But, depending on who’s “as good as” Monta, well then maybe I think about it. But I certainly do not want to drop two talented contributors for expiring bench riders. This would also have to depend on how good Curry is right away.

Not seeing why the status quo is so bad. The Warriors aren’t half bad this year, have young intriguing guys…if it wasn’t for stupid contracts to Maggette and Jack, the future would be looking very good right now.

It is, of course, quite possible that the Warriors braintrust would use this cap space stupidly. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that getting the cap space is stupid.

I don’t think the point is that getting cap space is stupid, or even that the Warriors would use it poorly – I think the point is FA’s are pricey and the realistic amount of cap space we’d have to sign one (pretty close to the $$ value of Monta’s contract) will give us a return less than Monta’s contract. That is, signing Monta to an extension has a higher expected value than what we can find on the FA market for about the same price…

I don’t feel morrown and buike could feel monta role, and what happens if monta is traded and becomes an all-star somewhere else?

Curry has yet to play an NBA game.

Absolutely true, and to say I’m jumping the gun here would be understating it. My argument only makes a lick of sense if he turns out to be pretty good. But he doesn’t have to be an All-Star or anything, just pretty good. To me, a B-level point guard is more valuable than a B-plus-level shooting guard.

Morrow is a nice shooter…but unless he gets a lot better right now, he’s not even close to being anything but a role player (which, in my terms, is the opposite of a "core" player).

I think you’re underrating Morrow a good bit. Morrow is not a nice shooter… he is one of the best shooters in the league. I know you know that, but it’s worth emphasizing. Moreover, he’s an above-average rebounder for a shooting guard, and his turnover rate was tiny, despite the fact that he got a fair number of touches. He’s not a totally one-dimensional guy. His main weakness right now is defense, but that’s Monta’s weakness too. Morrow has the size and willingness to defend capably… he’s not slow afoot. It’s the kind of thing young players tend to improve on.

I don’t think Morrow will ever be an All-Star. I’m not convinced that he’ll ever be as good as Monta Ellis. But I think the gap between them going forward will not be nearly as big as the gap in their salaries. Morrow is a solid player.

Monta is the best player on the Warriors – that’s actual talent, he’s the type of player that can be part of a good teams core (not the top player, but one of the top 3), and he’s proven it at the NBA level already. Long term does that make him part of the Warriors core? I don’t know, but someone will want him, and trading him just for cap space right now is a huge mistake.

I continue to think Biedrins is the best player on the Warriors, but Monta’s close behind him. I’m not being dismissive of Monta’s abilities. He’s a very good player, a winning player.

But his abilities are best harnessed alongside a big, physical, skilled point guard like Baron, a guy who can help out against twos when need be. Whatever Curry is or isn’t, I don’t think he’s that, and frankly there aren’t many guys like that in the league. There are admittedly more Monta types entering the league, undersized twos who are so fast that they’re useful, and the more common that type of player becomes, the more useful Monta becomes as a weapon against them. But for now, he’s a odd fit. And while I think other teams probably think he’s a good player, if we tried to trade Monta by his lonesome, I’m not convinced we’d get all that much back in return, for the same reason that nobody jumped for the extremely available Nate Robinson this summer. A lot teams are leery of expensive two-guards with defensive issues.

By the time these guys are good enough to make us a good team (assuming they develop into good players), they won’t exactly be cheap anymore, so I don’t see that as a big factor.

I don’t think that’s an outright given… Basketball Prospectus, for one, projects Randolph to be an impact player this year. Moreover, it’s not about assembling a permanently cheap team, as that’s impossible in basketball. It’s about finding windows where you have the financial flexibility to add a piece. If we’re going to add somebody, we should do it before we have to extend those guys. Trading Monta and Jack would give us that option.

Also, while Monta is a lot more expensive than them, his contract is very reasonable and pays him for what he is – more of a 2-3 best player on a good team, so it’s not like there’s any need to shed his salary.

I’d agree… I don’t think Monta’s particularly overpaid, and there’s no real need to shed his salary. But I do think there’s a real need to shed Jack’s salary… trading Monta would be a means to that end.

As for Joe Johnson, well, there’s a case to be made he’s not any better than Jackson.

A case, yeah… I don’t think a very convincing one. Johnson shoots with average efficiency at a very high volume, passes a lot better than Jack does, and is not far off as a defender… most metrics actually had Johnson as the better defender last year, though I don’t know that I’d put a lot of stock in that. Johnson is two years younger than Jack. Jack had what was probably his career year last year, and wasn’t remotely as valuable as Johnson. Jack doesn’t want to be here. I know who I’d rather have.

Having said that, I don’t think the Joe Johnson scenario’s a great one for us… it’d basically be making a lot of noise to run in place. But I don’t think it’d make us worse. And with better FA luck, we could do better.

Also, not sure exactly how the cap works, but isn’t max money > $15M?

Max deals vary based on the cap level. Guys with six years of experience or less can get up to 25% of the cap… guys with 7-9 years of experience can get up to 30%. Next year’s cap is estimated to be between $50 and $54 million, meaning younger FAs could get $12.5-$13.5 million, and the older guys could get $15-$16.8 million. (Guys with 10+ years of experience can get up to 35%… I doubt we’d bid on those guys, for a variety of reasons.)

If we subtracted Monta and Jack (and didn’t extend Law, which we won’t), we’d be at around $35.3 million. As such, we’d definitely be able to offer Rondo a max deal, and we would probably be able to offer the Lebron/Bosh/Amare/Wade guys max deals as well, depending on the exact cap level. And while I’m not advocating this, if we were just below max, we could easily dump ’Buike or Wright on somebody to add more space.

