:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/27576921/20131129_kkt_sx9_567.0.jpg)
In two recent tweets, Peter Vecsey credits Billy King with making smart financial moves in picking up Alan Anderson last summer and Mirza Teletovic the summer before. The Nets got the two players to accept smaller deals than they originally agreed to.
Vecsey, the Hall of Fame basketball writer, says King was able to sign both Anderson and Andrei Kirilenko by convincing Anderson to take less money
Fact: BK was set 2 sign Anderson 4 1.8M guarantee when Kirilenko became available & took $ plus some. AA decided 2 accept non guar vet min
— Peter Vecsey (@PeterVecsey1) January 20, 2014
Translated from Twitterese, Vecsey is saying that Anderson had agreed to sign a deal that would have paid him $1.8 million this season. That money would have come out of the Nets mini-MLE, the only cap space the Nets had at the time. The deal would have left the Nets with $1.3 million of the $3.1 million exception. Then, when Andrei Kirilenko agreed to accept the full mini-MLE, King was able to convince Anderson to take the vets minimum, $947,000, according to Vecsey. (Anderson's deal is fully guaranteed for two years, next year being a player option.)
Billy King choose to sign little known Teletovic (9.5M for 3) rather than Ersan Ilyasova, who wanted 50M f BK 4 five; he got 40M f Bucks
— Peter Vecsey (@PeterVecsey1) January 25, 2014
In the second tweet, posted over the weekend, Vecsey says Ilyasova wanted $50 million from the Nets in 2012, but settled for $40 million from Bucks. But that was more than $30 million more that what the Nets agreed to pay Teletovic. Vecsey's tweet seems to argue that the choice of Teletovic over Ilyasova was not just a smart deal financially, but from a basketball sense. Ilyasova, the Bucks' 6'10" power forward, is averaging 9.2 points in 26 minutes, shooting only 25.3 percent from deep, compared to Teletovic's 9.1 in 19 minutes ... and 42.6 percent from deep. (Teletovic originally agreed to $15.675 million over three but decided on the lower amount to keep the Nets from being hard-capped.)