No worries. I always approach this as a bar debate.
So the other thing to remember: no free agents are breaking down the Kings’ door. With Minny, Utah, the Lakers and others interested in Hill, I suspect they needed to make better offer to get him in the first place. When you look at the deal as basically a 2/$20 per, with a couple million buy-out in the end, it’s really not that bad.
I don’t think the Kings would have trouble finding a trading partner. There are a ton of $8-$12 million players that teams would love to dump. Two of those and some kind of protected #1 for Hill and a filler player? I think plenty would do that.
Look at Portland. In 2 years, they’ll still be over the cap. At that point, they’ll still be stuck with Crabbe (1/$19), Turner (1/$17), Harkless (1/$10) and Leonard (1/$10). If they wanted to rebuild faster, I could totally see them ship one (or two) of those guys and a #1 to Sac for Hill, who’d they’d then just cut. (I haven’t run the numbers, but I assume that gets them under the cap.)
Or if Detroit wants to finally blow things up. They find a trade for Drummond, then ship Reggie Jackson’s $16 mil and a protected #1 to Sac and suddenly they have TONS of cap space to go after anyone.
Once they finally trade Carmelo, the Knicks might want to dump Noah, Courtney Lee, or even (snicker) Tim Hardaway Jr. to free up cap space to sign a big name.
There are lots of ways to use Hill’s contract, assuming the Kings don’t just want him to play it out.
