First of all, 21mil for expiring contracts isnt overpay for a mid 1st+2nd round pick. Usually you need to take atleast two years worth of bad salary, now you only have to take one year. Its really a no brainer. With the free agents left, I'm very doubtful you could create assets as good as the mid 1st by trying to get team friendly contracts. Literally the only opportunity cost is that now you cant use that cap space but where are you going to use it? If you go after RFA you are going to overpay and then the player isnt an asset anymore. Also when you look at our vet signings, there is very little reason to believe those possible signings could be more valuable than mid 1st round pick, especially for a rebuilding team.
Also the argument that "we already have so many young players" is wrong. You never have too many young players or good players to add a mid 1st round pick. Rookie contracts are so cheap you get low risk high reward lottery tickets with them, they pan out you have restricted rights to them so you basically own them for 7-8 years and for team like Kings, its the easiest way to either get top level talent or affordable contributors. No team in the Nba is in the position where they couldnt use a mid 1st pick.
This was so obvious. We could've got a 1st round pick for expiring salary so basically for nothing and again Vlade couldnt make the deal. Im sure there are tons of apolgists out there but this is just humoristic level bad. This man cant be the gm for a rebuilding team if he constantly fails to create assets with the cap space. His fa signings arent assets (quite the opposite) and he misses trades like this to gain assets. This is not how you build a team and this is awful for a rebuilding team
There were some reports during the Boogie trade that others Gms have trouble to even get Vlade on the phone to negotiate trades. At the time that sounded so ridiculous to me that I obviously didnt believe it but god damnit could it really be the case? If this man isnt constantly negotiating deals for our cap space, its unacceptable. I dont know wether its his unwillingness to spend hours daily on the phone negotiating or just incapability as a gm. Last year he didnt get that Carroll + 1st & 2nd. Instead he signed 40 millions worth of mentors and because of that we now have 24millions worth of untradeable dead salary. And whats hilarious (or sad), from all those signings, Carroll would've easily been the best player even though he was a salary dump. Now he decided not to pursue this trade. We'll just have to see what he does with the cap space instead.
To me all this just reeks incompetence. And before someone says "maybe Vlade tried to do that but Nets beat him", he couldve done the deal without getting the 2nd or giving up a better asset like Skal or Wcs. We know he could've easily beat that offer and since he havent shown intrest in this type of moves in the past, the most logical conclusion is that he didnt really try hard to get this one