I'll have a much better opinion of Hughes when the bulls either beat mediocre teams consistently, or actually beat a good team. My hunch is that Hughes won't be an active participant in that endeavor.
Utah is a good team. We beat them in Utah on a Larry Hughes buzzer beater. That being said, I still have a hard time trusting Hughes. If we could get this Hughes all year, I'd be comfortable with Rose / Gordon / Hughes. In fact, that a pretty damn good guard trio. Ship Hinrich and Thabo out in a consolidation trade, if anyone really wants them.
Utah was missing 4 of it's top six. That was a nice win, but not the kind I am talking about. And they still almost beat the bulls.
I'm not one to blame Larry Hughes for our losses this season. I'd rather blame our frontcourt, which is now ranked last place in the league at both big man positions!
I think it's safe to say that if the bulls had a legitimate shot-blocking, rebounding big man, both Hughes and BG would look a lot better. But those guys are a lot harder to find. That's why GM's take Sam Bowie's over Michael Jordan's every year.
I wrote Sam Smith about it the other day in his "Hughes conundrum" post My response is what’s the question here? The moment an acceptable contract is offered for Hughes, the Bulls should count their lucky stars and move him. Doing anything else is playing with fire. His response was “but that’s what they often do”.... All I can say is that if the Bulls screw this up and don't have him gone at the earliest opportunity, the joke's on them. 1. If the Bulls traded away all his competetion for PT, he'd get lazy and more selfish without a strong veteran team to keep him in line. And he'll get hurt, because he always does. So you can't keep him and trade the other guys. 2. If the Bulls don't trade away the other guys, then Hughes will get mad and bitch. And ride the pine because he's a worse player than the other guys. It's not a tenable situation. If the Bulls try to get greedy with it, they'll fuck it up.
I couldn't agree more. It's not like they are beating good teams with him. On the contrary, they are struggling to beat mediocre teams while counting on him to play a significant role and he's taking up valuable minutes for guys who need them to develop. Move him.
Moving Larry Hughes isn't key. He expires in 2010. We need to move Kirk Hinirch and Andres Nocioni first. We can keep Hughes for the next 2 years, with Sefolosha as insurance in case Hughes gets injured.
Oh, don't get me wrong, we need to do those things too, but look at it this way. Kirk is out of the lineup already, and Hughes has already grumbled about minutes even with Kirk out. He's temporarily mollified, but it won't last forever even if Kirk is traded. So yeah, we gotta figure out some way to move him. It's not like trying to do that takes away from trying to move Kirk and Noc.
