[2 of 2] Pistons' WORST move of the offseason

Yes, I have seen LeBron do it, too, but you know who does not seem to do it much?

Rip and Kobe. I wonder if they are quicker and can get that first step, or if they just never learned to do it.

Too early to tell which was the worst, but I hated losing Ben for nothing, not firing Flip, and resigning Dupree.

Those three things have me seriously questioning Joe Dumars. What happened to the smart/cunning/ruthless/svelt/OG/GM?

He now resembles a bumbling overweight middle-aged middle manager in a cardigan sweater who is routinely outgunned and outmanuevered by the younger smarter employees but manages to hang on to his job through blind devotion and loyalty to the Billionaire who runs the company. :P

Giving away assets and replacing them with cheap substitutes doesn't win in the NBA. This has been a very bad off-season indeed.

Not so much that losing Ben was bad. If a guy wants to go then you can't make him stay. The money just was adding insult to the injury.

Losing Ben and not getting anything in return. Now that was bad!!!! If we could have gotten something anything for Ben it would have been nice. A legit back up point guard or combo guard or a draft pick. We should have gotten something.

No brainer that it was losing Big Ben.

Both Ben and Joe had to make some pretty quick decisions this offseason, yeah. Even as a Flip-hater by February, I didn't anticipate things would go this bad...

Agree x 500............it was not just losing ben........it was losing ben and getting nothing in return. no sign and trade, nothing.....look at what the pacers did with peja..........i think ben was very unhappy.........he really stuck it too joe for choosing flip over him.

Marc Stein's assessment of the Pistons' offseason:

I'd love to join the Better Off Without Ben chorus. But I can't. If the Pistons still had Milicic, perhaps. If the Pistons had signed Bonzi Wells as their Wallace replacement instead of Nazr Mohammed, maybe. But they don't and they couldn't, thanks to an unlikely chain of events.
The Pistons knew it eventually would be too expensive to re-sign Milicic and Wallace but only consented to trading Darko in February because they believed Big Ben was staying. Yet worse, in my view, was to follow Wallace's exodus: The Pistons quickly signed Mohammed as Big Ben's replacement, only for Wells -- a free agent they loved -- to fall unexpectedly into Mohammed's price range. When Sacramento withdrew its $7 million-a-season offer, Wells was suddenly available for the $5.2 million midlevel exception. But by then, Detroit's emergency fund was gone, robbing the Pistons of an ideal addition to their new 'Sheed-at-center plans.


Full article: ESPN.com - NBA - Stein: Ranking each East team on its summer moves

Ggazoo beat me to adding the Stein article. For what it is worth he rates Miami's offseason the best and Chicago's the second best in the Eastern Conf. while Detroit came in at 11th (behind NYKnicks).

I think he hit the nail on the head with losing Ben AND Darko being the crux of the problem. The Darko trade made no sense except that it freed up $ to re-sign Ben without going into luxury tax land. Before making that Darko (and Arroyo) trade there needed to be a real understanding that Ben was going to resign (a signed extension or at least a handshake) and obviously that was not the case. To go from having both of those guys to having Nazr, no PT in the playoffs, Mohammed is just sad.

I'm just sort of wondering what moves Joe Dumars would make if he could do it over again. Not in drafting, but purely in resigning players vs. letting them go and trades.

What if we had the following roster right now?

PG- Billups, Mike James
SG- Rip, Acker
SF- Tay, Delfino
PF- Sheed, Corliss
C- Okur, Darko

3rd team- Dale Davis, JMax, Amir Johnson, Lindsay Hunter

Our total salary for 2006/07 would only be $61.5 Mill, or just under what it is now. There would only be 10 teams with cheaper payrolls and we would have a nice combination of youth and experience.

I'm sure I'm missing a lot of complexity, but that is why I'm throwing it out there. What would have made this roster impossible?

in a heartbeat.

darko would sign for less to stay with the pistons.

it is better than what we have now. depending on who the coach is.

we definitely would have been to the finals in 2005 and won it. we would have went to the finals in 2006 and won it also. big men were are weakness the last couple of years.

I guess what I am trying to assess is how much we are handicapped by being frugal. It seems like we have let some pretty good players go because we would have had to pay them market value.

Maybe this run from 2003 through now is a bit of a fluke because we stumbled upon players who greatly outperformed their contracts.

Good thinking and assessment should be made. Sooner or later you will pay the price for not having a rotation of players that allow you too adapt. The latter can be ownership, organizational, coaching, and rule changes. One or many in combination can and will make a difference on some clubs.

Zeke would be a catastrophic coaching mistake as this current organization now stands. Once you start to nibble at the framework and how the organizational pieces behave (reinforcing or pulling apart), you start to think about historical patterns.

The current last (7) teams per NBA Salary Report:

(24) Detroit Pistons...........$58,349,927
(25) Seattle SuperSonics....$57,644,508
(26) Chicago Bulls..............$54,754,904
(27) NOK..........................$53,185,473
(28) Toronto Raptors..........$51,131,694
(29) Atlanta Hawks............$45,690,622
(30) Charlotte Bobcats........$38,032,540

wow I did not think we were that cheap. How much below luxury threshold are we?

$700,000 more than the Sonics. Nice job Joe, aour bang for the buck ratio is tremendous!

That is exactly right.

Isn't our only problem that we are not spending the $ on the free agents? With draft picks and trades, everything is pretty restricted and we've been playing the game fairly well.

The worst move in the last two season was signing Sheed instead of Okur. Okur is coming up big time clutch for the Mormons while Sheed complains about his ankle and gets T'd up.

Sheed helped us win in '04 no doubt. But we should not have given him a contract after that but signed Okur instead. But as I recall Sheed was signed and Okur left while Brown was still coach. Sheed was Brown's man all the way, both being North Carolina alumni and Okur is a European and we all know what Brown thinks of European basketball players. Plus Okur thought Brown was a jerk so it is easy to understand why things played out the way they did.

But it will always leave a bad taste in my mouth.