Daily Links 6/29

My first thought of hearing of the Ray Allen trade was Nooo! Then after thinking about it, hearing the thoughts of others, and assessing the needs of the team this deal started sounding better and better. I’m only going to dwell on what I think are the positive aspects of this deal. 1. We basically got Ray Allen for just about nothing (I’m ignoring the financial aspects for the most part). Allen for Wally straight up would have been good. I love Delonte, but was disappointed with his play last year, especially his outside scoring. I don’t think he’ll get much better. There was no one player in the draft, available to us, with the possible exception of Horford,, who would have totally fulfilled a need in a reasonable time period. I was looking forward to seeing Jeff Green, but later heard Mike Gorman saying he had talked with people who knew the Big East and the overwhelming consensus is that Ryan Gomes is much better than Green. 2. We fulfilled one of ours needs of getting an experienced, quality veteran and one who could spread the floor for PP and Al Jeff and vice versa. 3. I like the rationale of maximizing PP’s next 3 or 4 years by making a move now. 4. Another quality veteran will help the development of our young players, especially Gerald Green. I’ve mentioned before that we often had basically 5 high schoolers on the floor at the same time with all trying to figure out the puzzle. Now GG can often be on the court with a good number of players who have figured it out and they will help make GG better. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen him open in the corner and not getting the ball. This shouldn’t happen anymore. Other needs can be filled from this year’s free agent market. Mikki Moore is a free agent, not being paid a lot, and he could help us with depth under the basket. I heard today that Brevin Knight was waived by Charlotte. He could be gotten at a good price and would provide experience and depth at the pg position. These are just possibilities, but to me are now the way to go. We’ve got our vet, we can continue to develop our better youngs and we have a way to patch in fixes for other needs, all this made possible by this trade.