I have an extremely hard time believing Ed Stefanski will make a blockbuster trade that basically amounts to a salary dump in the next two weeks. That's not to say the Sixers won't pull the trigger on one of these rumored deals, but Stefansk? I don't see how he could possibly keep his job if this is the direction the franchise is headed.
We've debated the pros and cons of blowing this roster up ad nauseum. We've gone over every trade rumor, and they all revolve around a few guiding principles. #1, if the Sixers are going to free up salary, Andre Iguodala is probably going to be involved. #2, they're desperately trying to move Elton Brand, whose contract is perceived to be the worst in the league (which is kind of funny considering Gilbert Arenas is signed for more money).
What we haven't discussed is what this means for Ed Stefanski. Think about it for a second. Trading Iguodala and Brand would be paramount to admitting he screwed up the two biggest personnel decisions he's made since taking over as the Sixers' GM. He'd be admitting that he took us two years down the wrong road, and now he's convinced that everything he's done since he got here was wrong.
If that's the determination the powers that be in the organization have made, then fine. Blow it up. But how in the hell can you trust the guy who brought you to this point to choose the right path moving forward?
Now matter how much spin you put on it, Stefanski already has a tremendous amount of egg on his face. His hand-picked coach has done everything in his power to tell you, me and anyone else who will listen that this roster lacks (a) talent, (b) heart and (c) killer instinct. He went so far as to bench Brand and rip him publicly time and time again. Those barbs are directed at the players, but they land directly on the man who brought them in or signed them to extensions. They have to.
I'd love to be able to tell you the day Iguodala is traded away will be the lowpoint of my Sixers fandom, but it won't. I've been continually beaten down over the past couple of decades and I'm not as attached to Iguodala as I was to Barkley in the red, white and blue. I will say, however, that if Ed Stefanski keeps his job after completely tearing down the roster that he built (and stood idly by while Eddie Jordan decimated it), it will probably be the most hopeless I've felt as a fan.
Forget about ownership for a second, how can we as paying fans have any confidence that this brain trust will get it right on their mulligan?
If Ed Stefanski is reading, it's pretty simple. If you screwed up, and I mean royally screwed up, in building this roster, then you deserve to be fired. If you still believe in what you've built, and I realize it's getting harder and harder to hold the torch, then you need to get rid of the man who's continually made a mockery of it immediately. Eddie Jordan is not now, nor was he ever the right man to coach this team. Admit that mistake, address it, then maybe you will have restored enough of the faith you've squandered to earn the right to fix the problems with player personnel.
How many 'extra' years did Billy King get after mistake after mistake?
One of sniders main problems to me has been that he's too loyal. If he likes Stefanski, he won't be fired after this...yes he made 'his mess' but in the eyes of Comcast if he can move brand and get all that cap space back, he cleaned up his own mess too so he'll eserve another chance to make another mess.
I don't AGREE with it, but after watching Billy King last way too many years as GM (the number of years starts counting the moment the rat jumps ship), I won't be in the least bit surprised to see Stefanski maintain his job.
They never bottomed out with King, though. And he didn't survive once he finally got rid of Iverson.
Anyway, I'm not really talking about Snider/Comcast, I'm just talking about pure common sense. I can't think of a single line of work, other than the presidency of this country, where a guy can screw up on this scale and then be trusted to clean up the mess he made and chart a new direction. And trading Iguodala and Brand would absolutely be Stefanski screaming, "I screwed up!"
Aside from professional sports? You're probably right, but once you get into guaranteed contracts and the amount of money these guys make, it becomes relevant to the ownership in the discussion.
Guaranteed contracts are a freaking disaster, and if I ran a sports league it would be the first thing I tried to get rid of, and that would be GM's, Coache's, everyone...just absolute disasters.
In the heyday of the brooklyn / la dodgers, the guys running that organization were on year to year deals with a handshake, now you're guaranteeing an no experienced gm how many millions for how many years? It's a factor. Same with firing Joran...paying cheeks, joran AND another coach...for how long?
These are things that matter to a team that might be owrried more about its bottom line than winning and it's sadly the reality of many teams, not just the sixers
McGrady is healthy right?
Make that trade and see what he and Brand can do for the rest of the year.
Brand is not as bad as everyone makes him out to be. Maybe those two can make a little run. McGrady can’t expect a monster deal so if they do some good things maybe we can come to reasonable terms with him and use those two as the foundation.
Maybe I’m grasping but at this point they should try anything.
