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库班关于放走纳什的解释
“How could you let Steve Nash go?” It’s a question I’m going to hear for a long time. It’s a question Mavs fans deserve an answer to. As best I can, I will try to go through all the logical, illogical, emotional and financial scenarios that we explored in putting together the offer that we thought would keep Steve a Dallas Maverick for the rest of his career.
In the beginning….
When I first got to the Mavs, Steve’s name was one that was often included in our trade proposals. At the time, he was an often injured, unproven point guard of a team that hadn’t been to the playoffs in 10 years with a brand new, long-term contract. As is often the case in the NBA, the best deals are the ones that you don’t do. During and following the ‘99-’00 season, we explored several deals that included Steve. In every single case, no team wanted Steve and his contract. It seems so stupid looking back. It also seems like it was only yesterday. It was almost 5 years ago.
That’s the thing about the NBA, seasons don’t go by quickly, but the years do. One day a player is untradeable from a perennial loser, the next day he is a star on a perennial playoff team…and vice versa. Fortunately, we didn’t become a victim of our stupidity. The talent, work ethic and perseverance that Donnie and Nellie saw in Steve blossomed.
Steve went from a player that was booed by Dallas fans as an overpaid failure, to a two-time all star loved by everyone who knows him or watches him play. I felt the same way. Steve was more than just a player on our team for me as well. We got to be friends. My first year, when we visited Vancouver and Phoenix, he made sure his friends became my friends. They still are. How can you not have a great time with and love a guy whose best friends include a guy named SmallBalls, and another guy who goes out with us wearing a shirt that says “I F**ked Your Boyfriend”?
Three years in a row we were part of a Mavs group that went to the All Star game together, and had a great time. Although we didn’t really get a chance to socialize during this past season, Steve was one of the players I could phone and use as a sounding board. Whether the team was going well or poorly, we could talk about anything and everything that was happening with the team, knowing it would be honest and confidential. This past year was difficult for all of us, and we talked more than usual, I know it helped me. I think it helped Steve as well
I guess this was all a way of saying that I wanted — and expected — Steve to be a Maverick for life. Making that happen meant having to deal with contracts and agents, and that’s often where things get difficult.
With Steve in an option year of his contract, our first opportunity was to extend his contract. The process started during the season when we asked his agent, Bill Duffy, if he would consider allowing Steve to accept an extension. We said we would extend him out the full term that we were allowed — 6 years. Financially, we would be able to increase his salary by the 12pct base (This means we take 12pct times his last year salary, and then we can increase his salary by that same amount each year). The upside to Steve would be the certainty of having the extension, and the protection against a career ending or impacting injury during the season that might affect his value as a free agent.
Bill and Steve decided that it wasn’t in Steve’s best interest. That was understandable. It also meant that Steve knew he was going to be a free agent. Coming off a year where we went to the Western Conference Finals, and he made the All-Star team, it made sense.
At that point, we both decided separately, and agreed together, not to negotiate during the season. To me, that was a good thing. Steve couldn’t officially become a free agent until he opted out, by getting the message to the media, it would reduce the continuous barrage of questions from them. Hearing the same question over and over and over and over, even though you give the same answer over and over and over is distracting, draining and a waste of everyone’s time.
On top of the media, I don’t have the greatest relationship with his agent. I’m not a big fan of his and he knows it. There have been multiple times where we have expressed an interest in players of his, and he has placed them other places without even talking to us first. I’m not sure how or why we got to this point, but last summer was a perfect example. We asked him about Olowakandi, and he told us he didn’t think he would be available for the mid-level exception. Next thing you know, he signs for the mid-level exception with the TWolves. That’s his choice, but I don’t think he even presented the Mavs as an option to Mike.
Bottom line, I felt that my relationship with his agent could create tension, and I didn’t want that during the season. To the credit of Steve and Duffy, it didn’t.
Which brings us to July 1st — the first day of Free Agency.
