On Second Thought...

Well, well. It would appear that Amanda was right (see the comments from yesterday's post). My assertion that Sacramento got a great deal was based on Artest pulling a Vince Carter and playing hard while behaving for his new organization, at least for a while. Usually players do that when they force themselves out of places to prove some kind of point. In this case, however, I forgot to account completely for Artest’s inherent insanity. In retrospect, I shouldn't have been surprised that he's threatening to torpedo the deal, but I genuinely thought he wanted to play some ball. After what happened last year and now this debacle, though, I'm not sure of that at all. His recent actions make him look above all else like a perpetually attention-starved prima donna, which I guess isn’t exactly breaking news. This leopard simply doesn’t want to even try to change his spots, at least not right now.

On the flip side, it is now widely known that unless the Kings trade Peja before the deadline, they won't get a thing for him. There's absolutely no way now that he'll re-sign with them after being "disrespected", in his words. Frankly, I agree with him. How do you let a player who's given his entire 7 1/2 year career to your team find out that he's been traded by watching his hotel room's TV while getting ready to play a game for you? I always thought, even though I dislike the Kings, that the Maloofs ran a good organization. That impression, much like this trade could very well be, is up in smoke. After all, they’ve managed to not only completely botch their relationship with their best player, they’ve also severely undermined his trade value. Even if they can work a deal out by the trade deadline, they’re not getting anything close to equal value unless Artest can be convinced by the Maloofs to play in Sacramento. After this latest evidence of Artest's unreliability, I don't see why they'd want to.