Okay Jomal, Pietre has been involved in a horrible accident and is currently unable to make decisions due to his health. A full recovery is expected. Now, do you think Pietre was confident even if Artest was not traded by the deadline that he could either sign n trade him or at seasons end sign him to a new contract?
If the answer is neither, are you satisfied with letting Artest walk, the reasoning being the offers are not *good enough*?
You have been assigned interim GM today thru Thursday.
Artest, for his many faults, wants two things to come out of this summer - to sign with a contending team and to be paid at least close to his worth. If Petrie does nothing or decides to do nothing by Thursday because he does not like the offers, what he
SHOULD do is start looking at sign and trades this off-season involving Artest. But even if he can't pull the trigger on that, Artest will still need to find a team willing to sign him, and as we have previously noted, those teams are few. But a rumor has been circulating around the media types in Sacramento, that if Petrie does not trade Ron this week (the local odds are 50-50), he may very well be willing to sign Ron to a long-term deal, with some character clauses included in the language of the deal, which Artest has already agreed to.
At any rate, Petrie is working these deals so he will have cap room come 2010, when the free agent market is supposed to be rich. In the summer of that year, the King's payroll will be halved, from the roughly 64 million it currently stands at, or did prior to the Bibby trade. That year, Miller, Thomas and Abdur-Rahim all come off the books.
