Exactly, Hinrich is younger, way better defender and can shoot the three. Bayless.. lmao. They should have given that guy up in a second if it got them Hinrich.
Nothing else can really be said at this point. He is certainly an upgrade over Blake and there are some questions about how he fits. It appears the Blazers were after another ball handler and initiator and they got that for a reasonable price in Miller. Just have to see how it plays out.
Hinrich isn't better than Miller, not even close..he might be a better fit for Portland, sure, but not at the price of giving up Bayless, when they picked up Miller at a reasonable price..I'd understand if he was overpaid, but he isn't, it's a good price..
Andre Miller for the MLE>>Hinrich+his salary for a few years+losing Bayless..
It is about fit, is it not? Hinrich fits in with them much better then Miller imo and when that young Blazer team starts to really come into its own Hinrich won't be a grampa like Miller will be. You obviously disagree but I would have given up Bayless and someone else to get Hinrich for a couple more mill a year, no question.
We want to win NOW and that's why we signed Miller. We're going after it.
i think they ought to cancel the season and just give Portland the Larry O'brien
"Miller wouldn't help us, he can't hit the three"
Jeez, and the Lakers ain't even in town! That'll be new territory for your Blazers, tlong= actually "going after it" on the nites they don't play the Lakers.
Just shows to go ya.
Should have gone after Hinrich or David Lee.
http://www.facebook.com/ext/share.ph...u=RI49S&ref=nf
The Portland Trail Blazers have signed free agent guard Andre Miller to a multi-year contract, it was announced today by General Manager Kevin Pritchard. Per team policy, terms of the deal were not disclosed.
“We are excited to add a player of the caliber and character of Andre Miller,” said Pritchard. “He is one of the league’s ironmen who brings a wealth of veteran leadership to our team and is a great fit for our young and improving roster.”
Miller (6-2, 205, Utah) holds career averages of 14.6 points, 4.2 rebounds, 7.4 assists and 1.38 steals in 815 games (768 starts) during his 10 NBA seasons with Cleveland, L.A. Clippers, Denver and Philadelphia.
“I'm really excited for this opportunity with the Trail Blazers and look forward to working with my new team,” said Miller. “I hope to provide veteran leadership to a young talented nucleus and help Portland take the next step in the pursuit of a championship.”
Originally selected by the Cleveland Cavaliers with the eighth overall pick in the 1999 NBA Draft, Miller is tied for the 16th highest assists average (7.4) in NBA history and is currently fourth among active players. He has also played in 530 consecutive games, the longest active streak in the NBA. Miller has missed just three games in his career.
Miller, 33, has 174 career double-doubles and averaged one for Cleveland in 2001-02 (16.5 ppg, 10.9 apg) while leading the NBA in assists that season.
During the 2008-09 season, Miller averaged 16.3 points, 4.5 rebounds, 6.5 assists, 1.33 steals and shot 47.3 percent from the floor in 82 games (all starts). He ranked 14th in the NBA in assists, 15th in assist-to-turnover ratio (2.68) and tied for 15th in steals. Miller recorded 12 double-doubles last season, including two triple-doubles.
Miller averaged 21.2 points, 6.3 rebounds, 5.3 assists and 1.17 steals in the 2009 NBA Playoffs. He has career postseason averages of 17.0 points, 4.7 rebounds, 4.8 assists and 1.30 steals in 27 games (all starts).
What is "it" exactly?
The second round.
going for what? a second round parade
Larry O'Brien Trophy
Should have just put that before.
Keep it shiny for us. You won't have it for long.
Hollinger with rare lucid moments here.
---------
Updated: July 25, 2009, 12:21 AM ET
Miller deal a bargain for Blazers
By John Hollinger
ESPN.com
Miller will battle Steve Blake for the starting point guard position in Portland.
I didn't like Andre Miller going to the Blazers if it was going to cost them $40 million.
At $14 million guaranteed? At that price, I can talk myself into it.
Miller's three-year, $21 million deal -- which includes a team option for a third year that's part of a growing trend I'll discuss in a moment -- is unusually good value for an unrestricted free agent, especially a veteran point guard with a consistent track record who never, ever misses games.
Put another way, Miller's deal pales beside the one Dallas signed with Jason Kidd, even though Miller is younger and had a better year last year.
Sure, there are some ways this doesn't exactly fit. Miller does a lot of damage in the post, and the Blazers already have a couple of players (Greg Oden, LaMarcus Aldridge) occupying those slots fairly regularly. He's also an up-tempo guard on what was the league's second-slowest-paced team last season, and his inability to make 3s is an odd fit with the Blazers' habit of spacing the floor with shooters around Brandon Roy.
