Pacers Summer as Graded by Bill Simmons

All due respect, I’m going to have to disagree with you. Just getting a single star is not going to flip a franchise around. The Pacers are looking to rebuild and get a solid cast in place and that means getting experienced guys who are ready to contribute not boys who are going to get knocked around and injured when they bang around with men five to ten years their seniors. Give me a 22 year old experienced college graduate over a 19 year old freshman who will likely get injured and flame out. Remember, for every Lebron there are a dozen Benders.

We are only in the second year of Bird and Morway’s three year plan. The second star player is coming, we just have to be patient. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither is an NBA franchise

I love Simmons, actually. I hate the Patriots, but he’s been a lot more tolerable since the Colts won the Super Bowl. I think he’s afraid to diss them like he was in ’06 because he thinks it will jinx him and make them win again.

As for your Bayless comment…I don’t get it. Nor do I think Bill is necessarily informed when it comes to Brandon Rush. Claiming that Dahntay Jones does the same things as Rush is ludicrous. Rush is a scorer who could possibly develop into a defender. Jones is an athletic defender who has little interest in or ability to score. We needed Jones, plain and simple. And I’ve said it before, he’s not overpaid. At less than $4 mil a year you’re not going to find many guys as athletic, who are such good perimeter defenders, and have had so much playoff experience. You’re just not. Who else could they have signed to address their biggest needs? There’s no comparison between him and Arron Afflalo, who started 7 games last year (ZERO in the playoffs). Jones, remember, started 71, not including 16 in the playoffs. As much as Simmons knows about the NBA, it doesn’t work like a video game. You can’t just add the best players and prospects. You need guys who have experience in game situations where it really counts, and Jones has that (while most Pacers, unfortunately do not, considering their recent playoff drought).

And then there’s Bayless…what about this guy makes Pacers fans think he’s less of a “homerun” than Rush or Hibbert? If you’ve watched Pacers games, especially during the end of last season, you saw some pretty exciting things from both of these guys. Hibbert still has to mature and learn how to stay out of foul trouble, but that will come the more respect he gets from refs. When he came into the league he was known as a tree, now he runs the floor, looks for someone to block out on every shot and looks like he’s shed about 20 pounds of baby fat. As for Rush, by season’s end he was 100 times more confident and was a viable NBA starter, with plenty of upside.

As for Bayless, if you watch Portland games, well, you saw him riding a lot of pine. He played in only 12 games in the first two months of the season, then recorded just 8 games of over 7 minutes in the last two months of the season. I know people like him, I just don’t know why.

else would the Pacers of taken this year in the draft that would have possibly been a “home run” more so than Tyler Hansbrough. To me, they not only picked Hansbrough because he is a sure thing, but more so that there wasn’t really anyone else out there worth the risk… which seems to me that’s the way they have felt in the last couple drafts after getting burnt so badly before. If you draft safe, sometimes you still do hit home runs… ie. Danny Granger, and in my opinion Rush should turn out the same. Hibbert will turn into a “triple”.

if there isn’t someone WORTH taking the risk on, you have to go for the sure thing. Unless someone is sitting there that you KNOW will be a star, staring you in the face saying PICK ME… you have to go for the sure thing. Maybe that’s just me, but i think it’s a much better recipe for success to build the sure team so that when someone like that does come around, you have a great team to go around him. What’s the point in taking a risk on a guy when you don’t have anything to support him, it’s a recipe to disaster. See the Dwayne Wade situation, if shaq wouldn’t have come around, they would still be the barely above average team, 1 star player is nothing without a good supporting cast in basketball.

By all means, singles and doubles leads to 40 wins if that’s all you do. But the point is that you only go for home runs in certain situations when the chances are highest of connecting. If you go for a home run every time you just end up striking out a bunch. To keep the analogy alive, we’re just getting guys on base and when the chance comes, we’ll swing for the fences.

There was absolutely no opportunity this summer for the Pacers to swing for the fences. No one in the draft looked like a surefire star and we couldn’t do much in free agency. Maybe we’ll have the opportunity in next year’s draft, maybe not. But with all those huge contracts getting set to expire after the 2010-11 season, we’re going to be in PRIME POSITION to swing for the fences. It doesn’t make sense to do it before then so we’ll wait until we’re in a good place to make a huge trade or FA signing. Until then, we’ll just get all the other pieces in place.

Simmons ignores a few important things:

1) Salaries – all of the expirings in 2011-12 will put us in an enviable position either at the trade deadline or at the end of the season. Not now. We are building for that point in time. Right now our position is not enviable. Making a big move now and sacrificing the position we will be in 2011-12 doesn’t make any sense when we aren’t yet in a position to compete with the addition of only one more piece.

2) The State of the League – The league is so top heavy, there isn’t much point in making a move to become the 4th best team in the East…. In after the 2011-12 season, talent will probably be better distributed and we will have a better chance to compete without building a team full of aging all-stars.

3) Economics – We simply don’t have the resources (money or cap space) to make any big moves at the moment even if we wanted to. Too much of our money is tied up in players nobody wants (Dunleavy, Murphy, Tinsley, etc….). Bird is doing the best he can with what he has. The off season has to be graded with this in mind.

4) Rush/Bayless – Why does everyone keep harping on this? Wasn’t the trade worked out pre-draft? I’m not sure anyone ever confirmed this, but I think we had agreed to swap the picks before we even knew Bayless would be there. Everyone thought he’d be gone by then. If that’s true, good move. You have to grade the move at the time it was made.

5) Expected Value – like SHaFF said, there has to be “someone WORTH taking the risk on.” Taking risks for the sake of taking risks is simply a bad business decision. If there is a 90% chance that TH turns out to be a 7 (on a scale of 1 to 10) and a 10% he turns out be a 3 (expected value = 6.6), why in the world would we take Jrue Holiday at a 20% he becomes a 9 and a 80% chance he becomes a 2 (expected value 3.4).

I like Simmons, but he is WAY off base here.

Not surprisingly I’m in the minority on this issue. I have a hard time judging our team moves on what we might do in two more years. It’s great that everyone is so excited about the players that we “might” be able to sign then but no one seems to care that we sat out of the playoffs for three years already and might be looking at making it a fourth. And what do we have to show for it? Danny Granger and a couple of old rookies in Rush and Hibbert who might be close to peaking as average NBA players. That doesn’t seem like a championship base to me.

The Celtics, with arguably the richest NBA history were garbage for most of the 90’s and 2000’s. The Knicks with 10x the fan base can’t see the post-season to save their lives. All teams go through ups and downs. You can either look for a short term solution to patch the leaks, or wait it out and rebuild the team. We are in rebuilding mode.

As for our moves, none of us can see the future and what we will do in two years, we also have no idea if Rush or Hibbert will turn out. My glass half full attitude comes from anticipation that we will be able to sign a talent in two years and already have him surrounded by the necessary players to make a run at a few championships. The glass half empty would be your opinion that Rush and Hibbert have reached their max, and who knows what will be available two years from now. Either way, neither of us know the outcome, its just more fun to have the half full attitude.

this is pretty incredible

And I have to agree overall with Simmons. I don’t want to be paying Dahntay Jones for the next four seasons. He’d be perfectly reasonable to sign for one year. No need to lock him in on a team that already needs to watch its budget in a major way.

He’s not good enough to merit that.

Udoka, Almond, and Carney before I had Dahntay. I remember a few years ago Bird was targeting Almond in the draft. I wonder why he didn’t make a move for him this year…