Wesley Matthews returns to ESA tonight, and if he's true to form he will leave Jazz Nation pondering on what might have been.
As you undoubtedly recall, Portland offered Matthews a toxic contract very similar to what they offered Paul Millsap as a restricted free agent the year before. The Jazz brass wisley ponied up the scratch to keep Paul in a Jazz uniform, but they simply weren't able to do the same thing two years in a row to keep Wes along the Wasatch front. Instead, they had to settle for Raja Bell, who just didn't pan out as well as they had hoped.
The Jazz were so burdened by AK-47's contract that they really had no choice but let Matthews go, so you can't really fault them for that. I say the real Wes Matthews mistake was made about a year earlier, when they didn't offer him a multi-year contract as an undrafted rookie.
The Jazz knew they had something special when they brought Matthews to camp, and it became pretty obvious that he would make the roster. As an undrafted rookie, they could have tied him up for several years for peanuts. Instead, they offered him the league minimum, and when he blew everyone's expectations away, his market value became impossibly high for a team already teetering on the luxury tax brink. Essentially, they fell prey to the conventional wisdom that no player that got passed over by every NBA team twice could be worth a guaranteed multi-year contract. They should have trusted the coaching staff's evaluation that he would be worth keeping him around, and if they had, Wes could have saved the Jazz from last season's debacle.
Maybe there were legal reasons that sort of contract wasn't possible. Or maybe Matthews was so confident that he would be successful that he only wanted a one-year contract so he could cash in on free agency. Whatever the answer, he turned out to be the winner.
So join me for a trip down memory lane, courtesy of Memoismoney.
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