Well...it has to be done. Not sure where to go with this?

Trading away CBill without a proven PG?

Accepting AI on the team?

Hiring Curry?

Cap Space?

Getting Dice back.

Copy and pasted from Goods and Bads (http://http://www.wtfdetroit.com/forums/showthread.php?t=14798)



Good
-Flexibility/cap space this summer
-Discovering Will Bynum
-Getting Dice back after the trade
-Making the playoffs

Bad
-Trading Chauncey without a proven PG?
-Horrible coaching hire
-The lack of improvement from our young players
-Losing Dice for a month, Samb experiment failed
-Acker didn’t pan out
-Making the playoffs

I voted a D.

I like the Billups/AI move, I think that will pan out with further moves.

Hate the Curry hire.

Even with the trade and the transition that goes with it I expected a 4-5 seed and at least a winning record.

This season is a D.

Next season might be an A or B if the cap space pans out, but at this point we don't know for sure how it will play out.

Joe gets a D f#$king minus.

He brought in a farking retard to coach the team and then does nothing to fix the problem even though several good coaches are available.

He trades Billups too early and doesn't get sh*t for him.

He makes no moves at the trade deadline even though the team is struggling mightily.

He sucked A$$ with last years draft.

His big off-season signing was Kwame?? Really?? Really??

We kept AI around even though he didn't fit.

The team has seemingly lost direction and now our future depends pretty much on free agency.

We suck and it's Joe's fault.

This is tough cuz I like Joe, but damn, who else was more responsible for this season? We barely made the playoffs.

He has some pieces and cap space to make some moves, but I'm not completely sure he will make the right ones...mainly cuz of last year.

I can rationalize the trade. Taking a gamble on a hall of fame scorer with cap space as a consolation prize if you lose. Agree or not, at least a coherent argument can be made for it.

The Curry hire is inexcusable. Going into the season I just figured Joe must see something we didn't to hand the team over to such a green coach. In hindsight he was either stupid or tanking the season. Either way, I give him a D grade for the season.

The hiring of Curry & the big signing of Kwame are the 2 negatives I look at and wonder "WTF is Joe thinking?

The Iverson trade I understand - but Curry needs to be fired.

With the team we had we should have a much better record than we do. Think about it: we replaced Billups with Iverson. Stuckey, Amir and Maxiell were all expected to improve before the season started.

WTF happened? Stuckey, Amir and Maxiell didn't improve - some could claim all 3 got worse under Curry! Iverson never fit in due to our "offense".

For this season? F

For next season? We'll see what he does with the cap space.

He's a GM. His "season", so to speak, starts in July and ends in June. I'll hold off on grades until then.

But...

If you call this a "rebuilding year", then Dumars managed to get a "rebuilding year" team into the playoffs, while creating great flexibility for the future. In that light, I'd argue that his biggest error wasn't the short-term experiments of AI or Curry, but the Maxiell contract extension.

Good points Mxy, thanks for brining up Max. Imagine our cap space without him.

I go C. We all begged him to change the team, he did that the best way at the best time he could.

Trouble is those aren't his standards. He expects to contend for a title every year and he is not, so it's unacceptable to me as well. The Curry hiring was and is flat stupid. If he doesn't replace him I will start him off with a D next year....trouble is I don't know who is available.

He's a GM. His "season", so to speak, starts in July and ends in June. I'll hold off on grades until then.

But...

If you call this a "rebuilding year", then Dumars managed to get a "rebuilding year" team into the playoffs, while creating great flexibility for the future. In that light, I'd argue that his biggest error wasn't the short-term experiments of AI or Curry, but the Maxiell contract extension.

I look at it as taking a perennial contender and ECF regular and reducing them to a joke with a losing record. The fact that we made the last playoff spot with a losing record in a conference that is very weak after the first 3 or 4 teams should NOT be noted as a positive for Joe.

Joe blew the team up, has cap room to spare, picked a shitty fuck coach, his owner died.
And his team still made the playoffs
That gets an A in my book.

Joe blew the team up

Wow, really? This must have happened while I was gone. Last I heard, he just traded the starting PG.

Swami is back!

