Commercial Appeal beat writer Ron Tillery delivered a doozy of a blog post today about trade offers that didn’t come to fruition.
This is juicy enough to go through one by one and take a look at:
The Grizzlies had agreed in principle to acquire power forward Zach Randolph Thursday night but Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling later nixed the trade, according to two NBA sources.
During the NBA draft, executives from both teams hammered out a package with Randolph and Darko Milicic as the key pieces. Griz guard Greg Buckner would also have been included in the transaction.
The Griz ended up dealing Milicic to the New York Knicks for swingman Quentin Richardson after they waited on a final answer from the Clippers and received a curious no.
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And aside from Randolph’s off-the-court, character issues, the deal could have been costly for the Griz.
The 6-9 beefy scorer and rebounder is owed more than $33 million over the next two seasons. With Milicic entering the final year of a deal that pays $7.5 this season, the Griz would have absorbed more than $22 million in additional costs when the final math was completed on the deal.
Okay, in all honesty this is the only one of the bunch of which I have independent knowledge. I got tipped to some kind of Randolph deal last night and was able to confirm that there was a trade offer involving Randolph that the Clippers turned down. At the time I assumed it was a last-ditch effort to get Blake Griffin, because I couldn’t imagine any other Randolph-to-the-Grizzlies scenario that the Clippers would reject.
