I'm coming around to the idea that JJ might be here for a while, and surprisingly I find myself ok with it. I'm also worried about the "contract year" potential, but all year I've been under the impression that his cap hit to us (7.6M) would be prohibitive to the Blazers keeping him AND getting FA's. Maybe Olshey doesn't think that JJ pegs the meter, and will let him go regardless. I might do an analysis on this tomorrow, but my gut feel is that a 10pt/10rpg guy will get roughly 10M a year in a FA deal, and coupled with the fact that he's doing this at only age 24 it might be that he gets more. If that's the case, maybe sucking up that 7.6M cap hit to be able to get another FA and then re-sign JJ for 10M/yr wouldn't be a bad deal. If you believe in him going forward.
Why be surprised that we should keep our best player? It's because everyone here is stuck in Pritchard-think, in which we acquire major pieces only through the draft. That's why many fans couldn't accept 2 years ago the fact that our best player was Andre Miller, and sent him packing. Hickson is this year's Miller.
Miller had a body of work that showed that he was who we thought he was. Hickson has been doing a good job for about 45 games. Before that he'd been dumped by two teams. Maybe he's seen the light and reinvented himself. But there's way less certainty that you're going to get what you pay for with him than with Miller.
I don't understand why people bring this up. Who cares whether 2 awful team managements stupidly let him go? You're only as good as your last game, so it's ancient history. Many players improve fast and no one holds their prior ineptitude against them. But Hickson wasn't inept. In his last year with Cleveland his PER was 15.6 and he led them in minutes. They traded him after the season to let Jamison and Varejao start.
