Reportedly, the Rockets wanted to bring Ariza back but he didn't give us a meeting at all. Perhaps he was ready to move on? If true, re-signing him to later dump him for Oubre was not an option. https://bleacherreport.com/articles...-rejected-meeting-with-rockets-in-free-agency
yeah i remember this report but I still believe both sides already had an idea of what each were looking for once ariza went and got that phx deal. lets be real, i"m not sure how anyone can justify believing, Tilman was going to match that $15 mil that he got for a year. That's pretty much evident on the path the rockets took that offseason by not adding any big salary or significant FA's and tried their hardest to find the cheapest players available in probably the worse offseason under morey's tenure. The summer of melo, mcw, chriss, knight, ennis etc was just a nightmare from the beginning
Shams reported that the Rockets at least tried to counter instead of just letting let him walk. Unless you think we should have given him a $15M offer right off the bat it wasn't really our choice. Without being able to re-sign Ariza the most we could offer any free agent was the MLE. We weren't going to get a high level contributor for Ryno's albatross contract.
honestly I asked this before in hindsight shortly after ariza's departure, whether people would have just resigned him for that year. If the rockets decided to move into another direction then obviously you could just move him as we saw happened. he's still got another payday after that so he had plenty of value. again this was in hindsight, but really the only thing you're impacting is LTS. The rockets still haven't found a replacement to him or LMM to this day. and the rockets sat on that mle bc of LTS. just too many signs telling me that the rockets/ariza already knew what directions they were going
... Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum have done their level best, but just about everything else that could go wrong has gone wrong for these Blazers. Well, except for one thing—the one thing, ironically, that so many of us expected to go wrong. I believe it is time to apologize to Melo 5. (Or, I guess, Mel00.) It’s been nearly two months, and Carmelo Anthony has done exactly what the Blazers hoped he would when they signed him. He has provided legitimate NBA-caliber minutes to staunch the bleeding in their decimated frontcourt. He has given Terry Stotts an option to reduce the creative burden on Lillard and McCollum by creating, taking, and making shots; after more than a year on the shelf, Anthony’s averaging 16.1 points, 5.9 rebounds, and 1.2 assists in 31.5 minutes per game, shooting 39.8 percent from 3-point range and posting a better true shooting percentage than he managed during his lone season in Oklahoma City and his brief stint in Houston. https://www.theringer.com/nba/2020/...interesting-carmelo-anthony-blazers-grizzlies
https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/28467825/let-go-road-trip-nba-best-bucks Making friends around the league.
Melo does need a HUGE apology from a) the media and b) the slow bus fans (a few in this thread) that said he was washed up. I of course defended him after his departure from Houston, knowing it wasn't about basketball but the Rockets just trying to blackball him. Looking back in hindsight, we KNOW who was really trolling and who wasn't
Well below league average scoring efficiency? Check Putrid win shares per 48? Check Negative box score plus minus in offense and defense? Check Below league average PER? Check NEGATIVE wins above replacement? Check NEGATIVE rpm? Check Melo still clearly garbage.
Portland is out here sitting at 16-24 nuff said. garbage player who has a negative impact on winning. but most of us already knew that
I agree, Carmelo isn’t making the Blazers any better. They are out of the playoffs by a lot. I don’t know if they have major injuries, but they aren’t playing like a top team. Carmelo had a golden opportunity in Houston many many years ago. But he went for the glitz on New York. Carmelo is a good player, but does his offense pay the credit card bill left open by his inferior defensive abilities?
Now that Airemy Lin is out of the league, Melo is the player you want on your team getting plenty of minutes to make sure you get a nice lottery pic. Failblazers rebuilding model. lulz
They are also 2 games out of the 14th spot lol. Raise your hand if you want to watch Melo get isolated on defense in the playoffs once again.
The Blazers lost Nurkic to injury. They took Melo as Nurkic's starter replacement. To be fair, they did slightly better after getting Melo. So he is probably not totally useless. That just shows you how thin they were before Melo joined. (The next in line is Anthony Tolliver.) But that team was supposed to be a playoffs team with Nurkic healthy. So Melo as the replacement is still much, much below what they could have been.