The Delly thing is an interesting case study. Of course, hindsight is 20/20. So it's easy to criticise Griff for not signing him, but I don't think he made that bad of a decision.
The summer when we could have had him for 4-5 million a year, he was restricted. He could have signed an offer sheet if he could have gotten one, but he didn't. The cap was going to keep going up as well.
So he ended up getting the one year deal. But the unique thing about this circumstance...Is that Delly was STILL going to be a restricted free agent the next year.
So if you're Griffin...You have Dellavedova, coming off a great finals performance, who can't even get an offer sheet for 3-4 million. You're balls deep into the tax, and you can save your owner 10-15 million dollars, keep Delly for the year, and still have control over him the following year when the luxury tax hit might not be as bad. I feel like almost any GM in Griff's spot would have done the same thing.
What came next was just a lot of things combined. Kyrie was hurt, Mo Williams wasn't bad but could not defend a lick, so Delly ends up getting major minutes and he plays great, the team looks awesome with him playing and national television games see Delly playing well. Then Kyrie comes back and Blatt gets fired, and Lue finds this second unit combination with Bron/Delly/TT that starts running rougshod over everyone else's second unit and up until around the ECF, Delly has made a huge leap as a shooter, defender and distributor. He's now on the league's radar.
Then he gets hurt, and then plays really bad in the finals where it becomes obvious even healthy we can't play him more than 10minutes against GS because Kyrie has to play 40 and them.playing together doesn't work against GSW. Then we use Mo Williams over him in the last 4 games...And we win the title!!
Summer comes, the league has adjusted to the increased cap, there's insane money available, the contracts are insane, the backup PG market is as well.
Delly gets a $9m/year offer sheet. Brutal. Hard to justify matching that. Plus, Mo Williams is telling you he's coming back to finish out his contract. There's minimum level defensive guards out there (Liggins, Chalmers down the road, etc).
Then Mo pulls that bullshit, we suffer some injuries, here we are.
I can't say Griffin made a mistake. Delly is clearly overpaid in Milwaukee. His defense and shooting have fallen off. He got hurt again.
It would have been nice to get him for $3/14 million or whatever it was, but it was very justifiable for Griff to handle it the way he did. I really think it was a long string of bad luck and circumstances that led to the no backup PG thing this year. I think it will finally be rectified shortly.