But at some point, it became the only sensible move left on the chessboard. Portland had a limited pool of realistic candidates to pursue -- the Knicks were going to match David Lee and no sign-and-trade could be concocted to please all sides, and the only other halfway decent unrestricted free agent, Lamar Odom, seems sealed to the Lakers despite their public standoff. Meanwhile, the dip in quality in the unrestricted pool after Miller and Odom is staggering.
The only legitimate alternative was to make a run at Milwaukee's restricted free agent Ramon Sessions, but again the Blazers were risking the offer's being matched -- much as Utah did with Paul Millsap earlier this summer. That cost the Blazers a week, and if they had lost another week, there might not have been any players left worth signing with their $7.7 million in cap space.
The Blazers could have made a trade into their cap space, as well, but they would have been taking on another team's trash and it likely would have cost a player on their end -- the most realistic proposal out there would have swapped Travis Outlaw for Kirk Hinrich, and compared with that, getting Miller for free looks like a much better alternative.
"We wanted to keep this team together and just add to it," said Blazers general manager Kevin Pritchard in Friday's conference call with reporters.
Two interesting nuggets emerged from the call with Pritchard and Miller: First, the Blazers haven't guaranteed him the starting job. Miller and Steve Blake will compete for it in training camp, and although everyone expects Miller to prevail, he might not play more than 30 minutes a night.
Second, the Blazers want to play more up-tempo. We'll see how this plays out in the regular season, obviously, given that "We're going to run and press more" is right up there with "He has added 15 pounds of muscle" on the training camp cliché list.
But it's something we've heard hints of since Portland lost to Houston in the first round of the playoffs, and Pritchard brought it up again when I asked about Miller's tendency to push it up. "One or our keys is getting easier buckets," Pritchard said. "We can become better if we can get easier buckets in transition, and Nate [McMillan] and I talked about that quite a bit."
Meanwhile, it helps that Miller wanted to come. Pritchard told reporters in a conference call that Miller blew him away at a dinner in Las Vegas with McMillan because of his knowledge of the team and how he could find easier shots for the players (Apparently, the meeting was more memorable than the meal for Miller, who said it was "some Italian place" and he had "some kind of frittata").
"We went through all our options," Pritchard said. "Once Nate and I went to dinner, it was all about feel. He knew how to play with our team. He knew how to get us extra possessions. He knew his throw-ahead pass would be even more effective with LaMarcus and Greg and [Nicolas] Batum."
Pritchard said the Blazers were pretty much done making moves, although he spurred a raised eyebrow by making a point about several veterans not having guarantees and being waived in the near future. One of those is former Spurs defensive ace Bruce Bowen, who might be cut by Milwaukee in the next seven day because his deal becomes fully guaranteed Aug. 1; one wonders whether Pritchard -- who came through the San Antonio pipeline -- would have his eye on the veteran stopper if he became available.
Meanwhile, there's an interesting part of this deal that has been a piece of several signings this summer, and it's not getting nearly enough attention -- the use of a nonguaranteed portion of the contract or, as one GM calls it, "Confederate money."
The Spurs did this with Antonio McDyess' deal, for instance, and the Cavs did it with Anderson Varejao's. It's a great trick for a team that's already over the cap because, at the end of the contract, it allows the team to trade a veteran player for another one making the same amount of money as long as it can find a partner looking to cut costs; the partner then waives the player with the nonguaranteed deal and wipes the salary from its books. This would be impossible to do if his contract merely expired because that would make the player a free agent.
And if you think about it, it allows these teams to cir vent the cap. We've already seen teams doing it increasingly with year-end contacts that have a nonguaranteed second year added on (the Nuggets, for instance, acquired both J.R. Smith and Renaldo Balkman this way, after signing bit players in late spring and "trading" them to make the cap dollars work; their new teams immediately cut them), and now we're seeing it more with big-name players too.
I bring this up because Miller's third year isn't guaranteed. We don't know the language yet on the guarantee, but if it's a late guarantee date -- say, Sept. 1 -- the Blazers would be able to dangle him the whole summer in 2011 if his performance isn't up to snuff and get another player who makes his salary. They'd be over the cap otherwise (assuming extensions for Roy and Aldridge) and couldn't do that, but this little trick lets them sidestep that problem.
It flies in the face of our logic a bit because for years the assumption has been that guaranteed contracts are one of the worst things about the NBA and make it hard for teams to manage salaries responsibly. But we've seen in the past couple of years that nonguaranteed years at the end of those deals actually can be worse -- encouraging contending teams to spend more than they otherwise might have.
