People are just lazy and keep repeating the same garbage because guys like Bill Simmons goes on for years about how he’s smarter than NBA GMs (he’s not.)

1) The team was going nowhere with Pau and they had to reboot. They traded Pau for what ended up being a franchise center (Marc Gasol) and the cap space which allowed to them to….

2) trade ABSOLUTELY NOTHING for Zach Randolph. As a Clipper fan, the Grizzlies did in that trade exactly what the Clippers et al should have done. Leveraged the Lebron hysteria to advance their own interests. The Clippers were having fantasies about Lebron signing in Los Angeles so they needed to clear out cap space to make such an offer. Sure, drafting Blake Grifin made the “need” to move out ZBo (because everybody knows that you never want to have too many big men, right?) Cap space in and of itself was worthless going into last offseason because the idea of a marquee signing with Memphis never seemed realistic.

3) Wallace did not want to draft Thabeet. As the commenters on this blog had pointed out, Wallace wanted either Evans or Curry.

4) Gay was an overpay. But assuming the overpay didn’t keep you from adequately filling out the rest of your roster (and signing Conley, Randolph and voicing that you will sign Gasol make it clear that’s not a problem) who really cares.

5) This is bit simplistic on my part, but as of 09/10, wins were worth $1.607 million. According to Berri and Wages of Wins, Conley was worth about 8.0 wins this year which is worth $12.8MM in value. Going into 2011-2012, Conley is making about half of that at $6.6MM. The signing seems pretty defensible to me.

Wallace played his hand pretty beautifully by picking up assets undervalued on the market based on their reputation (Randolph, Iverson) and in Iverson’s case got rid of him quickly when it didn’t work out. The org admitted the mistake with Thabeet and moved him for immediate help in Battier to fill the void left by Gay. The pointing at laughing at the Grizz/Wallace these past few years is laughable and for writers to continue to be ignorant (we have no idea why this is working) speaks to the levels of group think in NBA “analysis.”