drosestruts wrote:I don't really get the arguments about the Bulls not trading guys like DeRozan, Caruso, and LaVine at the height of their value.
I guess it depends, as someone who DID recommend those trades in reality in the summer following their good year, I think the arguments were easy:
1: DeMar's year was a fluke of game winners unlikely to repeat, our year was a fluke unlikely to repeat, and we have a tiny window to get out of this short term mess with extremely low upside for winning and still execute a rebuild.
2: Zach was viewed as a bad contract by half this forum the day we signed him to the extension
3: Caruso is the most obvious one of the group, because his value actually held up all the way to last summer, and whether you like Giddey or not, we did actually trade him for reasonable value.
I don't see people saying the Bucks should trade Giannis, the nuggets should trade Jokic, the Thunder should trade SGA.
Clearly none of our guys are even remotely approaching that level, and that was incredibly obvious. This would be more like the Wizards trading Beal.
I mean if you want top value from SGA, now is the time, hanging onto him any longer is asset mismanagement - it's not going to get better than MVP, Scoring leader, finals MVP, and champ. Now's the time Presti, right????
You either get on court value or future value, when your ceiling is 1st round exit team, and you have no future assets, and you have no future salary room, and your guys are over 30 you aim for future value.
it's convienint having hindsight and knowing Lonzo's injury will be far more serious that initially diagnosed and that LaVine would himself run into some heath issues.
Definitely it was tricky to know Lonzo's injury. I won't say impossible, when the off-season started he was already way behind on his recovery, so signs were there, but to assume it was two more years would have been a big stretch, to assume this is a big risk? I think that was pretty reasonable though.
That said, you didn't need to know Lonzo's injury to know that you should have traded Vuc + DDR that summer based on their age, the absolute total flukeness of DDR's season and Vuc's already obvious decline, and the general unsustainability of this team. Those were the two I pushed for explicitly at that time (probably the peak value we could have gotten for either).
If you wanted to take a crack at it around Caruso + Lonzo + LaVine before realizing how bad Lonzo's injury was, I think that was reasonable, but watching this team, even in their wins, you knew it was fool's gold. I pushed for trading LaVine the next deadline when maybe we didn't have peak value of him, but we reportedly had offers for two firsts.
I did several episodes of my podcast where I said you could probably flip DDR + Zach + Caruso + Vuc into 6-8 1st round picks and we would absolutely look back at passing on this with massive regret because we wouldn't make another playoffs and would be staring at a rebuild without assets. That's literally exactly what happened, and it wasn't all that hard to see in advance.