Those are the rules right now, though, and the Blazers took advantage of them. They only have to commit to Miller for two years, and if they want to move on, his contact will be easily tradable for somebody else making a similar salary. It's one of many ways their risk on this deal wasn't nearly as great as on, say, the deal they thought about with Hedo Turkoglu earlier this summer. And it's why Miller, even if less than an ideal fit, was about the only sensible move once his price dropped so low.
John Hollinger writes for ESPN Insider. To e-mail him, click here.
Andre Miller as a Trail Blazer
By Kelly Dwyer
Ball Don't Lie
This seems to be quite fair, in all respects.
33-year old Andre Miller, stuck in "Knicks are my only option" limbo for nearly a month, has apparently decided to sign with the Portland Trail Blazers. The very young, Portland Trail Blazers.
If that news alone leaves you a little iffy, I can understand. You want your players to be on the same page, age-wise. You don't want to have guys in their prime's prime wasted playing with youngsters who are still too far away to consistently contribute at their best, or on the other side, well-heeled veterans who just can't cut it anymore.
But look at the terms, as Yahoo! Sports' Marc Spears reports them — three years, $22 million, with the third year coming as a team option.
Perfect.
There's nobody else out there, save for Ramon Sessions, and it's likely that he's not going to sign for a two or three year deal. There's even a chance any Sessions contract gets matched by the Milwaukee Bucks, as Sessions is an unrestricted free agent.
Miller, at this point, is a better player. Sessions could vault ahead of Miller sometime next season, with point guards in their early-to-mid 30s you always run the risk of a one-way ticket to dogtown, without any warning. But at this point, and at these terms, this is a sound deal.
The Blazers need an upgrade on Steve Blake, and though Miller has the same defensive deficiencies as the in bent Portland point guard, he contributes at a far greater rate in every area save for outside shooting. And the Blazers, first in offensive efficiency last season, have that area more or less covered. It's not their specialty, but as youngsters Roy will improve from the outside, Nicholas Batum will improve from the outside, and Martell Webster could be returning to fire away this fall.
So Miller takes away Blake's outside shooting, for a stretch. He also scores better, passes better, doesn't turn it over (both Miller and Blake are tremendous assist-to-turnover types), and is one of the best lob tossers of the last 20 years. Because I'm a blogger, I think the lob was created in 1989.
And if Miller falls off a cliff? Then you have Steve Blake, in his prime. You have Sergio Rodriguez, at least for now. Forgot Sergio was traded with cash and Brockman to the Kings for Jeff Pendergraph. You have Jerryd Bayless, who was ruddy awful in his rookie year, but that could turn around. Or they can just trade him with cash to the Kings.
And you only have Miller for two years, at a price just above market average, while your young team moves closer to its prime.
For Miller? He's not going to get another staunch contract like this in his career, even if he shines through all three years. But this is fair. He's made plenty of money, a good rookie deal followed by a big free agent deal with Denver, followed by this. And, to be fair, he coasted at times during his contract year. Teams obviously noticed.
But they also noticed over 16 points, 6.5 assists, and 4.5 rebounds last season. Even if that drops a bit in 2009-10 (coach Nate McMillan likes to slow things down, so even if Miller's per-game averages drop, it doesn't mean he's playing worse), it's still sound production to have.
Fine deal, for both ends.
Portland also called PHX about aquiring Nash in exchange for some young talent and Kerr promptly turned them down, citing stupidity and love for mediocrity as the reason.
To Kerr's defense, it's more like citing "The fan bases love for mediocrity" as the reason. If Kerr himself had complete control he woulda blown it up.
Based on his comments upon being hired I would agree. He's completely done a 180 since. The Nash "face of the franchise" factor, and the almight $$ have definately contributed to Kerr deciding that playing zero defense is acceptable.
It's a shame cause I think he would be a good GM if he wasn't under pressure to let Nash grab his nutsack and twist it in any direction Nash chooses.
This Miller signing is a decent alternative to bringing in a Jason Kidd or Steve Nash i guess.
I still think they need more veteran leadership up there before they can really do something important.....
Nash for Bayless/Outlaw/future#1 woulda been enough for me.
Kirk Hinrich woulda been the perfect fit at PG, they shoulda traded Bayless if it meant getting him. Idk how long it'll take teams to realize it's a lot easier to win a le with a role player at PG rather than a PG as the focal point of the offense.
That didn't last long:
http://blog.oregonlive.com/behindbla..._report_p.htmlMOST LIKELY TO BE TRADED
Andre Miller
The veteran point guard acknowledges that he's not a good fit for the offense, which is methodical and built around the clear-out skills of Brandon Roy, neither of which suit Miller's strengths. He has two years at $7 million on his contract, with a team-option for a third season. Potential trade partners: Washington center Brendan Haywood, Indiana forward Troy Murphy, Orlando center Marcin Gortat, San Antonio center Ian Mahinmi.
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