Varejao situation bad on both sides
| 12
|
by Suckatsports
After a long silence, Anderson Varejao decided to take his battle with the Cavaliers public and talked to ESPN about his situation. He said some damning things about the organization, and apparently the slap fighting has gone far enough for him to declare that he's been eternally jaded by the works of NBA business.
> "I wanted to come back," he said. "I love the fans and I really love my teammates. But there are others there that have made it very difficult. It's gotten to the point that I don't want to play there anymore. I'm just hoping for a sign-and-trade at this point."
I can understand that, I've been on the "stiffed" side of work negotiations, it is a very emotional time. One side things they're worth some amount, another side is only willing to give a different amount. It's frustrating, and insulting when you feel you've been undersold. That being said, Anderson and/or his agent Dan Fegan asked for roughly $10 million a year just this past summer, even though they claim no such amount was put on the table.
> Several other teams told ESPN.com they would have offered Varejao their full midlevel exception (starting at $5.356 million per season), but Varejao has not been willing to sign for that amount because he believes (a) the Cavs would match, and (b) he's worth more. > > The Cavs' popular forward wants considerably more than the team is offering. He turned down the Cavs' one-year, $1.2 million tender offer. (To retain a restricted free agent, a team must make a tender offer.) He also refused Cleveland's opening offer of five years, $20 million, and then its latest offer of five years, $32 million, with a starting salary slightly below the midlevel exception.
Here's the thing: Anderson is just a marginal player. He's young and has good size, all that is true, but he's neither defensively or offensively skilled except for taking charges. Beyond that, his athleticism isn't elite, so he can't lean on that to make plays; he leans on effort. He'll hound someone when he's defending them, he'll annoy them, and he hopes to get a charge called when he does. Beyond that, his stats of 6.8 points, 6.7 rebounds in 23 minutes don't indicate that he should be paid an absurd amount of money: surely 4-6 million were right in range.
He's valuable to the Cavs because of how LeBron plays, not of how Varejao plays. In that case, he's not nearly as valuable as other teams, and he's obviously overestimated his worth on the market. Truth be told, I think that teams weren't afraid that the Cavs would match their qualifying offer (he's a restricted free agent), but rather they wouldn't. That means they would be overpaying for merely an average player.
> My personal opinon on the matter is the Varejao and Fegan have misjudged the market and are scrambling like mad to get around the restricted free agency rules which have been in place for years. They are trying to put public pressure on the Cavs by angling in the media, first saying they’ll take a one-year, $5 million contract, then saying they’d be willing to go to arbibitration, now saying they demand a sign-and-trade. > > That’s all sounds so good, but no team in the NBA would give Varejao a one-year deal right now. Varejao would never give up position for a rebound, so why would the Cavs give up their refusal rights to an aribitrator? Nobody in the NBA would. As for a sign-and-trade now, who is fooling whom? The summer is for sign-and-trades, the summer is for doing contracts. You don’t think Fegan has been working on sign-and-trades since July? Of course he has and there is no deal to make. There one coming now just like there wasn’t then. See, so much of this is common NBA sense, which is why so much of this is nonsense.
And as Brian Windhorst mentioned, the real failure with the Cavs in this situation is not them trying to get Varejao back, but rather, "their failure is to not have a backup plan in place." So true. I fully agree with the stand the Cavs have taken in how much they are willing to pay Varejao, and he'll see soon enough that it indeed is his market value; but in the meantime we'll miss him on the Cavs, and he'll miss LeBron.
Varejao not interested in playing for the Cavs [ESPN.com]
Varejao vs. Cavs: Round 12 [Brian Windhorst]
This post is cross-published from We Suck at Sports.
