For all of you "Amir Lovers"

[Quixotic]

1. point was even tho Amir plays hard and gives it his all... in a playoff series do you really want him playing significant minutes againt a pau gasol who plays 40 mins a game... you can insert any of the other pf's i listed...

if the plan is to be good in 2-5 years, well then Amir will be taking up a decent amount of our cap in 2-5 years and what will he be doing for us ?

2. i dont like reggie either...but there's a salary cap... if u had bargs at the 4, and davis backing him up... reggie could have played garbage time and earned some of his salary...

3. i made this point in brackets, it wasnt important... but you only need to "overpay" players when you're a losing team... how do you stop being a losing team ? i dunno maybe let your draft picks develop and play players at the right position ??

4. you seem like the type of person who will never admit and say ok yea you're right...but here goes...

do you agree that in basketball, specifically in the NBA. the centre's main job on D is to defend the basket and get rebounds...(Perkins, Bynum, D12, Shaq, Yao Ming, Bogut, Horford, Noah) AGAIN GET REBOUNDS !!! now why would you continue to play a guy who isnt the best at defending the basket and getting rebounds at the 5 ??

i like bargs as well... but i think it's INSANE to play him at the 5 if you dont have to.

This is why it wasnt necessary to sign Amir to such a big contract, not to mention the development time that is now not going to go to Ed Davis.

1. Not that we will be facing the Lakers or anyone else in the playoffs this immediate year, but don't you think by the time our other youngsters develop, that Amir will have improved as well? I stated in another thread that he will have to earn his contract, so yes, if he never gets better and can only play 16 minutes, it's a bad contract, but there's as much chance of that as him getting better and making the deal seem a bargain. Somehow, I think the actual result will be somewhere in between.

And yes, if we were to face Gasol or any other good big, I'd want Amir Johnson (if he is more suited for the job than the team's center) to do it, but obviously not for 40 minutes (until he can show he can manage 40 minutes of the same excellent defensive play). Let me ask you, how many players in the league can guard Pau Gasol or any other top big well for 40 minutes a game and are making under $6 mil next season? Nobody. A better comparison is to look at all the bigs who will be making under $6 mil next season, and I'm sure you'll agree that Amir Johnson stands up just fine against those.

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2) A salary cap doesn't mean you should play a garbage player just so he earns his money. With every team, there will be bad contracts; that's what the inactive list is for. You need a minimum of 13 players, can only dress 12 at a time, and usually only play 9-10 a game. Someone is bound to be paid not to play. It's a sunk cost. So you stash them on the IL or the bench until you can get rid of them or wait for them to expire. It's illogical to play someone bad just because someone else (or even you) made a poor decision in giving them so much money. A subsequent poor decision doesn't make a previous poor decision better.

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3) I agree with you here that bad teams lose either because they do not spend the money or have spent the money unwisely. However, that's usually a judgement to be made on, for instance, Brand being paid $15-18+ mil the next few seasons instead of probably $6-10 mil now. Or Turkoglu being paid $10-12 mil a season when he really should be paid $7-8 mil a season. Amir Johnson being paid $5.8-8.2 mil (or whatever) a season is overpaid, but his real value to the team is probably $4.8-7.2 mil (in my opinion) over the next 5 years, so if you have to overpay $1 mil each year, you do it in this case because he's young, because he was one of the top Raptors last season in terms of win contribution, and because he plays the right way and your other youngsters could benefit from his example.

As I said in the beginning of the previous paragraph, bad teams also lose because they do not spend the money. In this case, not spending $1 mil more per year on Amir might mean spending similar money on an inferior player or not spending it at all, and there's no reward for money saved in previous years. Even the best teams overpay their important players -- personnel is not pure math where you can just reach out and grab someone equivalent at a lesser price -- and Amir was definitely one of the most important players for us last year.

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4) I agree with you that ideally the center's main job on defense is to be a big body, defend the basket, and get rebounds. I fully agree on this point, so don't say I won't admit or agree with something when it's right. :-p

Where I think you're wrong is in thinking that because your 5 is inadequate, you should experiment with him at the 4 in hope of hiding his deficiencies, while giving up on a young 4 who does do those things well. If anything, the answer to your question of why you would continue to play him is, very simply, you don't. Coming from a Bargnani fan and not a hater, I would like to think it means something when I say it.

Not to count my eggs before they hatch, but I think Johnson + Davis at the 4 is a very nice, almost ideal young PF tandem for a rebuilding team. They both play the game the right way, they are both good defenders, and they're exactly what we wanted from Bosh (minus the offensive potential). And there WILL be sufficient time for the both of them, since we shouldn't expect Davis to average more than 20-25 minutes, and Johnson isn't exactly going to play 30+ minutes either. Add in the time they will spend on the court together (some matchups will dictate this), and we'd be lucky if we don't need someone else to mop up the remaining minutes at the 4 (lucky because either Davis is doing well, Johnson is avoiding foul trouble, or both).

I only HOPE that Bargnani will grow in Bosh's absence. So far, whenever Bosh has been absent, Bargnani hasn't exactly stepped up to the task, but hopefully he's just a late bloomer as he has been with everything. We aren't exactly contending, so there's no rush to dump someone who is still so young and has so much potential, but we need to be ready to move him if he cannot be that big body 5 who cleans the glass, defends (so far, he's done okay man-to-man; it's his help defense that blows), and just all the little things that anchor the team's defense. And again, when I say move him, I don't mean make him an even bigger defensive liability by having him guard quicker bigs, but to trade him. IMO, Davis, Johnson and DeRozan currently hold the keys to the team's future success, and they should be built around, not Bargnani.