so, i took a look at the unrestricted free agents for the upcoming offseason, in hopes that i might find the miracle salve to treat the wounds of the still fresh loss to the magic.  to me, the only thing that the magic series showed (aside from a lack of creativity from mike brown and the rest of the suits on the bench) is that we need help in the front court.  no real mystery there.  more importantly, though, we need defensive help in the front court.  unfortunately, the list of FA big men is less inspiring than a physics lecture.

what you'll find after the jump is the FA list (there are a few players in here w/ early termination rights, so they might stay w/ their current teams, but i didn't have time to parse through that).  there are two categories: players that we care about and i tracked down 2008-09 numbers for, and players that we (at least i) don't care about.  feel free to disagree.  i'd be interested to hear people's thoughts.

i looked at several different numbers, but in the interest of space here i chose to show: position, age, 2008-09 PER, 2008-09 Win Shares (WS), 2008-09 Defensive Win Shares (DWS), and then the ratio of DWS:WS.  in keeping w/ my theory that we need defensive help up front more than offensive, i thought DWS/WS was worth looking at.  i'm not saying we don't need offensive help in the front line, just that defense is more important.  each position is ranked by PER.  remember, a PER of 15 is league average.