Steve and his girlfriend had spent the summer traveling overseas. We exchanged a few emails, and he let us know that he would be back June 30th.
We asked Steve’s agent to get us information on how much money he was looking for. Not unexpectedly, rather than giving us “his price”, he faxed us a presentation that really set the tone for what we were up against. These presentations, which agents love to do, would get laughed at in any normal business environment. They show all kinds of numbers and stats reflecting a player’s performance. What makes them unusable from our perspective is, as you would expect from a player’s agent, it only shows the numbers that reflect the player’s performance positively. It’s not an honest assessment at all. What makes these presentations dangerous is that they always only include salary comparisons that only include players whose salaries are at the top of the pay scale. The performance comparisons included Chauncey Billups, Sam Cassell, Jason Williams, Gary Peyton, Tony Parker and Rafer Alston among other point guards, but the salary “comps” only included those point guards who were maxed out or very close — Jason Kidd, Baron Davis, Mike Bibby, etc. What makes these things dangerous is that the agents show them to the players and use them to set the players’ contract expectations.
It’s easy to find stats that make Steve Nash look good. There are a ton of them. It’s easy to see the intangibles that make Steve Nash valuable. What is difficult is to make honest assessments about where the team is and where it is going and how Steve or any player fits into a championship.
On the intangibles side, Steve is a great guy to have in the locker room. He gets along with everyone. He isn’t going to give a locker room speech. He isn’t going to get in anyone’s face. He isn’t going to get into other people’s business. He is definitely what I would call a quiet leader. He leads by example. He is the kind of guy anyone in any business would want to go to war with. He gives 120 pct and all of his teammates see that.
So on the intangible side, Steve is incredibly valuable.
It’s also that kamikaze spirit and approach to the game that is Steve’s greatest weakness. The most improbable stat from Steve Nash is how few games he has missed in the last few years. I have seen the pain he goes through before, during and after games, yet he still manages to trot out there and play at an incredibly high level. To protect Steve, Nellie has tried to limit Steve’s minutes to 33 to 35 per game, with the goal of getting that number lower and lower every year. It’s why we drafted Devin Harris. It’s why we would draft a point guard at all. We have Marquis Daniels as our backup point. Yet we still felt that we needed to have another point guard on the roster. We wanted to have someone who could come in and play this year, plus be trained by Steve as our point guard of the future. This would allow us to use Steve more effectively and reduce his chance of injury. Our feeling was that we were fortunate that Steve had been so injury free. That it was only a matter of time before his style of play caught up with him. Between Marquis and Devin, we felt like we had taken the steps to not only protect Steve for this year, by not having to overplay him, but also we could extend his career because of the reduced minutes. We were going to have 3 point guards on the roster, all of whom we felt would be contributors.
With all that said, the issue still came down to how to determine what you pay any player. We had made the commitment to pay 3 point guards. But how much should I offer Steve?
Figuring that out is far more emotion and art than science. It’s Donnie and Nellie’s job to pick which players we go after. It’s my job to figure out how much to pay them.
In the pre-luxury tax days it was easier. If you made a mistake and overpaid someone, it wasn’t difficult to move him. Teams would take chances. I will trade your mistake for mine, and we can see what happens. Now, if a team is at risk of going over the tax threshold or the cap, they won’t make that move. Not only does the cost double for tax teams, but for non-tax teams, taking just a little bit more salary back than you gave up can mean the difference between being under the tax threshold and collecting millions, or being over the tax threshold and forfeiting your share of the tax money and paying a tax on top of that.