Welcome back Swami.

The Curry hiring was and is flat stupid. If he doesn't replace him I will start him off with a D next year....trouble is I don't know who is available.
Who Should Coach? (http://wtfdetroit.com/forums/showthread.php?t=14740)

Also, welcome back Swami.

Wow, really? This must have happened while I was gone. Last I heard, he just traded the starting PG.

Those Mormon missions sure take a long time, don't they?

Peeps all over the place with Mr D jr.

I just don't see how anyone can give Joe D a grade higher than a C. The only things he did that could even be considered good was to get cap space (by giving away one of our best players for too cheap) and extending Rip (debateable). He deserves ZERO credit for getting Dice back because his dumb a$$ shouldn't have traded our best big man in the first place.

He did zip in the off-season other than Kwame.

He totally f&%ked up in the draft.

He overpaid Maxiell.

He picked the shittiest coach to ever sit on a bench in the NBA and then even worse, didn't fire him.

How is any of that an above average? How can anyone say "he's rebuilding" since we have almost the identical team as last season?

This is going to be an interesting off season and I hope that Joe can redeem himself.

^ I'm having a hard time coming up with an argument against that.

It's not my argument, but one could say that they weren't happy with ECFs, which is as far as we were going without making a "bad" deal. Now Joe is king.

Dumars bet on the cap going south with the Corliss trade, and got burned when the league decided to give a "get out of over-the-cap penalty hell free" pass to the likes of New York and Dallas. Dumars is again betting on the economy going south. We'll see if he's right, if he can use that to extract goodness.

I just don't see how anyone can give Joe D a grade higher than a C. The only things he did that could even be considered good was to get cap space (by giving away one of our best players for too cheap) and extending Rip (debateable). He deserves ZERO credit for getting Dice back because his dumb a$$ shouldn't have traded our best big man in the first place.

He did zip in the off-season other than Kwame.

He totally f&%ked up in the draft.

He overpaid Maxiell.

He picked the shittiest coach to ever sit on a bench in the NBA and then even worse, didn't fire him.

How is any of that an above average? How can anyone say "he's rebuilding" since we have almost the identical team as last season?

This is going to be an interesting off season and I hope that Joe can redeem himself.

co signed

D-

trading Chauncey was a mistake, he was clearly our most important player, we lost more than a top 5 PG, his leadership can't be replaced easily, even if we get a better frontcourt this summer, this team has no leader....he was our 'star' player, he was the brain of the team, hit the clutch shots, but also was the guy who told the other guys what to do...

Remember, our "top 5" PG wasn't better than Jason Williams, Boobie Gibson, and Rajon Rondo in the past 3 ECFs. PG was a matchup we should have won versus all those teams over the course of 6 games, and Chauncey played to a draw.

A draw is being nice.

I just don't see how anyone can give Joe D a grade higher than a C. The only things he did that could even be considered good was to get cap space (by giving away one of our best players for too cheap) and extending Rip (debateable). He deserves ZERO credit for getting Dice back because his dumb a$$ shouldn't have traded our best big man in the first place.

He did zip in the off-season other than Kwame.

He totally f&%ked up in the draft.

He overpaid Maxiell.

He picked the shittiest coach to ever sit on a bench in the NBA and then even worse, didn't fire him.

How is any of that an above average? How can anyone say "he's rebuilding" since we have almost the identical team as last season?

This is going to be an interesting off season and I hope that Joe can redeem himself.
^ Good post. You've made me re-evaluate my opinion of Joe this year. Joe's gotten a lot of criticism lately for making "bad moves," but honestly my feeling is that he hasn't done much of anything at all, and the few things he has done were more bad than good.

I'm not sure this is the right way to look at things, but for the first time I'm starting to see how Joe Dumars could be perceived as being very reactive, instead of proactive. Repeatedly, over and over again, some situation with the team degrades to the point where it is simply unacceptable, and then Joe responds by making the crudest possible decision, based on convenience.

Need to trade Chauncey, and Denver won't go for it? Toss in McDyess.
No coach available? The guys seem to like Michael Curry.
Why do I need to obtain a 3? Tayshaun's doing alright.

