re: Who Stays, Who Goes?

quote:

---

Jrue will not be back.
Nothing to do with cap numbers.
He does not want to be in New Orleans and would prefer to play elsewhere.

---

show your work

Clean House. I would trade Holliday to New York for Melo; Get rid of Asik and Ajinca;Get rid of Cunningham, Frazier and D-Mo; Pay Cousins and find some young talent and veteran leadership in Free Agency and the draft; Get rid of Demps

I agree he plays hard but he has absolutely no offensive skill set; teams leave him wide open in the corner while they double Davis.

He shot 39% from three this year.

quote:

---

I would trade Holliday to New York for Melo

---

Both players would have to agree to go to the other team. I doubt that would ever happen. Then Melo would only be locked up for one season, and I can't imagine him staying in a small market. I think it would be scary to not have built something around Cousins and Davis when they are having to decide to renew their contracts. I think they are an awesome tandem that can be successful on a team together; however, I think they need a competent quasi all-star player on the perimeter to be a contender.

If the Pelicans keep Holiday and slightly improve depth they can be really good. I think moving on from Gentry would be good. While Demps has made some errors I think it would be a bold move to fire the guy who did great in bringing in Cousins and rediscovering an improved Crawford the later half of the season. The team still has picks intact in future offseasons to improve going forward also. That is amazing considering he was able to bring in a young All-NBA player. The moves surrounding Omer Asik have shown to be all-time bad though.

Cunningham has shown to be a solid veteran role player which is the type of players the team needs surrounding its core guys. What is wrong with him? He has been a solid cheap guy off the bench.

true but calling Dante an offensive threat is a stretch
he does not require attention from a defense

He's a starter who plays significant minutes and he averages 6 points and ranks in the bottom 3rd defensively, because we get torched by small forwards. I don't care if he shoots 50 percent from 3, he sucks. I'd rather play against him than with him.

I'd be surprised if he got much more than $5 million per (unless it's because Demps outbid himself). He's a partial MLE for a playoff team kind of player. Even then $5 million seems like a stretch. What team is going to want Cunningham as their highest paid offseason pickup? The only reason I say $5 million is because I could see a playoff level team operating with cap space using the cap room exception on him if they already landed their other targets.

Would it be possible money wise to trade for dragic and sign reddick?

quote:

---

Would it be possible money wise to trade for dragic and sign reddick?

---

That depends entirely on how much money Redick costs. Let Holiday walk, stretch Asik, trade Moore, Pondexter and Ajinca and Cunningham opts out you'd have about $16 million in cap space with Dragic. But you'd still have a lot of positions to fill.

Dragic/Frazier/Cook
FA/Crawford
Hill/?
AD/?
Cousins/Diallo

This is the reason why it's always been likely the team would try very hard to resign Holiday. It's just really hard to get someone as good as he is with the amount of cap space you get by letting him walk. And by going into cap space you lose things like Bird Rights to Cunningham and the MLE. That's part of what makes the Melo trade thread I posted earlier today interesting, it lets you get a top SG FA target while staying over the cap and keeping your exceptions.