Thursday, February 21, 2008

caps and trades

sad to see J-Kidd go but haven't been paying a whole lot of attention to the Nets since K-Mart left and they kind of got gradually, steadily shittier... but between having been kind of out of the loop and not knowing much about esoteric NBA trading rules, I was pretty shocked when I heard the trade was going to include Keith fucking Van Horn - who is kind of intrinsically funny as a shitty overrated non-European white basketball player with admittedly good cheekbones... but more importantly I thought he had retired etc!?

well, he had, basically, but NOT officially - and, due to the insanely convoluted trades teams have to make to comply with the NBA's apparently retardedly-designed salary cap, the Mavericks actually had to sign Van Horn out of his unofficial retirement for $4m and trade him to the Nets, after which he suits up and sits on the bench for a month and then retires again, $4m richer!! "It's like hitting the lottery" - Slate explains all, as it so often does -

sooo anyone want to riff on the structural similarities between these wasteful distortions and trades for Russian and former Soviet 'hot air' under the Kyoto cap and trade system? no? well, they're there pretty obvious I guess. game on! hoops and carbon markets, where else are you gonna get that kind of blogging twofer?

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