dougthonus wrote:coldfish wrote:The Bulls getting their pick back is more about feelings or anxiety than any statistical value. Worst cast is they gave it up as 9 or 10 but that is unlikely. Either they would have just kept it every year or they would have popped up and made it a pick in the teens, harming its value.
Chicago barely saves any salary as a result of this too. Chicago will be in no position to be a player in free agency, or just sell capspace, for YEARS.
The primary value here is simply being worse for this draft. That could be accomplished in other ways.
This just continues Chicago's doom loop of incompetence. Our only hope is lottery balls and even with them, the odds aren't good.
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If the Bulls do get a high lottery pick, I sure hope Michael Reinsdorf asks himself if AKME is really the leadership that he wants to train that player and build around him.
I think with the new lotto odds, there is a pretty good chance they give up 9 or 10 if they don't get the pick back. If you are slotted at 8th, there's a very good probability that someone moves up past you, and the Bulls could trivially rebuild to 8th in the next 2 years.
I also think you are underselling the trade flexibility and salary relief. Collins and Huerter only have one year left each, so you save the full 48M or whatever in Zach's final year, you save 10M next year, so if you envision this as a 2 year dip to rebuild (with this being year 1), you save a ton of money in year 3 when you are rising.
Huerter and Collins are also likely not "bad salary" guys, and could pretty easily rebuild value on this team to possibly fit a need as future trade targets for 2nd rounders possibly. It's also the case that getting much further away from the tax will allow the Bulls (if they choose to, and they should) to save their MLE to take on money at the deadline and be a facilitator much easier and possibly gain asses that way.
Overall, that extra wiggle room gives them a lot more options to do something small too (granted, they may have ended up their anyway based on who they signed and for how much this off season).
I give this trade a C. They clearly canvased the market on Zach for years, and this was the best out there. It might have gotten better this off-season, but it might not have. Zach's an injury or coach blow up away from being negative value again, and you have to believe the Bulls and Zach had some agreement that if he toes the line they'll get him off the roster.
As such, saving 60M on money, getting more flexible, tradeable contracts, while firmly setting a direction and reducing the risk of giving away your pick feels like about as much return out there as possible. It wasn't sexy, but in this case, I truly believe there was no sexy trade out there for Zach. Unlike Caruso, where there were lots of bidders and we had options or DeMar whom we sat on too long, with Zach, this was probably the first real opportunity we had to trade him without attaching something in the last year and so we jumped on it before the teeter totter went back down.
