re: Official 2014 NBA Offseason Mega Discussion thread

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The Lakers, though, are also interested to see if Kansas center Joel Embiid falls to them with the seventh pick, assuming they don'??t trade it. Embiid had surgery to repair a stress fracture in his right foot Friday and could miss part or all of next season.

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Great read on the hysteria over Melo to Miami.

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It must constantly be remembered that this whole discussion is being revisited by the idea of Carmelo leaving the New York Knicks. NEW YORK. There is not a bigger market to be in, and yet he might still leave it. He would leave it for less money, less glitz, a less desirable city than the one he essentially hand-picked for himself three years ago. Melo has the opportunity to take much more money to be a star, THE star, in the biggest market available. If he would rather take less to be a sidekick, maybe he just wants that more than any rule change could prohibit.

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Loyalty to the team that drafted you is apparently a thing. We romanticize the idea of the one franchise player, especially as it becomes less and less common in the modern NBA. Even Paul Pierce eventually got traded, so rare is the concept now. However, it is a concept born out of a strange idea of loyalty that emanates from a choice the players do not have. They are chided if not loyal to staying somewhere they never chose to go to in the first place.

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That something, evidently, is winning. That is how you keep players, and the best means teams have against protecting themselves from the risk of these players losing is to do enough to give them reason not to leave. Teams should not be 'rewarded' for the 'development' of these players any more than they already do by having them as players for four price-fixed seasons. If they need any further protection, they already have it by way of the restricted free agency after the expiration of their rookie scale deals, and the ability to negotiate an extension prior to that.

If they do all that and still blow it, what more loyalty can be demanded of the player? At what point can a team said to have burned out their loyalty to a player? At what point can the player say, 'you had your chance, sorry, but I need to win while I still can' without being morally tarnished?

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LINK
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