OT: Darius Miles and Portland situation getting weirder and weirder

http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/news/story?id=3820794

Are you kidding me? Portland's management has been fantastic in the past few years, but this is totally bush league for several reasons. First off, teams should be able to sign Miles if they want to play him. Secondly, it's not a bad thing to try to make your team better than your rivals. Sometimes that means duping them in a trade. How is this morally that much different?

Lastly, what about Miles himself. Doesn't he have the right to try to make a comeback and try to play? Aren't the Blazers unfairly limiting his possibility of further return?

I know we've got at least one lawyer and maybe more on this board, so have at it.

 

Yeah, no kidding. I wrote this on our Blazers board just now about it:
This is getting ridiculous. The real issue here is that the league has created this weird situation in which other teams can hold significant power over the Blazer's salary cap.

That's a problem because the CBA and the cap structure is set up to prevent such gamesmanship. By utterly failing to fix the situation, the league and I'd imagine the player's union has done Darius Miles (a union member) and one of its teams (the Blazers) massive disservice.

That being said, the Blazers are missing the boat and creating more problems in the way they're handling this. If I were Darius Miles' lawyer, I'd be preparing a letter of my own this morning, perhaps more. If I were another team, I'd be that much more irritated with the Blazers.

 

Darius Miles should sue the Blazers for interfering in him finding work.

 

I was extremly angry to here this pile of crap...it is so wrong on many levels (as stated by many other posters). The Blazers have no grounds to sue any team for signing a free agent bases merely on the fact that it would fuck up thier cap space.
When it's all said and done i see even more teams looking more closely at signing him and it's just plain wrong to throw a threat around that can hurt the chance of Miles getting a job.

I wouldn't be surprised if Miles ends up sueing the Blazers for this....and they could end up losing even more than just the 9mil a year for next two....very stupid move.

 

Just so you know, a lot of Blazer fans agree this is not good. It's a weird situation that Portland appears to be making worse with this.

On the one hand, an independent (i.e. not chosen by the Blazers) doctor determined it was a career ending injury. On the other hand, Miles clearly still wants to play and there should be no artificial barrier preventing him from doing so. This wouldn't be the first time a doctor was wrong.

It would be pretty classless for a team to sign him solely to punish the Blazers. However, this email seems equally classless to me. Either way, I hope it's over soon.

 

It's pretty much a ridiculous mess all the way around. The league and player's union should have stepped in and clarified this months ago.

 

Remember the Eddy Curry situation? The Bulls ruled that Curry could not play again, even offering him a long term contract, in which he wouldn't play, but they'd pay him, just because they cared about them. The Bulls doctors came to the conclusion that Curry's career was over, but they didn't impose their doctors opinion on the doctors throughout the rest of the league. Clearly their opinion turned out to be wrong. Same thing probably happened with the independent doctor being wrong.

There is no argument for the Blazers to make. The league set 10 NBA season contests (pre-season, regular season, and playoffs) to show that a player is healthy enough to play in the league. Miles is about to reach that mark, so his injury was clearly not career ending, which throws out the independent doctors ruling. It's quite simple.

 

Well, it's a bit different because Eddy wasn't under contract. In this case the doctor's prediction is being used to waive an existing contract and apply for cap relief.

To me, it's just as simple that this is the NBA's problem. The possibility for mischief is created here by the nonsensical rule applied in cap relief cases. I think there needs to be an application process. If the NBA approves the application for cap relief, then the player comes off the cap whether he plays again or not. If they don't, he stays on the cap whether he plays again or not.

 

I don't think it's a nonsensical rule. In order for a guy to make it through 10 games, there is no way he could have had a career ending injury. It's not like Miles is just standing at half court. He's out there playing. He's averaigng 8 blocks a game per 36 this season.

If he didn't suffer a career ending injury, then Blazers shouldn't get any cap relief.

If he did have a career ending injury, there is no way he would make it through 10 games. A person with a real career ending injury would not be picked up and played 10 games.

 

It didn't go down quite like that, iirc. The bulls offered Curry an anuity to cover him if the test came out positive. The doctors thought he had the condition and wanted to confirm it with a genetic test. It's a little bit different.

 

Whoops, quoted the wrong one.

 

I don't see how that's at odds with what I said.

 

I think you hit on the obvious reason this was not a winner of a business move, notwithstanding the fact their actual liability with respect to Miles is much lower than their LT payment.

Thing is, I think it's a relatively crummy provision in the CBA (the 10 game clause) and its application isn't really consistent with the general intent of the CBA, which is to avoid messes like this. Hence, I think the fair thing would be for the NBAPA and NBA to let it go for the Blazers and agree to an amendment of the CBA to eliminate the possibility of this sort of mess.

I wouldn't hold my breath though, and I especially wouldn't hold my breath for the Blazers, since their ham-fisted approach to things has reduced everyone's willingness to help them out to less than zero.

 

I disagree. Blazers deserve no relief if Miles plays 2 more games. The NBA set 10 games as the amount of games needed to be played to show proof that a player has not suffered a career ending injury. If Miles gets through 10 games, he will have shown proper proof that he did not suffer a career ending injury, thus the Blazers will not deserve cap relief for a player who suffered a career ending injury.

And it's not like Miles is just standing in a corner doing nothing. He had 2 blocks in 7 minutes in one game. That's better than Joakim Noah!

 

Like I said, that's what the rule says, but the intent of the rule was to cover the case of a player returning to his own team (while under contract) and not being able to play. Limping through games.

In any case, the point of what I said was that the CBA is constructed to keep control over team salary in the team's hands. Putting it in other teams' hands is an obvious conflict of interest, and seems superfluous in that an agreed upon third party (a doctor approved by both the NBA and NBAPA) said he likely had a career ending injury.

Turns out he was wrong, but if the CBA were simply limited to abiding by that judgement, this whole mess would be avoided.

 

I don't see this as a mess. I just see this as the rules playing out. Miles didn't have a career ending injury, so Portland shouldn't be entitled to the cap relief.

 

Sure it does. There's a whole "catch all" provision in there to allow the NBA to stop things that might be technically legal or just unthought-of, but act against the spirit of the agreement.

And when that happened with Arenas, they promptly changed the rule to prevent it from happening again. Thus, the whole "Gilbert Arenas Rule" in the latest CBA.