Tracy McGrady's Future?

But teams that are trying to to reach a championship are not cutting salary all that much. Lakers, Celtics, Cavs are all well above the salary cap. My point is that if you think you have a good team that can go all the way, you probably don’t mind going over the cap.

Crawford and Maggs are both very offensive minded. When you already have Yao, Battier, and Artest on the defensive side, having guys like Crawford and Maggs can be a good change of pace. Especially if your team is struggling to score.

As far as the metrics, I do remember reading about something about Houston using that, but not too aware of what it is actually, got a link?

Everyone should read it. One of the best articles I’ve read in awhile

One of my favorite parts:

For most of its history basketball has measured not so much what is important as what is easy to measure — points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocked shots — and these measurements have warped perceptions of the game. ("Someone created the box score," Morey says, "and he should be shot.") How many points a player scores, for example, is no true indication of how much he has helped his team. Another example: if you want to know a player’s value as a ­rebounder, you need to know not whether he got a rebound but the likelihood of the team getting the rebound when a missed shot enters that player’s zone.

There is a tension, peculiar to basketball, between the interests of the team and the interests of the individual. The game continually tempts the people who play it to do things that are not in the interest of the group…

It is in basketball where the problems are most likely to be in the game — where the player, in his play, faces choices between maximizing his own perceived self-interest and winning. The choices are sufficiently complex that there is a fair chance he doesn’t fully grasp that he is making them.
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Robert Seale for The New York Times

Battier Knows Bryant is a Less-Efficient Scorer 1 Off the dribble. 2 Shooting from long range with a hand in his face. 3 Going to his left, not his right.
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Letters: The No-Stats All-Star (March 1, 2009)

Taking a bad shot when you don’t need to is only the most obvious example. A point guard might selfishly give up an open shot for an assist. You can see it happen every night, when he’s racing down court for an open layup, and instead of taking it, he passes it back to a trailing teammate. The teammate usually finishes with some sensational dunk, but the likelihood of scoring nevertheless declined. "The marginal assist is worth more money to the point guard than the marginal point," Morey says.