I’m not about to do a FireJoeMorgan (RIP) style post here, but I do want to point out some misinformation, bordering on idiocy coming from an off-season review penned by SI’s Chris Mannix. In the article, Mannix grades the Nets with a C- for their off-season moves, something I don’t necessarily agree with, but I can’t really argue with since the team did strike out on the big free agents and was unlucky enough to not get the #1 pick in the lottery. So fair game there. But here’s one of Mannix’s justifications for the grade (emphasis mine):
Like their cross-river counterparts, the Nets were eyeing the big prizes in free agency. When they missed out, they committed a combined $57 million to Travis Outlaw, Jordan Farmar and Johan Petro. For a team going nowhere this season, preserving that cap space might have been a better bet.
Say what you will about some of the contracts doled out by the Nets – they may have overpaid for Outlaw and Petro, though I think they got great value on Farmar and Morrow – but this idea of having to preserve cap space … teams are mandated by the league to spend a certain amount of money of their players and the Nets are barely spending enough this off-season. They are actually preserving as much cap space as they can get away with. So short of signing a bunch of players to one-year deals, or trading their core for a bunch of expiring contracts, which are both ill advised and unfeasible, I don’t get why Mannix is calling the Nets out for not doing exactly what they actually did.
This is one of the big reason national writers drive me nuts. Outside of the obvious destinations (Miami, Boston, LA), they don’t follow the league as a whole and probably most of these guys have to google search to get facts on lower rung teams like the Nets and the Timberwolves. Now, I don’t profess to be a league-wide expert myself, but that’s why I do most of my analysis for a Nets-blog because I do follow the Nets like they’re a drug. I just wished some of these national columnist would back away from this league-wide stories because it exposes them as misinformed.
