Paul George Trade Rumors/Proposals

[granger05]

I assume I'm not the only one that's constantly checking in here or doing searches for Paul George news. I'm curious to hear what others think of the various offers rumored to be out there or floated by others on these boards.

I'll start with the one that seems like it's legitimately been offered from the Lakers:
- Randle or Clarkson + 27th and 28th picks for George.

I don't like Clarkson's contract. He's young enough you can hope he gets better, but there are plenty of other guards making similar money and he's not going to move the needle for us.

Randle seems like a good player, but he'll be due for a paycheck after this season. He'll be restricted so even if we decide not to pay him we could get involved in a S&T to recoup some value, but that would involve taking back salary anyway. He's the piece that I'd like best in this deal, but I'm not excited about him since his rookie deal is almost up.

Late picks have a very low success rate. I searched for "best nba picks by draft slot" the other day and found some article from 2014 that listed the best 27th pick ever as Elden Campbell. I can't remember who the runner-up was. The best 28th pick was Tony Parker which seems eye catching, but the runner up was Ostertag to give you a sense of what an outlier Tony was. Looking at basketball-reference I see some other names like Rudy Gobert and Pacer legends Jamaal Tinsley and Ian Mahinmi, but the point is that you have to draft somebody French if you want these picks to amount to anything.

I think that given the current situation, this isn't an insulting offer, but if I'm sitting here a year from now and find out this was definitely on the table, was turned down and we lost George for nothing...it wouldn't hurt my feelings. It's likely all of these assets would be meaningless by that point anyway.

What's your take on any of the offers you've seen? What's your favorite?

[granger05]

Rumored deals I'd like better would be anything where we get Cleveland involved to move Love around and pickup a top-10 pick. I also think that compared to the Lakers offer, Portland starts to sound competitive with contracts like Harkless and Aminu and some combination of their picks. I'm not as big a fan of Allen Crabbe unless more of the picks were moving.

The trade board CHA offer of MKG + #11 is also something I like better than this. I'm not sure MKG is a guy you can win with in today's NBA since he's so limited on offense, but his contract is very reasonable and I like him anyway.