For posterity, here's a summary from this thread. Is it accurate?
--------------
Miles was about to become a restricted free agent, which means that we could match anything he signed with another team. Nash told Miles to go out on the market and get an offer, which we would match. So his agent got a 6 year deal at $24M from Denver. The Nuggets never formally offered him the deal because Miles' agent made it clear he wouldn't accept it and besides, Portland would simply match it. Is that considered tampering, since Miles was under contract with the Blazers? Miles and his agent complained to Allen that his value was crushed because Allen had made it clear that he would match any offer. Allen capitulated and signed a $47-48M extension on Sept. 1, rather than risk him becoming a RFA. I don't recall Pritchard pushing that deal as DPP. In fact, I don't even know if Pritchard was here.
The trade was Zach and Miles for Steve Francis and Malik Rose. Allen didn't want to trade Miles, so Pritchard changed Miles to Webster. Then Penn crafted a TPE to trade Jones and Dickau for Francis and Frye, getting the exception we used for Jones (to get Rudy's pick from the penny-pinching Suns, who didn't want just the $3M). The idea was that since Miles would come off the salary cap, the team should medically retire him instead of trading him. Trading him would have gotten a worse contract and not fixed our cap issue. For this, Penn was promoted from Consultant to Asst. GM.
Malik Rose's contract ended 1 year before Miles. That extra year didn't matter to New York because they had a bunch of contracts running until Summer 2010. But the Blazers would have benefited from the extra cap space in 2009. Getting medical cap relief isn’t easy, so instead of gambling on that, we should have jettisoned Miles in the deal. If you want to ship out talent and gain future cap flexibility, it needs to be all or nothing. Going half-assed with a cap clearing strategy caused us to miss benefits of MLE signing players for multiple off-seasons and expiring contract trades.
When Miles played for Memphis in 2008-09, it cost Allen $27M. That was $9M a year for the final 2 year's of Miles' contract, plus a 100% luxury tax match for the 1st year. If we'd kept Miles until after the 2009 playoffs, no team could have poached him to play 10 games and messed with our cap space. If Memphis had not played him until 2009-10, it would've gone on 2009-10's luxury tax, but not on the cap in Summer 2009, which no one would care about since we probably had already blown our ~$20M in cap space. Had the Blazers kept but not medically retired Miles, we would have had his cap space for Summer 2010 signings, since he comes off our books June 30th, 2010. At the 2010 draft Pritchard refrained from trades and non-Euro picks, to position the team with cap space for Hedo.
