that were easy enough to reflip and churn out more value. As it is, the green band is so thin and green potential rookies are a dime a dozen that you can train most of them to be low blue potential like Clark and get a similar prospect without having to give up the best Center in the league.

But the place for a contract like Clark...or a contract like Parker...aren't the Bucks. Here's why:

4. Stewarded teams can't train players that need a lot of work for the juice to be worth the squeeze. If they could, the Bucks already have two rookie contract wings (Hannon looks worse than Clark, but Armentrout looks more intriguing to me than either Parker or Clark). A stewarded team's mission isn't to trade away any win-now player they can and stockpile as many rookies as they can. Stewarded teams can't insure extra players (and this year, the stewards didn't insure anyone, so that kind of nullifies the argument that it's a good idea to stockpile rookies).

But even so, for the Bucks...if I was the mentor to their next GM, and he took over today. I'd tell him (or her) to hold onto Ware and try to move him in the offseason when you wouldn't have to take on any bad contracts and more teams have cap space to take on a purple player, give you a rookie prospect or two, and a whole lot of cap space to play with in UFA.


BUT ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL...

I spent the entire day after seeing this trade posted talking to as many old heads as I could. I talked to two former commissioners, one future commissioner, and another potential steward candidate with more experience than both the current steward candidates. None of them thought the trade was fair and two of them thought it was a clear veto.

With that not being unanimous, I was torn. I thought it was a strong veto, but if greeple, someone who knows the game pretty well and whose opinion and character I trust, surely a veto was not in order. So I felt pretty vindicated when I found out that he knew nothing about the trade and it was little more than a miscommunication, and mostly I felt relieved because it meant I didn't have to make a final decision on whether to veto or process.

I don't think Mike Lowry had any fault in the trade posting and his defense of the trade isn't unreasonable, but there is a reason I paired him up with a proven entity like greepleairport. ML's a fairly new GM, one that has spent a good bit of his tenure in tax jail, which tends to distort your value of the trade market because you can't really do anything in several important aspects of the game, and nothing means anything to you except maximizing your points.


...OR IS IT

With the potential steward trade kiboshed and a few sims gone by, I was hoping that we'd all learned a valuable lesson about market value. Then, as I was doomscrolling in bed, I checked PBSL and saw Mavs/Hawks up there.

Candice Parker for Kevon Looney.

My initial reaction at the time was that it was a great deal for the Hawks, but it wasn't a steward trade, so who was I to veto? I went to bed and figured I'd process it in the morning when I was on my computer that has the VNC on it. But when I woke up, there was a lot of drama on the board and even an unaccepting of the deal by the Mavs, who had apparently been reamed about the deal by the Dubs GM.

Looney isn't too much of a step down from Ware in some respects. He's one of the game's best rebounders, is a strong defender in the post with solid A blocking ability, his offense is efficient, and he doesn't foul too much. He's literally everything you can ask for in a center. Sure, he's not put up the over-the-top number one option offensive stats at Ware, but he's certainly good enough on the offensive end to be considered a two way player.

Despite his massive current attribute numbers, hes been more of a defensive force than he's ever been used as a primary offensive focus, so he doesn't have the accolades that you'd expect from his attribute ratings. Perhaps it's misuse (he's a top 5 C in the league if he's playing that position), but perhaps it's just underperformance. Some players never look as good as their attributes, so that's why they say stats > atts.

So, if the Ware deal was unfair with Clark involved (and Clark being the more appealing part of a rebuild package), then the question becomes whether Looney is more than one Caitlin Clarks worse than Kel'el Ware, I thought that it was clearly a favorable deal for the Mavs and not clearly as good for the Hawks. If they'd sent the Hawks a longer term asset like Clark along with Parker, I don't think anyone would've batted an eyelash. Hell, they probably could've gotten a few courtesy points back from that trade in the process.

For the Hawks, only receiving Parker means they've either taken on salary that won't help them in the long run, or it forces them to invest in a player when they have comparable players on friendlier contracts to build around in addition to having Herman Campbell. Without Parker on the books next season, the Hawks could have been able to make some major moves to sign multiple free agents for a run to coincide with Campbell's emergence.

While I wouldn't have advised the Hawks to do this trade, I can see the appeal to it. Parker is younger than Looney, and you gain nothing by not trading him this season. It's just a matter of what you lose out on by spending that salary on Parker. There is a chance that Candice is one TC bump away from justifying pumping a handful of training points into her to turn her into someone worth a max extension. But the price tag on the lotto ticket is astronomically high in comparison to the chance of TC bumps. And if the Hawks can move her, I think we can see the value of Parker and whether it stacks up to the value of Looney.


UPON CROSS EXAMINATION

In the trade thread and other spots on the forum, the Mavs had a couple arguments that I felt like providing a different perspective on because this perspective is important to understand for the context of this article.

First, they likened the Looney for Parker trade to a trade he did with the Pacers that sent He Hor to Indiana for blue/green Terrance Lewis-Weeks. But the Mavs also got 10 points in the deal, He Hor was expiring, He Hor was 3 years older than Kevon Looney is now, and TLW was putting up more productive numbers in the same stage in his career as Parker is in now. Even so, with the better return that the Mavs got, it still was not a great deal for them. The best thing that came out of it was that they were bad enough to get some draft luck that led them to landing Angel Reese and Dominitrix Johnson. But that had little to do with the deal. Without a lot of luck down the road, the Hawks probably aren't in much better of a situation in a few seasons. Maybe they wouldn't have found a better deal for Looney, and they might well not have, but you can't really say unless you look. He was never on their block.

