GM Soundwave:
Welcome everyone, good to see all the familiar faces in here. I'm sure you have plenty of questions and I am here to answer them as best as possible.
Let me begin by saying that this is a transition year for our team. We decided in the middle of last season that our goal would be to get younger and deeper. I am very happy with the results so far. We have changed our team philosophy from looking at the ratings to actually looking at the numbers on the court. We used to go strong for A defenders but now we are looking more for playmakers. Our new stats based system will hopefully allow us to find players that fit better together.
Now I would like to speak on the Grant Hill trade. Grant was a wonderful person to have in our locker room and did everything we ever asked of him. It was a very tough decision to let him go. We noticed a slight decline in his play last year and decided we did not want to break the bank and risk our future on a player of his age. It was a very slight decline but we did not want to sit a wait on a pattern to form. We noticed even more declines in Rasheed. We were hoping he would not be greedy in Free Agency, but after recieving his contract proposal, we decided it was best for us to part ways. Now he is free to smoke it up with Stro or whatever else he enjoys doing.
Those moves allowed us to lock in Andre Miller for the very long term. He is now our team leader and the future of the franchise. His play wasn't as good as Hill's or Sheed's, but we saw plenty of improvement in his short time here. Signing him was a bit of a crapshoot but we have the utmost faith in him. We are not in the business of acquiring good young players and letting them walk. He has proved us right so far in his offseason training.
Our other big signing this offseason was Kenyon Martin. He is not the prolific scorer that Sheed was, but his defensive #'s jump off the charts. Averaging 3.1 blocks per 36 is nothing to take for granted. If we can run a bit more those blocks could turn into easy points for us. We love his D and at only 27 he is still improving in rebounding and offensively. He will be backed up by Kris "what do you see, yeah a cool guy" Humphries. He is a player we loved in this past draft. We believe he will be the perfect backup at PF for us for years to come. Good, cheap backup 4's are very hard to find.
Now that we have gone over our big changes this season, any questions?