Could Villanueva Be the Endgame to Tuesday Deal?

Posted Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Could Villanueva be the endgame to Tuesday deal?

What’s the endgame that began with Tuesday night’s trade of Amir Johnson to Milwaukee for Fabricio Oberto? Follow the trail and you could wind up at the very large feet of Charlie Villanueva.

Let’s start with this: The Pistons more than likely made that trade with Milwaukee not for Oberto, but instead for his contract – only about half of which is guaranteed. The result is they’ll pocket almost $2 million more that they can add to their free-agent shopping money. Joe Dumars told me last week he expected to have $17 million to $19 million. This pushes it somewhere around $20 million, give or take.

It’s curious that Carlos Boozer, who said several months ago that he would opt out of his contract, has yet to inform Utah he’ll do so. Even though negotiations can’t take place until July 1, agents can sniff out what the market will bear. Boozer is due nearly $13 million next year. Agent Rob Pelinka must have at first thought he could get him a contract starting at close to that and escalating upward from there. But maybe he’s less confident now. And maybe Joe Dumars, sensing Pelinka will shoot for the moon, is looking elsewhere to fill his frontcourt needs.

Enter Villanueva. Until the Bucks dealt Richard Jefferson to San Antonio earlier Tuesday for three spare parts – Oberto, Bruce Bowen and Kurt Thomas – it was widely believed Milwaukee would lose at least one, and potentially both, of its restricted free agents, Villanueva and Ramon Sessions. The trade – and the ability to buy out Bowen and, perhaps, Thomas – gives Milwaukee greater flexibility.

The way the draft is shaping up, the best guess is that the Bucks are going to find a starting-quality point guard at 10, perhaps Syracuse’s Jonny Flynn. That would seem to make it more likely they’d be inclined to let Sessions get away than Villanueva.

But now that they’ve added Johnson? Hmmm. That might tip the scales.

It also helps the Pistons that Dumars can count on a straightforward answer from Milwaukee general manager John Hammond, who spent the previous seven seasons under Joe D as his vice president. Hammond will be looking out for Milwaukee’s interests, but if Dumars extends an offer to Villanueva, the likelihood is he’ll know beforehand whether Hammond intends to match it or not.

That would take some of the risk out of extending an offer sheet to a restricted free agent. The gamble is that the original team has seven days to weigh its options. And during that week, the team that extends the offer has that much money in limbo. So if the Pistons, for instance, were to make Villanueva an offer starting at something slightly above the mid-level exception – say, $6.5 million a year – they’d have that much less to play with until Milwaukee made its decision. And in that time, other alternatives could dry up.

There’s also this to consider: If Pelinka and Boozer have been counting on the Pistons to make the biggest offer, and relying on the fact that there were no other obvious options for them in order to extract the most money, the trade that sends Johnson to Milwaukee and seems to signal a greater chance that Villanueva could leave might erode some of Boozer’s bargaining power.

Stay tuned. These are the twists and turns no one could have predicted when Joe D made the Chauncey Billups-Allen Iverson trade last November and became the biggest player in free agency ’09. Many more twists could be in the wind in the hours leading up to Thursday’s draft, and in the days that follow.