if you were in a court of law trying to prove a point, wouldn't you want to bring up evidence that establishes a behavioral pattern?
the tone of this thread is "you can't judge petrie on the moves he's doing now, have patience, a rebuild takes a few years." and then i'm told, "you can't use hindsight, those deals are in the past." so when, exactly, can i analyze his moves???
I'm sorry if you got the impression that I was defending Petrie by trying to completely absolve him of all guilt in this matter. I'm not.
I am, however, defending him (somewhat) on "The Gerald Wallace Mistake". I don't think it was too big of a deal, to begin with. And I don't think you can sit here and criticize someone for a mistake in 2003, if you're looking at it from a 2007 perspective. You can look back and say what Petrie
should have done, but anyone can do that.
What's impressive to me about a good GM is when they see something before anyone else does, and they react to it to improve their team. Jerry West showed this type of foresight with the Kobe/Vlade trade. You can argue that Petrie showed a lack of foresight when signing Peeler, but I differ. I think Peeler was what Petrie was looking for, and Peeler's sticking contingency was (apparently) that he have a second-year option.
You can argue that Geoff should have signed some other random player to a two-year contract in order to keep Wallace protected, but that seems rather unprofessional and, to be honest, unrealistic.
You can analyze a decision four years later, but to criticize the person that made the decision seems rather unfair, if you ask me. You have the benefit of hindsight; he didn't. However, he has made mistakes, oversights, etc., and has allowed this team to deteriorate into the mess we have today, and we have no apparent plans to rebuild anytime soon. I'm not trying to protect Petrie from criticism; I'm saying that you can't say "Look at what Gerald has become; how did we leave him unprotected?! Stupid Petrie!", when it's 2007 and that happened in 2003-04. That doesn't seem fair to me.