btw, to answer some of my own questions, it seems it's possible that houston is moving on from fvv. depending on how that's accomplished, it could make space to get smart and keep eason.
I would imagine that there are scenarios in which we’d definitely be down to retain Smart at that contract value, we just have too many other more significant plans being worked on. Need the cap flexibility and can’t commit yet, so maybe this all is even just smoke from Smart’s camp to put pressure on the Lakers.
lol... we dumb AF if we lose him for that. You are dealing with timing? Fine. Tell his damn agent we gonna hotdog stand him
i don't get why he'd leave for less than the room exception. we could have held that for him no matter what (over the cap, we could have used the mle to offer the same money). so this means we probably weren't offering anything at all. which sucks. but it could mean that we had something else ready. may take a few days for the dust to settle. btw, tpmle deals only go two years, so again, if houston's doing this, they're dipping into mle, which means they have other things to do.
^ It probably means we have a plan, or at least I need to believe that we do. Letting Bron go makes sense, but letting Smart go just isn't productive except if you really know what you're doing. We'll see.
you have to either believe that maximum flexibility is crucial OR you have to think you have a player who can replace smart already waiting to join. only ways it makes sense to let him walk at that number.
Marcus WAS our defense last year, he was the vocal leader, the leader by example, he changed the culture. We better not be letting him walk for cheap without a plan to replace that. What worries me is that we clearly don’t value that type of player here though, we let Caruso walk, and we let Goodwin walk to sign Smart. So really in a way we lose both of those guys for nothing if Smart walks.
i don't like it, but i could see the counterargument being that we picked both up for basically nothing. but i'm on everyone's team here; at this moment i'm not understanding why smart wasn't a higher priority for us.
We keep fumbling good players - for 7m? We could have brought him back with non bird rights at 6.4 and gave him more next year. That’s how easy we could of retained him.
Sigh losing another player who I loved watching. Would have been freaking poetic if the Lakers would have won a title with Smart
