Charlotte Hornets have formally offered their GM post to Mitch Kupchak
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Vanquish
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PostPosted: Sun Apr 08, 2018 7:43 pm    Post subject:

slavavov wrote:
Omar Little wrote:
The idea that the Lakers were going to move what they did to get Howard and then trade him mid season, when he was starting to come around and when there was really no one willing to trade anything for him is silly. Fwiw, the biggest mistake of that whole period was not trading Pau the minute they acquired Howard (those two were never going to work together as Jerry West rightly predicted) followed by interviewing and then not hiring Phil.

I know it's easy to say this in retrospect, but maybe they shouldn't have even traded for Howard in the first place, knowing he could've been a one year rental and that he was coming off of back surgery. Just move Pau to center, and use Bynum as an asset to make the team more of an up-tempo squad to get with the times. Or even better, don't even trade for CP3 knowing that Stern was the acting owner of that team.

I'll give Mitch credit for trying to keep that team fresh, but it should've been done a different way. Not sure if Mitch or Jim Buss was to blame for those miscues.


Sometimes, I think we are way too hard on Mitch. If Stern haven't vetoed the Chris Paul trade, we might actually still be relevant today, instead of being in a lottery for 5 years. It was not just about losing Chris Paul, but Mitch was forced to trade Odom ASAP because of it, and even though Pau still played like a professional, you could tell he had mentally checked out and was just waiting for his contract to end. Mitch also had Jim Buss as a boss and had to work with very public yet unrealistic deadlines, so there's that. I think if Jimbo didn't guarantee a return to the playoffs, Mitch's strategy might have been different.

The CP3 case, I don't think anyone could have predicted. It is established practice that once a trade has been agreed on by all GMs, it's a done deal. Mitch specifically said, that no GM would ever agree to a trade without owner approval. Stern did a dirtbag though technically legal move - his excuse of not having given the greenlight before was total BS, he change his mind once he got blowback from the small market owners. Given this, I don't think any GM - not just Mitch - could have anticipated it.

Howard's case, I can also understand, they were trading for the future. And yes Howard's preference was to go to Brooklyn but look at PG13. There's a real chance he might want to stay in OKC given the bonds he had made over there. I think Mitch was not being unreasonable in betting that Howard would do the same here. Howard just had a specific personality which was only obvious once one knows him well enough of which we didn't.

Mitch made some mistakes but a lot of them were only mistakes in hindsight. A lot of what Mitch did, aiming for high profile Free Agents/trades were what worked for us as recently as the mid 2000s. The market changed, and Mitch didn't have the benefit of looking back after the fact to realize what he was doing were mistakes at the time.

My only real problem with Mitch was that he didn't realise we couldn't amnesty a player under the current CBA. If he was aware of that, we might not have had the Moz/Deng problem.


Last edited by Vanquish on Sun Apr 08, 2018 7:53 pm; edited 1 time in total
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slavavov
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PostPosted: Sun Apr 08, 2018 7:53 pm    Post subject:

Vanquish wrote:
slavavov wrote:
Omar Little wrote:
The idea that the Lakers were going to move what they did to get Howard and then trade him mid season, when he was starting to come around and when there was really no one willing to trade anything for him is silly. Fwiw, the biggest mistake of that whole period was not trading Pau the minute they acquired Howard (those two were never going to work together as Jerry West rightly predicted) followed by interviewing and then not hiring Phil.

I know it's easy to say this in retrospect, but maybe they shouldn't have even traded for Howard in the first place, knowing he could've been a one year rental and that he was coming off of back surgery. Just move Pau to center, and use Bynum as an asset to make the team more of an up-tempo squad to get with the times. Or even better, don't even trade for CP3 knowing that Stern was the acting owner of that team.

I'll give Mitch credit for trying to keep that team fresh, but it should've been done a different way. Not sure if Mitch or Jim Buss was to blame for those miscues.


Sometimes, I think we are way too hard on Mitch. If Stern haven't vetoed the Chris Paul trade, we might actually still be relevant today, instead of being in a lottery for 5 years. It was not just about losing Chris Paul, but Mitch was forced to trade Odom ASAP because of it, and even though Pau still played like a professional, you could tell he had mentally checked out and was just waiting for his contract to end. Mitch also had Jim Buss as a boss and had to work with very public yet unrealistic deadlines, so there's that. I think if Jimbo didn't guarantee a return to the playoffs, Mitch's strategy might have been different.

The CP3 case, I don't think anyone could have predicted. It is established practice that once a trade has been agreed on by all GMs, it's a done deal. Mitch specifically said, that no GM would ever agree to a trade without owner approval. Stern did a dirtbag though technically legal move - his excuse of not having given the greenlight before was total BS, he change his mind once he got blowback from the small market owners. Given this, I don't think any GM - not just Mitch - could have anticipated it.

Howard's case, I can also understand, they were trading for the future. And yes Howard's preference was to go to Brooklyn but look at PG13. There's a real chance he might want to stay in OKC given the bonds he had made over there. I think Mitch was not being unreasonable in betting that Howard would do the same here. Howard just had a specific personality which was only obvious once one knows him well enough of which we didn't.

Mitch made some mistakes but a lot of them were only mistakes in hindsight. A lot of what Mitch did, aiming for high profile Free Agents/trades were what worked for us as recently as the mid 2000s. The market changed, and Mitch didn't have the benefit of looking back after the fact to realize what he was doing were mistakes at the time.

Everything you just said is fair and reasonable. However, when you have a championship caliber team that just needs reloading, there's no real need to take significant gambles like trading for Howard when you didn't know if he would want to stay. I just don't think breaking up that core (Kobe-Pau-Odom) was the right thing to do at the time.

This is where I wonder if a healthy Dr. Buss could've changed things. He had vision and was really shrewd. He knew how to take smart risks and benefit from them.
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PostPosted: Sun Apr 08, 2018 8:07 pm    Post subject:

slavavov wrote:

This is where I wonder if a healthy Dr. Buss could've changed things. He had vision and was really shrewd. He knew how to take smart risks and benefit from them.


I 100% agree with you and think it would have. Mitch had to work within Jimbo's idiotic parameters and that led to a lot of Mitch's mistakes. Heck, even if the boss was Jeanie and not Dr Buss, I think Mitch might have still have had his job today and we wouldn't have spent 5 years in the lottery and counting.
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PostPosted: Mon Apr 09, 2018 9:35 am    Post subject:

slavavov wrote:
Omar Little wrote:
The idea that the Lakers were going to move what they did to get Howard and then trade him mid season, when he was starting to come around and when there was really no one willing to trade anything for him is silly. Fwiw, the biggest mistake of that whole period was not trading Pau the minute they acquired Howard (those two were never going to work together as Jerry West rightly predicted) followed by interviewing and then not hiring Phil.

I know it's easy to say this in retrospect, but maybe they shouldn't have even traded for Howard in the first place, knowing he could've been a one year rental and that he was coming off of back surgery. Just move Pau to center, and use Bynum as an asset to make the team more of an up-tempo squad to get with the times. Or even better, don't even trade for CP3 knowing that Stern was the acting owner of that team.

I'll give Mitch credit for trying to keep that team fresh, but it should've been done a different way. Not sure if Mitch or Jim Buss was to blame for those miscues.


I probably had 10,000 posts on why we shouldn’t trade for Howard.
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