Q-Rich is like a poor man's Ron Artest on offense. He's brutal in the post (in a good way), takes a bunch of threes, and doesn't play with a lot of discipline.
He's no Artest on defense, of course. From what little I've seen of him, though, he's pretty good for a Clipper.
This is kind of an ugly pickup, in that it takes the beautiful little rotation the Suns were developing and throws a huge monkey wrench right in the middle. There's no way for Q-Rich to get 30 mpg without several players making adjustments in their roles (and probably at least one player gets dropped from the rotation entirely). The guys who are losing minutes are far more efficient scorers than Q-Rich, as well.
Remember what D'Antoni said about depth solving the team's problems on defense? Maybe that's the thinking here: competition for minutes is going to be so intense that D'Antoni won't have to play anybody who's not playing effective D. (On the other hand, the Suns have developing players who still need minutes to develop, and now they don't have the minutes, so how are they going to develop?)
Well, if I needed any confirmation that Robert Sarver had an open-checkbook policy, here it is--the Suns just committed to 6 years at over $8m/year for a player they don't need. I wonder what the team's yearly budget is going to be--$60m? $70m?
I guess (like the Pacers) the Suns have a whole bunch of trade bait now, if the Clips don't match anyway. I would love it if Q-Rich was the first guy on the trading block, but I'm guessing there are BYC issues and he's not.
Maybe the Eisley/Joe Johnson package we've been kicking around makes sense now. If they keep Joe J, the Suns are looking at Cuban-type balance sheets within a few years.