But Rudy Gay is not an effective pull-up jump shooter. NBA greats such as Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan impacted an entire generation of basketball players as pull-up jump shooters. A scoring wing with a tendency to take pull-up jump shots is one thing. Part of the reason for Gay’s relatively unappreciated career year was that his stats simply weren’t making an impact in the win column. But oddly enough, it felt like no one noticed. In 2014-2015, Rudy actually averaged 21.1 points per game, good for the 12 th highest scorer in the regular season. Mandatory Credit: Justin Ford-USA TODAY Sports If Gay proves he is healthy in the first half of next season, the Kings would once again have the ability to move him at the trade deadline or allow him to expire in the offseason.Even after continuous improvement in Sacramento, SF Rudy Gay still has plenty of critics to quiet. Gay and the Rock Nation group would have been looking for that much or more as a starting point for a new 3-4 year deal this summer. Gay has an extra two months over what Matthews faced, although we still don’t know the severity of the injury.Įven if Gay doesn’t opt out, $14.4 million isn’t an unreasonable dollar figure. Technology has turned a year long recovery into a 7-8 month ordeal.
He signed a 4-year, $70 million deal four months later with the Dallas Mavericks and recovered in time to play 78 games in the 2015-16 season. Wesley Matthews, a friend of Gay’s, ruptured his Achilles tendon on March 5, 2015. They would lose their pick, but not face the scrutiny of the pick swap.Īlso, Gay could still opt out of his deal. They very well could rally around their fallen compadre and finish the season outside of the top ten. The Kings are 5-6 on the season without Gay. If Sacramento somehow remains in the top ten and keeps their pick, but then has to swap for a lower pick with Philadelphia, it will turn an already suspect deal into a complete disaster.Īll of this could be moot. With a 7-2 record over their last nine games, the Sixers now sit at 14-26, just a game and a half behind the Kings in the standings. The chance for the Kings to somehow jump ahead of the 76ers seemed remote. Philadelphia has posted the NBA’s worst record over the previous three seasons. The pick swaps were almost an afterthought. Only Koufos remains on the roster, although Belinelli yielded the pick that the Kings used to select Malachi Richardson in the 2016 NBA Draft.
They used that cap space to help pay for their free agency haul of Rajon Rondo, Kosta Koufos and Marco Belinelli. The bigs might never play in the NBA.īetween Thompson, Landry and Stauskas, the Kings saved over $30 million in guaranteed salary over a two-year period. In the summer of 2015, Vlade Divac and his front office traded Jason Thompson, Carl Landry, Nik Stauskas and what has now been established as their 2019 unprotected lottery pick to Philly for a boatload of cap space and the draft rights to two European bigs. They assumed they would be outside the top ten and the pick would then be relayed to the Chicago Bulls for a trade made all the way back in 2011.īut with their downturn of late, not only is a lottery pick in play, but so is the Sixers’ ability to steal the Kings’ draft position. The Kings had already written off their 2017 draft pick. Lastly, there is that sneaky pick swap with the Philadelphia 76ers.