by newc on Thu Dec 16, 2010 5:24 am
Chapter 4
Janis Kalnins had a meeting scheduled with the board of directors in the next day after the draft ceremony in which the Wizards took Emmanuel Montero and Oskar Cano. So at the next morning Kalnins went to Wizard’s club centre, where the board was already waiting for him.
“Good to meet you Mr. Kalnins, take a seat.” After Kalnins sat down, one of the board members started to ask questions: ”So what are the news from the team, regarding the players we are willing to resign?”
“Well, first of all, Josh Howard announced to me, that he is not interested into playing for us anymore. He wants to be on a championship contender team.”
The board didn’t look much interested into this. “Move on,” said another member of the board.
“Al Thornton won’t resign right away too, he said, he will look for other options and then decide, what to do.”
“Pity, but what about Yi Jianlian?” after this question all board members moved a bit closer to Kalnins to hear what he will say, this was the thing, why they wanted to hear from their General Manager.
“Unfortunately, Yi isn’t going to play for us either.”
“Why? Is it because of money?”
“No, he wants a starting spot, but we have Andray there and…” Kalnins started, but was interrupted by board members: “Screw Blatche, we need Yi on our team. He gives us big time money from the Asian market.”
“But I can’t guarantee Yi a starting spot if coach Saunders won’t give it to him.”
“We will talk with Saunders, you, in the meantime, contact Yi and offer him a starting spot and a good contract, OK?”
Kalnins didn’t look so happy, because he had to take orders about basketball from bunch of old not-knowing-anything-about-basketball crabs, who had dollar bills instead of their eyes.
“Alright, so this would be all?” he said after a moment of silence.
“Yes, thank you for coming Mr. Kalnins, we hope you will get this done.”
***
Although he didn’t like to take basketball related orders from the board, Kalnins called Yi and offered him a contract and a starting spot on the team. He thought, that Yi was a really good player and could be a great starter for the Wiz and Jianlian didn’t have high requirements for his contract so they managed to agree on one pretty quickly.
But know Kalnins had another problem to deal with – what to do with Andray Blatche, who, Kalnins was sure, won’t accept the bench player role. Some teams had already offered a trade for him, the best one thus far was the Oklahoma City offer. They offered James Harden and a first round pick in next years draft for Blatche, but Kalnins was a bit pessimistic of this, because he already had Arenas on SG spot and he wanted to get a starter for Blatche, preferably a small forward. Washington’s only small forward at this time was rookie Oscar Cano, who clearly wasn’t good enough to even come from the bench for a NBA team.
Things in the free agency weren’t looking good either for Janis and the Wizards team. Tayshaun Prince tended to take some other teams offer if Washington wouldn’t offer him more money, so Kalnins started to look for a “plan B” at the starting Small Forward position. Josh Howard was still certain, that he wanted to play for a contender and said, that he had some good offers, although it was rumored, that he is asking an unreasonably high salary. Al Thornton said, that he will take a look at Wizards offer and make a call if he decides to stay.
Kalnins had another player he was negotiating at the moment, a great defensive specialist - Shane Battier. Coach Saunders had high expectations on this player because of his defense: “Janis, guys like these make the team to play on the court, guys like these does the little things, that do not appear on statistics, but which are extremely important for every team,” he said the other day. So Kalnins decided to invite Battier to Washington to show him the training centre and maybe pursue him to sign the contract.
So a couple of days after Battier came to Washington to see Kalnins in person. The start of this meeting went pretty good, Battier liked the training centre, then he had a talk with Saunders and they had a similar opinion about how the game should be played, which was really good. But at the end, when Kalnins tried to convince Battier to sign a contract, he said: “Everything here looks good, the money on contract is good too, but I don’t think this is the right place for me, sorry, but I just don’t feel it.”
After that Kalnins walked Battier to a car, which drove him to the airport. Although, Battier didn’t take his offer, Kalnins didn’t look sad at all. He took his cell phone and dialed: “Hey, what’s up!” he said to the person on the other side of the phone, “he didn’t accept,” other person asked something and he answered, “Yes.” After this Kalnins hang up and went back to his office.
After just couple of days Wizards GM got a phone call: “Hello, Janis, let’s make a deal.”
Yeah, found it on the internet, and thought, that it fits great for my dynasty 
