Jazz trade away Maynor and Harpring’s contract to Oklahoma City
// December 28th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Trades
On December 23, 2009 the Jazz trade rookie Eric Maynor and Matt Harpring’s corpse to Oklahoma City for…wait for it…the rights to Peter Fehse!! Who?! That’s exactly what I said when I heard about it. Oklahoma City (then the Seattle Supersonics) drafted him in 2002 but kept him playing in Europe after they drafted him. He never panned out in any fashion good enough for OKC to decide to bring him to the NBA. He’ll never play a game in the NBA…that’s safe to say. Basically when you make a trade, especially with the Jazz sending 2 players, the NBA requires that both teams receive something in the trade. Harpring’s contract this year is $6.5 million but since Harpring is out for the season (and likely will never play again) insurance is covering the majority of his contract. Since the Jazz are over the cap, it essentially means that they were paying the portion of Harpring’s contract that insurance was not picking up ($1.8 million) AND also $6.5 million in luxury tax to the league since insurance doesn’t cover over-the-cap fines. Eric Maynor’s contract is good for $1.3 million this year. (continued…)
On the surface, this trade seems crappy. Eric Maynor, even as a rookie, has been a solid backup to Deron Williams and trading him away for essentially nothing doesn’t really seem to be worth it. However, digging deeper we see that this trade was a pretty savvy move by Kevin O’Conner. I like Maynor better than Ronnie Price because he has a better passing and shooting game but Price is a decent backup to Williams. It’s not like the Jazz are high and dry now that they traded Maynor. The other thing to remember is that, at best, Maynor/Price as the backup will only really get 8-12 minutes per game…which isn’t all that much. Something else to remember is that the Jazz were $12 million over the cap which means they forking out a lot of money in salaries and to the league for the luxury tax fines. After making this trade the Jazz save $10.5 million this year…that’s astonishing. Someone I know who is VERY close to the Jazz and their financials disclosed that the Jazz were losing over $200,000 per game this year. In these tough times it’s hard to ignore that figure. In times of recession the rich lose more than the rest of us. The owner of the Oklahoma City Thunder has been reported to have lost over $2 billion in the last few years. It’s safe to say that the Miller family has probably also lost money due to the bad economy. The last thing the state of Utah needs is for the Miller family to be losing money in their non-Jazz related ventures AND then for the Jazz to be losing money because we don’t need them pulling the plug.
Another way to think about this is from the opportunity cost side. When this trade became available the Jazz could very well have looked at it like this. If we trade Maynor we save $10 million dollars. Is Eric Maynor worth $10 million dollars? Would he be worth a $10 million dollar contract? No way. That’s not even a question. Luol Deng, Hedo Turkoglu, Manu Ginobili all make around that and Maynor is not remotely in that same class. So the bottom line is: you make that trade and be happy you did.
In the meantime, the Jazz are under the required roster size of 13 so they’ll need to pick someone else up. Whether that’s through a trade, bringing up a D-League-er or someone not playing in the NBA we’ll see.
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