The Nuggets Needed More For Camby Than Nothing; the Center Position is Now Hosed

(This is commentary I did on a forum a few months ago; for editorial explanation, see below the break.)

No one is going to begrudge Mr. Kroenke's right to stop paying the luxury tax, but everyone is eligible, to say the least, to criticize dumping a player of Marcus Camby's caliber.

It is ridiculous to say that the Nuggets could not have gotten more for Camby. They could have traded their 2008 pick (#20 in the draft I think) and Camby for a higher draft pick center, as any one of several dozen possible better scenarios. That way, you get a decent center prospect and substantial cap relief at the same time, without throwing the baby out with the bathwater as the Nuggets are actually doing.

Very simply, if you are all of a sudden running away from the luxury tax like a scared rabbit, you had no business piling up a fat luxury tax in the first place. If you are afraid of fire, stay out of the kitchen.

Is one of the main secrets behind which franchises are run well and which are not in the NBA whether there is consistency over many years relative to how much luxury tax, if any, an owner is comfortable with? Apparently so.

Although Nene is 6-11, he is rated a PF; he doesn't have the hands and polished finishing skills to be a true center and may never have them. But nor does he have any kind of outside shot that a good PF is supposed to have.

The Nuggets never really "experimented" with AI, not only because they had one of the least organized offenses in the League, but also because they didn't deviate in the slightest from the way the 76'ers deployed Allen Iverson. In other words, the 76'ers already ran the experiment, and it failed. If you run the same experiment again, it will fail again.

(Commentary was made July 17, 2008)
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EDITORIAL EXPLANATION
The imports from forums related to the Marcus Camby giveaway have been posted one by one, due to the franchise-changing nature of that development. (And Google says you can get more visitors to your site if you make a bunch of shorter postings!)

For many other forum comments, made previous to the Camby giveaway, including ones regarding the Nuggets-Lakers playoff series in late April, 2008, see the series of posts that all begin with "Return of Nuggets 1..."

Forum commentary I did from March 2008 through July 2008, when I didn't have time to do the detailed and extensive reports that I like to do, is being posted in October, 2008. The primary themes are how the Nuggets are blowing a great (and expensive!) opportunity to play the game of basketball in such a way that respects the sport and that takes as much advantage as possible of who they have on the roster. The 2006-09 Nuggets have turned out to be an excellent case study of how not to run a basketball team; many things you should not do if you are a basketball manager or coach can be identified from what the Nuggets actually did during these years. So learn from their mistakes.

In these comments, do not look for the usual huge amount of detail and proof that you see in the ordinary releases here at Nuggets 1. Some of this is more like everyday conversation than like top quality sports writing. On the other hand, some of the comments do include some detailed reasoning and proof that I pride myself on in the full reports.