QWERTYLICIOUS
Starter
It still hurts!
[KINGS] Comments that don't warrant their own thread (2025-26)
- Thread starter Tetsujin
- Start date
It's pretty hard to "accidentally" not draft someone. (Though, yes, I think I have heard of debacles in the NFL draft.) This is just a fuller explanation than we've seen before, though consistent with prior explanations (overlap with Fox).
SacTownKid
Hall of Famer
In fairness, maybe Vlade knew something about the big market stuff. Luka ended up in LA somehow, someway. Like the NBA isn't choreographed to a large degree right? lol.
Yeah but it not that bad to have the problem of holding onto young Luka and Fox deciding who we want and who to go where for how many lottery picks.
Telemachus
Starter
I agree with him on this one. It isn't like GMs can leave agents out of the loop when it comes to trades.
kingsboi
Hall of Famer
you must really like solitude if you are way out there in Sitka
Insomniacal Fan
Starter
Obviously this is about Cousins. Retrospectively, I'd actually defend Vlade being transparent about Cousins spiking the deal, and Vlade having to settle for a worse deal.
If it's public knowledge that a player is going to be uncooperative with management, making that information public allows other teams to price that into their valuation of the player when they're going up for contracts. (Teams would be willing to spend more on players that won't obstruct trades)
If a player's agent plays hardball, then it's fair that there's a price.
I think what hurts in this is that Luka surely would have forced his way out of Dallas in 2-3 years if they were on a play-in treadmill trajectory, but Nico bounced him while his heart was still in it.
And then we had a guy that seemed to love and be all in for Sac just knife us in the back, and for those two guys to be joined at the hip in the draft evaluation for Luka. uggh.
And I guess I will always fall back on - if you wanted the athletic big how can you not even workout JJJ (and Bamba and WCJ for that matter). Gotta hand it to them for being so confidently incorrect, but also you maybe wonder if Bagley didn't have his dad in his ear telling him everyone else around him was the problem not Bagles, maybe all those physical gifts turn into a full player. I just think every pre-draft evaluation of MB3 said the same thing about his mental game and that he'd at best be a stat sheet stuffer on a perennial loser. He hasn't even been that.
Big part of the Haliburton saga was how blindsided Tyrese was by the move. It largely defined the narrative on how dumb Monte is beyond the fact Hali did fully blossom into a star.
Also I don't know how much players can get away with this now with the new CBA though. It's either going to be the one or two teams that angled for cap space or your current team with Bird rights that you can sign with until salaries fall in line with whatever actually works with the aprons being what they are.
He already told us all of this at the post-Cousins trade press conference... "If you think this deal is bad, guess what I had a better deal just days ago and the player's agent sabotaged it" ... and it did not make him look any more competent back then either. There was no reason to tell either the player or the agent until the trade was official. He's admitting that he out-leveraged himself by not understanding how the game is played.
I do agree with the premise -- agents do have too much power -- but the Fox trade is a better example of that than what happened with DeMarcus. Rich Paul effectively reduced the number of teams Monte could negotiate with down to 1 and as a result Fox is now in a great position and we are very much not.
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