re: Pelicans, Kings, and Blazers agree to Tyreke Evans/Withey trade

Well guess i'll now be excited about the news and crack open a beer, cause Merica

Sons are staaaaaaaacked

NBA is fuuuuuuuuuuucked

Baby Jesus certainly did this for 'MURICA, and the Pelicans.

frick YEAH!

Came on the girlfriends of kings fans everywhere...

To be clear, it wasn't Matt Moore (guy who runs HP twitter) who wrote it, but another one of their writers. Apparently MM doesn't see it as negative as I do, so I'm trying to read it again. If it isn't totally negative then it's worded very strangely.

quote:

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Then for some reason the Pelicans have seemed to lose their patience for progress. They drafted Nerlens Noel, but flipped him to Philadelphia to take on Jrue Holliday and a little extra salary. Okay, fine, Holliday is an established All-Star and Noel is little more than a complete unknown at this point. Despite them taking on a little extra salary in the deal, they’d still have room for this summer and move Rivers to a more natural position: the bench shooting guard. If nothing else they now had solid point guard depth with Brian Roberts factored in.

Now, fast forward to this week where the team finalized a 4-year/$44 million dollar offer sheet with free agent Tyreke Evans. Evans is a nice player who could possibly do well with a change of scenery, but the Pelicans will be short on cap space with no other pending moves. Of course cap space has never won anyone a championship, but with the current construct of New Orleans’ roster they’re attempting to build a team that is capable of competing for the eighth seed, at best. This is basically the equivalent of speeding by someone on the road and accelerating to a red light.

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I mean, is that not an extremely bleak outlook on this group?

So has Evans lightened up on his stance of playing SF for this team? I'm excited to see Holiday, Gordon and Evans on the court at the same time

The only negative is if Eric Gordon is terrible/injured, otherwise Jrue is an all star PG. Tyreke has tons of potential and durable, then obviously Anthony Davis and Ryan Anderson.

The biggest negative to this team to me is that were in the Western Conference

He words it pretty negatively but it's actually what everyone on here has been saying. Demps is making these moves with the hope that Gordon stays healthy and regains his 20+ per game form, Davis emerges as 20/10 all-star, Evans is reinvigorated with a change of scenery, and Ryno and Holiday both improve their officeincy playing with better offensive talent.

IMO taking risks like this is the only way to build a small market team to contention, which this writer also acknowledges. He just also acknowledges the possibility that Gordon is injury plagued again, Tyreke is the exact same player he was in Sacramento, and Davis still has some growing pains in his second year. In which case we aren't THAT much better

quote:

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He words it pretty negatively but it's actually what everyone on here has been saying. Demps is making these moves with the hope that Gordon stays healthy and regains his 20+ per game form, Davis emerges as 20/10 all-star, Evans is reinvigorated with a change of scenery, and Ryno and Holiday both improve their officeincy playing with better offensive talent.

IMO taking risks like this is the only way to build a small market team to contention, which this writer also acknowledges. He just also acknowledges the possibility that Gordon is injury plagued again, Tyreke is the exact same player he was in Sacramento, and Davis still has some growing pains in his second year. In which case we aren't THAT much better

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Fair enough if you put it that way. I just see that Davis is pretty much guaranteed to be a top player in the league, Tyreke just had a great season and now has a defined role in a much more stable organization, Holiday already made an All-Star game and at 23 certainly shouldn't get worse, and Anderson was about what we expected and should keep that up. The only real big unknown is what happens with Gordon, but even with him struggling I don't see how an 8th seed is the ceiling.

6th man, Manu Ginobili-esque role is much more defined than moving around from PG, SG, and SF with what the Kings were trying to do.