Beggars can't be choosers man
If I ever see him out begging I'll remind him of that.
the only reason he was cut was to make room for the trade.
Very true.
He was initially PART of the trade but he would have Devean George'd the trade and so he was just cut to pave the way to move Bibby.
The story concerned is this one, from Amick.
The other note of interest here is that I was told Williams was originally part of the Atlanta deal. The Kings would have received Salim Stoudamire (expiring contract for $783,000) in return and Williams would've been in a better setting, except for one hitch. Because he had signed a one-year deal for the minimum, he had the same right to block a trade that Devean George has. And because of the way that
stipulation blocked the Dallas-New Jersey deal for Jason Kidd, there was fear of a repeat occurence in this trade. Eventually, Williams and Stoudamire were removed from the table because of it.
http://www.sacbee.com/static/weblogs/sports/kings/archives/010648.html
Atlanta had plenty of reason to want him, but there was supposedly anxiety because he
could veto the deal. I don't hear Amick saying that he
would have. Knowing how those things always seem to go in Sac, nobody asked him anything, and the first thing he heard about it was notice that he'd been waived. But let's look at the situation in a little more detail.
There could have been an extra dose of paranoia involved in the trade, because, had it failed, there would only have been a few days left before the deadline to implement some sort of "Plan B" trade. Otherwise the Maloofs would have been facing many millions in luxury tax when Kevin's extension kicks in this summer, and I'd wager that the Maloofs have told Geoff that they are
not willing to pay luxury taxes on a lottery team. Geoff is a guy who likes to play it safe, so he might have talked Atlanta out of the Justin-Salim part for that reason. We wouldn't want Stoudamire as anything more than an expiring anyway, he's the rough equivalent of a thoroughly disgruntled Quincy Douby. Cancerous enough that we might have waived him the minute he arrived.
But, speaking of Douby, had Geoff agreed to the Justin-Salim part, just to make Atlanta happy,
who would we have waived to make room for Stoudamire? That aspect alone would have made it ugly for Geoff. He may well have presented the Devean George side of it to tactfully get out of a part of the proposal that he really didn't like.
