Friday Bolts – 8.2.13
Rob Mahoney of SI.com on Jeremy Lamb: “While the hope is that Lamb becomes a rotation-caliber perimeter shooter, he doesn’t seem to be a likely candidate to replicate Martin’s success as a creator in the two-man game. Martin isn’t a standout passer, but his chemistry with Nick Collison gave Oklahoma City a solid fallback option in its short-handed lineups. By getting some separation from his man and maneuvering the lane in fits and starts, Martin was able to draw fouls and create passing angles off the dribble. Lamb, by comparison, manages to get a step on his man and attract a few defenders, but he seems hesitant to make the lead passes necessary to generate consistent offense out of that basic pick-and-roll set. That could change as Lamb plays more and gets more comfortable with his Thunder teammates, but right now there’s not much reason to be optimistic about his ability to work off a high screen.”
Matthew Yglesias of Slate: “You might want to ask yourself at this point how is it that the Thunder ended up playing in such a small and relatively poor place like Oklahoma City? Wouldn’t it make more sense for an NBA team to be in a place like, say, Seattle that has a much larger and more prosperous population? Well it turns out that there was an NBA team in Seattle and a consortium of rich Oklahomans led by Clayton Bennett purchased it. Since these guys lived in Oklahoma, they wanted to move the team to Oklahoma where they live. Which is nice for them, except Oklahoma turns out to not have any large media markets. Them’s the breaks, I guess. The fact that the Lakers (rather than, say, the Knicks) have the richest local TV contract in the league is a reminder that there’s more to the business of basketball than being located in a large city. But a successful basketball team located in Seattle (3.5 million people in the MSA) is going to be more lucrative than a team located in Oklahoma City (1.3 million people in the MSA), which makes it more financially worthwhile to invest in things like a long-term contract for James Harden.”
Marc Stein of ESPN.com on the Nets: “Adding Anderson on a minimum deal nudges those figures to $30,463,009 … and a mind-numbing $87,199,293. So the signing of a player due to make just under $1 million next season will cost Brooklyn more than $4 million in additional taxes under the league’s much more punitive tax laws that go into effect this season. See? That was fun, wasn’t it?”
Brett Koremenos of Grantland with a great read on the new role player market: “If you’re an NBA-caliber perimeter marksman right now, you’re in demand. And it’s a seller’s market. As teams across the league place more emphasis on shooting, the contracts for shooters go up into the range of those middle-class salaries that teams like, say, the Rockets avoid. Houston’s progressive front office has shown that you can find effective role players in the second round of the draft (Chandler Parsons, Chase Budinger), by digging around the free-agent scrap heap, or looking to Europe and beyond (Patrick Beverley). Other teams are clearly coming around to this way of thinking. What Datome signifies is that teams, even those with questionable decision-makers like Joe Dumars, are open to the volatility that comes with that third option.”