Not to get too far off topic, but the crazy thing is, no one in the NBA ever expected that the luxury tax would ever be activated. The league wouldn’t say it directly, but every capologist or GM in the league would tell you that the TV contract was going up in value every year. That meant the tax would be very unlikely to kick in. That is until the TV revenue stopped going up and in fact went down and the tax kicked in with a vengeance. Now that we have had two years of the tax and are looking at a 3rd, the amount of flexibility to move players with big contracts has fallen considerably, even for last year guys. Yes, deals can be done, but it is far more difficult. If you sign a player to a long term, high dollar contract, the expectation has to be that you will not be able to trade that person…ever. He will play out his contract. If at some point in that contract, the player no longer plays at the level he was at when the contract was signed, you have a huge problem.
The problem is not just how much money you have to pay. The bigger problem is that you start chewing up roster spots and you lose the ability to add players. For better or worse, because we “went for it” in making trades, hoping that the deals could get us to a championship, we have ended up with several players who don’t get much playing time with us, yet have contracts that are difficult if not impossible to trade. You can only have so many of those before you have zero roster spots available and you have to trade players who really do contribute in order to package them with less desirable contracts and free up spots that can be used to add draft picks or players signed with the mid-level or some other exception.
Lastly, there were two significant business variables that played a big part in how I decided what to offer Steve, or any other free agent for that matter. The first is that the Collective Bargaining Agreement is coming up for renewal by the end of this year. I have no doubt that there will be changes. If the changes are conservative financially, which I can guess that they will be, then high dollar players with older contracts will be even more difficult, if not impossible to trade. The 2nd element was that the national NBA TV contract expires in 4 years. We saw TV revenue decline with our last TV deal, and given the climate that exists in the TV biz today, until something changes, a reasonable businessperson would have to expect that there is a material chance that the dollar value of the next deal could be less and possibly even drastically less. If I’m wrong and the contract goes up, great. That’s gravy, and when it does I’m happy to give it to the players. On the flipside, if it doesn’t, and the league’s largest source of revenue declines — or even disappears — teams are still on the hook for those salaries. In what is probably the ultimate stupidity of any business I have been involved with, we sign contracts that are guaranteed for periods when none of our revenue sources are.
If you look at the Mavs’ contracts, only our rookies and soon Marquis Daniels have contracts that extend beyond the TV contract, and in each there is an opt out. In the event there is a draconian change in how we do business in the NBA, I should be ok. If the business of the NBA excels I have a boatload of cap room to reward Dirk, Marquis and the team and add new players.
Which brings me back to Steve. I had fears in terms of his durability. I had roster fears. I had the business fears cited above. I had to come up with a number. So I did the only natural thing, I tried to figure out what the other guys might pay him.
Every summer at this time, agents go to the media, or have their friends do it, and talk about how much in demand a player is. Every agent wants it in the media that every team wants his guy. There is always far more smoke than fire. The key is separating one from the other. Agents are a good source of information. There are quite a few that are straight up, just looking for a good deal for their guys. They will share information with you about their guys, and that in turn gives a good feel about what each team may or may not do. After making my calls and Donnie making his calls to friends and family around the league, we pretty much knew that the only team with a real interest in Steve was Phoenix. The Suns were out there telling everyone they were going after Kobe Bryant, but I just couldn’t see that happening. Mr. Colangelo had gone through a lot with his team a few years ago and I couldn’t see him dealing with the off-court uncertainty attached to Kobe. So I needed to try to figure out what the Suns might offer.
The Suns had just taken on new owners, so I didn’t know if they came in flush with cash, or would be conservative. So that didn’t help me. What I felt strongly about is that the Suns would want to add more than one player with their cap room. They were doing everything possible to maximize their cap space available, beyond what would be considered a max out amount, so that cemented that perspective. Looking at their roster, they probably were looking for a center to go along with their interest in Steve.
To gain the most flexibility with that cap room, after signing Steve, they would need to retain more cap space than the mid-level exception. The big problem is that although teams are out there saying how much cap room they have, they don’t really know how much cap room they have. The league doesn’t give us the cap number until we can start signing free agents.
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发表于 2004-7-2 08:54:00
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发表于 2004-7-2 10:30:00
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