Second, I want to call shenanigans on LTS' insinuation of Looney's low worth based on the ability to get someone to agree to buy him for 10 points in the offseason. With the acceptance of the team option on the line, an agreement on any deal this far out from when the deal could be completed is an incredibly tall ask. A team's long term plan may get derailed by injury or playoff performance or a number of things. Furthermore, Looney's value would have to include what he brought to the team. To imply that he's not even worth points to another team, trading, like comedy, is about one thing timing.


SO WHAT'S THE BIG DEAL? WHY TRADE AN ASSET IF YOUR TRADE PARTNER DOESN'T NEED TO? WHY ARE THESE TRADES COMING OFF SO SLIMY?

Well, to me, it comes down to a few things.

1) The biggest factor that I think is setting off a lot of red flags is that the Mavericks are supposed to be the Hawks' mentors (and they're real life brothers). While the Mavs don't have that much more experience than the Hawks, they appear to be more active than their mentee, and throughout the Hawks first 7.5 seasons, the Mavs have traded with the Hawks more than I've seen any mentor trade with their mentee team in such a short period of time. Most of those trades have been small, but when the trades get more consequential between mentor/mentee when the mentee hasn't yet acheived a proven track record of success, it comes off as bad form, even if there is no malicious intent. Hopefully Titan picks up some insight about the optics here.

2) I think the valuation that LTS is missing the most in his cries that the deals are even is the value of cap flexibility and how much of an anchor a contract like Candice Parker's really can be. Even if Candice Parker isn't a terrible player, she's nowhere near a max value player now, and even in a couple years (and aside from a recently trained PAS and a mostly irrelevant PSD, her other attributes are probably only one camp away from her potentials), Parker's production will likely be solid, but not enough to justify the max contract against the opportunity cost of what you could get with that cap space. I think the comparison to the TLW trade is apt, but we saw how that ended for LTS. Weeks didn't get the Mavs much. He put up better stats than Parker at the same age, but ultimately, the Mavs weren't able to move him on such a long max contract, and the only thing that came of Weeks' years in Dallas were high draft picks, which the Mavs could've gotten without trading for TLW and could've used that cap room to do things like grind points for cap relief and try to sign players that they would have an easier time trading for more youth or more points. That they'd use their He Hor trade as a defense for a trade with their mentee after the TLW trade netted them little more than 10 points (and then sent 0 points in the Parker swap) makes it seem like he chose competitive gain over responsible mentorship.

3) I don't think the defense of the criticism of the trades is doing much to help Titan's case. Sure, when folks are jeering on your trade thread, you have to defend yourself, but it's hard for anyone on any side of an argument come off unobnoxiously, but that aside, the arguments haven't held up. The threat to train Parker to purple might have been kiboshed when it was publicly aired how the overall ratings work--or rather, don't work (without a TC boost, it would be impossible under our current training rules to get Candice to purple potential before her contract ends), but I certainly would respect the hubris of such an spite move.


WHAT'S THE VERDICT? IS LAZYTITAN THE NEW KING OF SLIME?

In this case of the people of PBSL vs. LazyTitanSmash, I find the defendant not guilty (but not proven innocent). Lazy's enthusiastic for the game and still figuring out how to put together a championship team. I don't expect him to view things through the same lens as people who have been doing this for almost a decade. It takes a while to catch on how to become a contender, and oftentimes that takes less time to figure out than it takes to develop a full understanding of all the subtle and somewhat subjective ethics of the league.

I think the trade dynamics in PBSL are tricky because there are so many people at different levels of understanding and experience in the game. When two GMs who are widely regarded make a deal with each other that seems questionable, we give them the benefit of the doubt that even if we don't understand a move, they understand a move. I don't think a lot of people give LTS that benefit yet. I think he'll get there soon. He's got a successful team, and that's something you have to do to truly learn and understand the cost of being successful.

As for the King of Slime? Yep, still Doug. It'll always be Doug.

[Black Superman]

The New King of Slime (?)
A Garbageman Production


Furthermore, because of things like height factoring into overall ratings, it's hard for a true PG to have an off the charts overall/color rating even if their skills are A's and B's across the board and their production is elite level. With bigs, the skillset is much narrower. To be effective and put up monster numbers, they only need to be good at 4 or 5 things. So a Center who ranks mid blue can still be a player that carries a team.


Bullseye! First great article Josh.
This was my point to LTS when I said Henry would be a better player at his position than Candace at hers. Big men don't need much to be dominate. Henry's stats are exactly what you'd want in a big man. Is he the best big man prospect? Not even close. Be he has all the traits to be a better rebounding/less defensive Anas Mahmoud. Who has always averaged double digit scoring his entire career. Henry can average 20&10 in his sleep once he grows into form. A categories in both rebounding and INS scoring. He'll be better than Parker at their respective positions.

[greepleairport]

5000+ words, +10pts

The only thing that could beat this for MEOTY is if Josh does a podcast