The one wrinkle I’m not sure about is whether there’s a preemptive cap hold for our first-round pick… maybe jae could clarify that. But if it came to that, we could deal the pick, maybe sending it to the Nets to complete the Marcus Williams deal.

I’m not convinced that going all-in on free agency is the right move for a scrubby franchise like ours. But if we moved Monta and Jack for expirings, we definitely could put ourselves in a position to offer a max deal, and with a good bit of young talent left to try to tempt FAs. It’d be an interesting position to be in.

Curious – why do you think this?

Completely talking out of my ass here… I could be 100% wrong, and I hope that I am. But I just don’t know you can get much more out of Monta’s skill set than he got that year. The meat of his contribution that season was his absurd .544% on twos, and I don’t think he’s going to ever get much higher than that. I was high on the idea of trying Monta as a point guard, but it really doesn’t seem like it’s in the cards. He’s not likely to become a dramatically better rebounder. I think he could eventually become a strong defender against point guards, as he’s shown flashes of that in the past, but I can’t see him ever becoming more than a mixed bag against twos. If more li’l twos keep popping up, that could possibly change, but you’re still gonna get stuck sometimes… either Monta or Curry is going to have to defend either Kobe or Artest this year, and the results won’t be pretty.

Monta could get better in some ways. It’ll be great if he can keep up his improved free-throw shooting from last year. True three-point range would open things up for him a bit more. And maybe there’s something in his bag of tricks defensively that I’m not anticipating. But overall, I think he’s a guy whose value is predicated on hitting from midrange and driving, efficiently and repeatedly. And it’s hard to imagine him doing that much better than he did in ‘07-’08. I fear we’ve seen his ceiling.

Monta made one ill-advised (though possibly correct) statement that he wasn’t sure he and Curry could play together because of the defensive liability. Jack has gone and made a total @$$ of himself. Monta has since complimented Curry numerous times for how complete his game is and how much farther along as a player he is than he (Monta) thought.

In what way are these guys similar? I just don’t see it.

Well, it all has to do with the fact that Monta has proven to be a very good NBA player. The most likely case is Curry, as of right now, is not anywhere close to that good. That’s just how rookies are, especially ones that aren’t super prospects that go 1st overall (Howard/Lebron types). Sure, he could be, but he also could be pretty bad. I’m good going with his expected value based on where he went in the draft, college stats, scouts opinions, etc, and I declare that with supreme confidence to be much worse than Monta as a basketball player. :)

In the future that gap will narrow, of course, but again, the most likely scenario is Curry never ends up being as good as Monta…

I hate your love of Kirilenko.

Oh, I agree on both counts… I don’t think those were good moves. I’m just pointing out that it’s not true that lame teams can’t sign anybody. Hedo already had an agreement in place with the most promising young team in the league… instead, he went to a crappy team for a tiny bit more money. He also liked the city better, to be fair, but do we really think the Bay Area’s a more loathed destination than Detroit or Toronto for most free agents?

You have to be disciplined when you have cap space… you can’t just burn it on the first decent player you find. Sometimes it even makes sense to wait a year or two. But if you’re smart, you can use it to add quality players, even if you’re not based in LA, New York or Miami.

You didn’t say “trade for good players”, you said “Cap space is valuable in the NBA”. While cap space is valuable, it does not help you trade for good players; in fact, it implies that you have less players to trade, thus making it harder to complete such a transaction. If you have a piece that you can trade that will help ANOTHER team attain cap space, then you may be able to trade for a good player using that piece. But that wasn’t the scenario originally posed.

I meant that I don’t think that there’s evidence that it’s the “best way” other than the draft. I most certainly did not say it was worthless or could not be used to help make a team better, but the statement: “Cap space is valuable in the NBA. Besides getting lucky in the draft, it’s the best way for us to improve our roster” appears unsubstantiated. Is it really better than making good trades in absence of cap space? I see a statement about how something is “the best” without any support and cringe. It’s a worthless line.

Generalizations about how this requires cap space or anything else are flawed. The NBA is a zero sum experience for all teams. Following the model of others means that some teams will succeed but others will fail with the same model. It appears to me that the best way to get better, barring luck, it to avoid doing stupid things until the opportunity to do a smart thing comes along.

Ah yes, back to the whole 1 player is responsible for championships thing again (not that you were responsible for it before). You don’t think a Spurs team with Monta instead of Parker would be pretty damn close to the same team?

Monta is a very good scorer. He can handle the ball, I’m not sure why that’s a weakness? Not saying he’s the best ball handler in the league or anything, but it’s not like it’s a liability. He’s extremely effective off the ball – unlike a number of other scoring guards he’s very effective without having to dominate the ball – that’s a good thing. He isn’t the ideal distributor, but who says he has to be? He’s still a very, very good offensive player without doing that.

Defensively, he obviously isn’t a good fit defending 2’s. He’s capable against 1’s, though, and while his effort has lacked at times, he’s gone through stretches where his defense isn’t terrible, too. He’s also not a half-bad rebounder, though that depends on position.

Yeah, his defense isn’t nearly as good as his offense. Good thing for us his offense is damn good. Overall, quality player, a guy who can be a core player for a championship team – though not the best player.

And it’s not as if trading Monta and Jack for cap space ISN’T a gamble.

Orlando isn’t really stocked with “expiring contracts” to send back. They’ve bought long hoping to win it all while Howard is on the ascent before Carter falls apart.

I certainly hope that Cleveland thinks that Jax might be the guy to get them “there”. I am pretty certain that he is not, but if they can put something together (*which means Ilgauskas if we’re talking expirings and I doubt they’d go there) I’d jump at the deal. I do hope that the perception of “Jax the versatile defensive stopper who scored 20ppg” overcomes the reality of a shot happy low percentage scorer who rebounds like a guy 6 or 7 inches shorter than he is.