McGrady is useless as a player at this point. They'd be trading for his expiring deal, nothing more.
so i see a lot of fantastic eddie bashing here, but one thing never seems to get mentioned which bothers me. does anyone remember back in say october when we had a young dynamic power forward named speights that looked like a future 20 point a game scorer? Everybody loved his explosiveness and the way he could bury a 15 foot jump shot consistently. Yeah he had some rebounding issues but the man could score at will it seemed in only his sophomore season. Then a partial tear of the pcl. Out 6-8 weeks. But then our coach is afraid he is going to get fired. So 3 weeks later, out comes speights. Now two months after that, speights is now getting much less minutes and much less production as it shockingly seems that 3 weeks isnt long enough to recover from a partially ripped up knee. so now as the season is lost we are still watching him struggle and not be healthy. can we be mad at jordan for ruining our young power forward?
Um, well...no
He's not ruined
and it's not the coachs fault that he rebounds and defends poorly and seems allergic to passing is it?
It could be the coach's fault that he came back early from the injury, though.
I suppose but I don't think coming back early has hurt his game at all, I don't think his injury is still affecting him, the coach has stupid rotations and always has, and no offense to speights, brand deserves more minutes and if speights was getting pf minutes it was at brands expense
I don't know if health is an issue now either, but it definitely was when he first came back.
And there should be more minutes for Speights backing up Brand, but for some reason our coach uses Thad exclusively at the four.
The coach is an iiot
I think that pretty much fits all situations involving the coach
Yeah, I was banging that drum when he first came back. He absolutely was not healthy, not sure if it's still bothering him, or hampering him at this point. He's been completely marginalized, though it's tough to tell if it's due to his health or the fact that he can't spell defense.
Stefanski will redeem himself temporarily in my eyes if the Dallas rumors are in fact true(Brand+Iggy to Dallas). It would be admitting he made a mistake, but its a step in the right direction. Admit the mistake and move forward. However, if he goes out this offseason and hires another one of his NJ cronies to coach this squad, a guy like Byron Scott, i will puke.
If they trade Iguodala and Brand, Eddie Jordan is our coach to start next season.
You think so? I really hope not. I think of an Iggy+Brand trade as the start of a "clean house" move for Stefanski. I would assume EJ to be the next victim. To be honest with you, if EJ is the coach of the sixers next season, i'm not sure i'll even watch them as much as i love the team i just can't put myself through that.
I'm not sure how many mistakes the guy can admit in one year. By trading Iguodala and Brand he's admitting he didn't give his guy the right pieces. I think EJ stays if they make a deal like this. It's also the cheapest option.
Well there's also a way around that too :) Spin baby spin
Eie Joran was brought in because he knows how to get the best out of veteran players but now that we have moved towards a rebuilding plan we need a different kind of coach. We think Coach Joran is a great coach and wish him the best but we need to go a different direction with the coach since we've decide to go a different direction with the team.
Or something like that :)
Mike Preston is going to have his work cut out for him.
I'm assuming he does PR for the sixers?:)
The sixers are almost irrelevant in Philadelphia, their attendance is pretty much already at the bottom of the league, spin it the right way and everyone saves their jobs :)
Just fire him during a big weekend series with the mets or maybe the dodgers. nobody in this city will realize EJ is gone for 2 weeks...
ESPN just reported that Iverson is no go tonight for personal reasons.
I saw speculation somewhere else that Iversons kid might be in the hospital but haven't seen confirmation
I just wish the powers that be cared as much about the tams as some of their fans do. What has been de-moralizing to me has been the non-action by the powers that be as EJ's "learning curve" has resulted in a lost season & regression in the skills of many of our players! EJ...the supposed "NBA mind" we needed to finally maximize our players/their abilities to take the team to the next level that Cheeks & DiLeo were deemed incapable of doing. Now given his colossal "Lockery-esque failure"...instead of canning his ass...this blind organization is looking to shed players who were able to somehow win 41 games last year depite "mediocre" coaching. How is this possible...how did we get here...& more importantly...why the hell do we still care?
