How did orlando manage to get to this point again ?

[Theoo's Daddy]

1: You'd think they learnt their lesson when Shaq left.

2: After the decision, they still had time to rectify this.

This can't be happening to their fans again, especially after just getting a new stadium.. How did they manage to **** this up. List the bad trades/moves they've made over the years thats about to cost them a superstar player..

Let me start with this

A: Keeping van gundy around for too long, it should be clear by now, he's not a head coach, he's best suited as an assistant coach. I don't get what they saw in him.

[kentatm]

its not SVGs fault that Otis Smith is a dipstick GM.

[3zazer1]

Otis Smith is a horrible GM that relies on empty idiotic deals that sound good on paper to fall in his lap. I remember when I was a big fan back in 08-09 when they made there run to the finals. I immediately started to second guess when he broke up the team by giving away there best defender on Kobe (Cortney Lee), Rafer Austin, and lost Hedo via free agency to the Raptors


He couldn't even do the the trade back in December right! He had to get Gilbert. We see how that turned out.

Really, they need to get rid of Otis Smith. He has to be the most overated GM in basketball.

[jbryan1984]

They traded for Arenas and Turkoglu. What's funny is, they ended up paying Turk the contract they refused to just a year earlier.

I feel for you Orlando fans, losing the 2 best big men the league has seen the last 20 years.

[kaiiu]

they jumped the gun after that finals loss. Should have kept Lee

[Micku]

Bad contracts.

[MeLO MvP 15]

Orlando should give 90% of the blame to Otis Smith. The owner gave him the freedom to take back a lot of money in a deal and the best he could do is turn a good center (Gortat), a massive expirer (Vince), a good contributor (Pietrus), and a pick into Jason Richardson, Hedo and Clark. Granted, JRich seemed like a good pick up, but if he searched a little longer or waited he could've gotten a lot better players for that package, all he had to do was wait 2 months until the deadline to get better players. He also turned a bad contract into the worst contract in the NBA b/c he's friends with Arenas. He panicked. Just like his coach. Speaking of Stan Van Gundy, he gets like 10% of the blame just because he managed to turn good player like JRich and Arenas into simply spot up shooters.

Otis Smith. He made a bunch of panic trades. He pretty much wasn't patient at the slightest. First he tried out the VC experiment, it failed, so he panicked and thought Gilbert Arenas was the solution and that was an even bigger failure than the VC experiment. Otis Smith is really the only one to blame.