Welcome. Let’s jump right in.
In the draft, we took Thabo Sefalosha with 10th pick. Obviously, the draft was fairly shallow once it got around to us so we focused on drafting someone that we felt could play key minutes off the bench. We hoped Thabo could see some gains in TC and when the situation presented itself, he could give Kobe a bit of a breather. Those gains didn’t come this season, so we will have to see how he does next season. We are certain that Thabo is going to give us an effort, but considering our depth at the wing, it could be tough for him to ultimately find his role.
We quickly found ourselves with a few key decisions.
First up, Reggie Evans.
In all honesty, the front office very nearly lost track of the deadline to claim his RFA rights. While we like what Evans has developed into, we weren’t going to be bullied into an expensive offer sheet. Knowing we could match a deal we liked, the team decided not to extend a formal offer. We trusted that the market would make this decision for us. As expected, Evans received an offer sheet, and we were presented the decision to accept or decline the rights to his offer sheet. We had a quick dialogue with the winning bidder, 42PhD, and accepted the offer sheet when it was determined a trade was unlikely. At 4 years for $40M, we thought the deal was a fair asking price.
Next up, Larry Hughes. We had floated out the idea that we would be looking to sign and trade Hughes since one of our main goals in the offseason was moving Kobe back to his natural position. We heard some decent offers, but one in particular caught our eye. The Boston Celtics offered us Jason Terry, JR Smith, and their 2009 first rounder. This seemed like a go-for-broke move by the Celtics creating a very formidable starting lineup that should scare most in the East. To us, maxing Hughes would send us into salary cap hell too quickly, and since Terry would be expiring, we saw an opportunity to actually free up some cap space in the offseason next year. JR Smith is a young developing guard that we hope will develop into something special off the bench and the 2009 first rounder meant that we had at least a few TCs in front of us that could kill the Celtics. This move gave us more depth and addressed an area of need. This was a no-brainer in our front office.
Training Camp came next and we saw some really exciting developments.
Andrew Bogut saw his total attributes jump 51 points, and he improved from Yellow to Green in his current rating. Since his contract negotiations will begin once Jermaine O’Neal’s contract is expiring, we are really thrilled that he is nearly O’Neal’s peer at this point. This will be an exciting season for Bogut.
Tony Allen improved 39 points and his Potential went from Green to Blue. He will be a key player off of our bench. We hope that he improves this offseason, but we do not look forward to negotiating with him in the offseason.
Other improvements included Reggie Evans +32 and JR Smith +24. Our first two moves of the offseason paid off here.
Some less exciting Training Camp results involved our first round draft pick and last year’s starting PG. Thabo decreased 7 points in total but saw 17 point drops in two key attributes at his position. He’ll likely be relocated to mop-up duty when our initial depth chart comes out. Raymon Felton, the once promising PG, dropped from his Green potential to Yellow. We are glad that Terry survived TC, because Felton will be the back-up point at the beginning of the season.
Before preseason though, we still weren’t satisfied. We started working the phones. We had six first round picks in the next three years and it was time to leverage some of those. We got a call-back from ColtsGuy and began negotiations for Kyle Korver. At that moment, Tony Allen would be starting at the 3 and we felt he would be better suited off the bench this season. Korver is a capable starting 3 that appeared to work well as second banana to Kobe. The original asking price was for CG to get his pick back, but with the fate of the franchise in flux, we decided to hold that card back. After all, Korver was an exciting addition, but we felt like it would be a serious overpayment for a one-year rental with a potential top 10 pick. Ultimately, the deal cost us our 2007 first rounder and CJ Miles. We welcome Korver to the team and look forward to seeing how our new starting small forward starts off the season.
After preseason, we added two backup power forwards since Kleiza was called on to play at that position during the preseason sim. He is obviously very undersized so we would rather see true 4s be the ones called off the bench in that position. We are going to attempt to distribute the frontcourt minutes between Bogut, O’Neal, and Evans so that these guys don’t get relied on too hard.
We are completely committed to making it back to the playoffs this season and will spend the early months discovering a depth chart that works. Once we find that sweet spot, we are confident that we can hang with a lot of teams. The goal during the season will be to shop the remaining picks that we have to secure some help at point guard for this season and the future. We can’t help but be hopeful that the actions by the front office in Orlando puts us in a position to acquire a good piece to the puzzle in next year’s draft.
We’ll open up now for questions.
