Unless something falls through, it appears that Wilcox, Gooden, Al Harrington, Lorenzen Wright, and Loren Woods will all be signed soon if they haven't already. Following the signings of Ben Wallace, Joel Przybilla. Francisco Elson, Nazr Mohammed and Jackie Butler; plus trades of Magloire, Ratliff, Joe Smith and Raef LaFrent - it has certainly been a busy summer for bigs. This is not even counting the signings of Tim Thomas and
Vladimir Radmanovic.
So what's left? The answer is, "not much". I could be missing someone, but by my count the guys who are left include:
Michael Olowokandi
Kelvin Cato
Scot Pollard
Keith Van Horn
Reggie Evans
My read on it is that neither Olowokandi nor Cato are in especially good condition. Pollard has a history injuries. Van Horn has been on a downward slide for several seasons.
Based on last season's performance, the best of the bunch is Reggie Evans. He might even be willing to sign a one year deal for what remains of the Suns MLE. The only problem is that he is not really D'Antoni's type of player.
D'Antoni really likes versatile, skilled players. Evans is a specialist. He rebounds. In 04-05 he averaged 9.3 rpg in just 23.8 minutes and with Denver he averaged 8.7 per minute: This was an amazing .37 per minute with Denver in a league where anything over .25 is considered pretty good. (Marion is the Suns best rebounder and he averaged .29 per minute).
With that kind of rebounding, why is Evans unemployed? He can't shoot. He is a career 53.5% free throw shooter, which puts him in the Shaq class of brick layers. He gets 5.6 ppg on 48.9% from the field, but this due mostly to offensive rebounds rather than any offensive skills.
Would he get any minutes on the Suns. More than money, that would be the issue for Evans. It's hard to say, but it would be nice to be able to respond once in a while when getting killed on the boards.
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