Hedo or Batum?

I’m not sure it’s such a smart idea for the Portland Trailblazers to be trying to recruit Hedo Turkoglu. Last season he scored 16.8 points per game on .541 TS% in 36.6 mpg. He pulled down 8.2 percent of available rebounds. Portland’s incumbent small forward, Nicolas Batum, only played 18.4 mpg and thus scored just 5.4 points per game. But he did it with a .555 TS% and and a 9.4 percent rebound rate. Plus he was only 20 so he’s likely to get better. If I were the Trailblazers, I would just give Batum more minutes and spend my free agent energy on trying to find a point guard who’s better than Steve Blake.

Now of course if you sign Turkoglu then you can still play Batum off the bench and let Rudy Fernandez go sulk or whatever. But any time you’re considering signing a free agent, especially in the NBA context, I think you really need to ask yourself if you’re not headed for a “winner’s curse” type of situation. When a truly top-notch player comes along, the kind of guy who teams would pay more than the max for if that were allowed, then of course you sign that guy. But otherwise, you’d better have some reason to believe that he either fills a unique need for your team (for all that Rashard Lewis’ contract seems a bit absurd, very few guys can both hit three pointers and defend power forwards credibly) or else that you have some specific reason to believe he’s being undervalued by the market. Turkoglu, a scorer we’re all talking about because we just watched him shine on national television in a run to the NBA finals, doesn’t fit the model of someone who’s likely to wind up undervalued.