And as time goes by, and the situation at 4-5 is looking worse and worse, Joe seems like he wants to wait until Rasheed is gone for good and then scramble to find himself another 3rd-rate big man. I hope I'm wrong.

McDyess was included in the trade to make the salaries match. Denver's decision to cut Dice was likely prearranged.

It wasn't like Chauncey didn't have good games, but he should have had more good games against non-elite players than he did. When you can't crack 10 points against Rondo in half your games, when you let Boobie off the bench be the bigtime hero twice, when you let Jason Williams and his no-cartilage knees outwork you... I can see where Dumars was coming from in trading him.

As far as C goes, remember that our current starting C was an All-Star (in a weak conference) at that position as recently as last year. The Lakers and Nets are going ga-ga over young Cs who are getting 13/8, but Sheed is the suck for going 12/7. That's not an easy problem to solve. The PF situation, and in general the situation where we have oodles of natural SGs and PFs but only one PG/SF/C is a different story.

Yeah, let's not pretend Billups played well in the ECF the last few seasons.

Besides, we weren't winning the title as currently constructed so Joe moved a piece. Does it suck that Billups was moved? Yeah, every now and then we're gnna think it's was the dumbest fucking move ever.

But (depending on free agency and draft) that deal could be the single best thing Joe has ever done. For all we know it could be the move that begins a sequence of events that leads to us winning 15 titles in a row!

Who the fuck knows what will happen?

As Van Halen once said "Right now, youth is king" and we were not getting any younger. The Billups trade opens up so many options for Joe. I'll wait until he has a chance to use those options before blasting him.

It will be interesting to see if the "put a big defender on Chauncey and watch him disappear" weakness gets exploited with denver.

Chauncey was supposed to be the motivator here, perhaps they have enough clowns high on the playoffs there to motivate him.

It will be interesting to see if the "put a big defender on Chauncey and watch him disappear" weakness gets exploited with denver.

They had bigger defenders on him all night. They put Paul on Dantay Jones and let a host of people take Billups that didn't work...Butler, Brown, Daniels, Posey. I think Paul mostly guarded Billups when Smith was in there.

I didn't see Posey on him.

But he was raining threes from poor rotation. He only made 2 non-threes. He wasn't creating except on the break really.

But he was raining threes from poor rotation. He only made 2 non-threes. He wasn't creating except on the break really.

Right, which means it wasn't like Billups took advantage of a bad matchup. He was hot and they left him open (on a lot of those looks). The Hornets played bad defense, were hacking everyone and pretty much just got outplayed.

I never saw Billups posting up Paul or anything (if it happened I missed it). Denver seemed to just outwork them.

After watching the first 3 games against Cleveland I am changing my grade to an F-. This team just will not play for Curry (because he's an incomptent turd) and Joe is sitting on his ass getting fat.

I'm not sure Joe knows how to get there from here.

I'm holding out hope that:

A: Joe is instructed to purge the long-term salaries off this team by ownership in prep for a sale.

That would likely mean the few young assets we do have (Daye, Stuckey, Jerebko, 2010 picks, future picks) would be thrown around like rag dolls in an effort to dump Rip and Maxiell.

Tay is not an issue, since his ass expires at the end of next season.

B: Joe really couldn't get anyone to take Tayshaun's soon to be expiring contract but he knows come Draft Day he'll be holding a lot of cards.

Armed with...

Youth (Jerebko, Stuckey, Daye, a mid Lotto pick, future picks)

Expiring contracts (Tay and Wilcox)

A "Reasonable" contract (Nova's "MLE-type"?)

2 20ppg SG's (costing us $10 mil per each - FUCK!)

Joe MIGHT be able to do something to wake up the fucking fanbase.

IF nothing drastic happens this coming off-season the man needs to move the fuck on.

IF nothing drastic happens this coming off-season the man needs to move the fuck on.

I don't think he survives the change in ownership regardless.

WTFDetroit, where http://kdwhigham.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/downer.jpg lives.

Can well get an emo forum going?:emo kid:

We could call it, "the glan."

^insensitive

Actually, it would probably be TOO sensitive.