Rob Babcock
Rob Babcock
Rob Babcockis the former Vice President of Basketball Operations with the Minnesota Timberwolves of the NBA. He is also the former general manager of the Toronto Raptors...
firing logical looking player
Waiving a player never is easy, because you essentially are firing someone, ... But looking at our team, this was the most logical choice.
catch gives hopefully move opportunity pursued reasonable respect scenarios timing trade
We pursued all the trade scenarios we could (to try to move Murray). With that in mind, the timing of this is out of respect for Lamond and his family. This hopefully gives him a reasonable opportunity to catch on with another team.
along chicago chris guard national offers playoff point starting team won
Chris, along with Rafer Alston and Jose Calderon, would give us flexibility in the guard positions. Chris was the starting point guard for a playoff team in Chicago and won a national championship with Duke. At just 23 years of age, he offers a lot of potential.
comments trade
I don't make comments on any trade discussions or rumors,
aggressive chance guess might
If I had to guess, I'd guess they would probably match, ... ... But there's a little chance they might not. You have to be aggressive and see what happens.
depending next player signed since sure training until wait
It's unrelated, since we still could have signed another player now without waiving anyone, ... That's not to say for sure that we won't sign someone next week. But we still may wait until just before training camp, depending upon what happens.
based hoped last optimistic turned
Things didn't go as well as we would have hoped last year, but I was very optimistic that would have been turned around based off our discussions and the way things were going with our workouts,
likely playing
It just made sense to do it, ... He was the least likely of them to get any playing time.
basically message plan
The message that we want to get out there is basically what our plan is,
adjust depends good players quickly team
There's a lot of players on our team who are young . . . and we think they're going to be good players for us in the future. It just depends on how quickly they adjust and how quickly they develop.
comment discussion specifics
As you know, I don't comment on trades. I will say we've had discussion with them. I can't go into specifics other than we've had discussions.
ask determined fill guards guy interested left likely looked money point serious sign spot third worth
When we looked at the other (free-agent) point guards who were available, we determined a lot of them weren't worth the money. And of the ones we were interested in, we had to ask ourselves, do we have enough money left to make a serious bid? So at that point we said, okay, let's sign Matt, who we wanted to keep anyway, and we likely will go with a minimum-salary guy to fill that spot as our third point guard.
both excited game hard past season throughout worked
We are excited to have Pape back with us. He has worked very hard on his game over the past year, both during the season and throughout the summer.
I would say it's probably a long shot,