I don't agree. Maybe I'm underreading the symbolism of dealing these guys away, but the whole world already knows signing Brand was a mistake. And the deal with Iguodala was contingent on Brand working out, and he didn't, so it was a mistake too. If Brand had still been what he was, a go-to guy on offense, top ten player in the league, defensive force, then signing Iguodala for all those years would've made all the sense in the world. Since Brand didn't work out, we find ourselves in a situation where all our money is tied up for several years in a second banana and a vastly more expensive, not quite as good version of Carl Landry. It's like the healthcare bill. Half the pundit class says that Obama dare not admit that health reform was a mistake, but it seems to me that the electorate has already made up its minds (rightly or wrongly) about that and owning up to the (perceived) error can only make him better off. Similarly, there's no one out there who doesn't think Brand was a mistake, very few people who don't think we overpaid for Iguodala given where the rest of our money was, so admitting that Brand was a mistake can only help at this point. If he were to persist in trying to build a team around those two, ownership would regard him as delusional and replace him with someone sane.
I think you're missing the point here. Stefanski, much like Obama, had a mandate to do whatever he wanted to with this team from the day he took over. This is the path he chose. This is the direction he chose because he thought it was the best direction for the team. So if you're now admitting that it was the absolute wrong direction, which you would be if you trade Iguodala and Brand, then why should he be given another chance to plot the course of the team?
Just like why would we re-elect a president who couldn't get anything done when he had a super majority for a year?
Well I think you're missing my point. Why keep a guy who made decisions that he admits were absolutely wrong? You probably shouldn't, but it's better than keeping a guy who made decisions that were absolutely wrong and refuses to admit it or fix them. It's been evident for at least months now that Brand was a mistake, that even when healthy he's not worth anywhere near what we paid him. That debate's over. So the question is what's better for Stefanski's job security going forward, and surely it isn't digging in his heels and not trying to get out from under that contract. If he's going to keep his job, it'll be by correcting his mistake(s), not denying that he ever made any.
I disagree. The worst sin he could possibly commit would be to throw the baby out with the bathwater before even giving his team a chance to play as a unit under a legitimate coach.
The biggest mistake Stefanski has made to this point is hiring Eddie Jordan, and there's a very quick fix to that one that doesn't involve selling a 26-year-old stud for table scraps.
I'm told there's nothing to the Mavs-Sixers trade rumor.
That's good news, to me at least.
Do you get the feeling that Iguodala thinks he's going to be traded?
I think he believes there's a real possibility.
Not sure why it makes you feel more comfortable, history is littered with lies spilled by franchises about 'not trading' guys who then get traded.
There's 2 weeks now until the deadline...lies are coming from every source, and unfortunately, writers will be lied to.
I'd rather someone tell me it's not going to happen than tell me it's imminent. That's why I feel better.
If you say so, to me it doesn't make that much of a difference what they tell the 'disseminators' of information, because spin is spin :)
Sixers sent out a release that Iverson won't be playing tonight.
Brand said yesterday about Iverson's daughter being in the hospital for a month.
Iverson listed as game-time decision for Saturday in Houston.
This Player Swap Tool* says that we'd actually be a win better over 82 games if we swapped Iguodala for Amare.
* http://www.queencityhoops.com/playerSwapPage.php
To me, the Iguodala deal will never be a mistake. If you want to argue he's a little overpaid, fine. It was not a bad move locking his value up like that. I don't think trading Iguodala would be admitting a mistake but more trying to correct the Brand move. Well, that is unless they unload Sammy and Iguodala, which would mean I don't know what the hell he was thinking. Maybe he's admitting Brand was a huge mistake and he's gonna take a step back to try and go forward.
The problem for Brand is that people hate his contract and it's way too high and too long. I honestly think he would have more value if he wasn't playing for Jordan. He still looks like 90 percent of the scorer he was in LA, and that's still pretty damn good. His coach doesn't use him well, and was terrible to him earlier in the year.
That's why it all gets back to Jordan. That is the single most damning move of Stefanski's tenure. Not only does Jordan act like a handcuff to Stefanski to make other moves, but he's hurting the possibility of those moves with his incompetence. Brand would have more value with another coach, period. Now, with that handcuff, Stefanski is making moves with one hand behind his back, which is what you can't have. If you blow it up, it has to be completely blown up. I don't know if Ed S. can do that and keep his job.
Hey Brian,
Admit it, we're the Clippers East. So if Eddie gets fired, will we be fighing our west coast red, white, and blue brethenern for coach applicants. i wonder what is a more appealing destination, Sixers or Clippers. At least with the Clippers, if you suck, the owner is too cheap to fire you...
Lockouts a comin
http://ken-berger.blogs.cbssports.com/mcc/blogs/entry/11838893/19929589
trade brand(or dalembert), and igoudala for t-mac, and a future 1st round pick