bondom34 wrote:TaylorMonkey wrote:bondom34 wrote:I said in the previous post to that iit was different.
Bondom, that's not "breaking up a team" at all. Lee was getting DNP's during the end of the season and most of playoffs. And Lee wanted to go to a place where he would actually get minutes after being a good soldier which coincided with Lacob saving tax. If Lee wanted to stay and was getting a 20+ minute rotation, he might have been kept.
This is sort of the equivalent of saying OKC broke up their team had they had won it all and traded Collison's declining backup or Jeremy Lamb on their last year when they wanted to go. Maybe the equivalent of trading Perkins. Lee was eventually the 9th or 10th man on the depth chart. It's certainly much less of a breakup than trading Harden after reaching the finals. Lee would be a 1 and Harden would be a 10 as far as squad breakups go. Not meaning to delabor that trade, but putting things in perspective by comparison.
And that's what I said. But trading for Wallace is worse than trading for actual NBA players. The return for Lee would be a 1 and Harden like a 5 in comparison too, I know the trade wasn't ideal but I'm gonna be flat honest, most OKC fans don't care that much about it and everyone else won't let it go. Its the Bill Simmons effect.
The drop off from Lee to Wallace on GSW with so few minutes left for Lee is much less than the drop off from Harden to what his return was-- the drop off from Lee's impact as a player on GSW given his minutes is like a 3 to 1, vs. Harden's value drop from a 9 to a 4 or 5, but like I said, I don't mean to belabor the point. I mean you could trade say Durant for Barbosa, or Barbosa for Steve Nash. Obviously the former trade is much worse than the latter, even though Barbosa is more of a serviceable player than Nash. So you can't really evaluate a trade just by what's brought back. You have to consider what contribution and value the outgoing asset had with the available playing time on his original team, as well as his overall trade value (Lee was considered a negative asset with his contract and decreased performance).
I didn't like the trade for basketball reasons this immediate season-- the roster was weaker, however marginally so, and Wallace is not a playable asset-- but apparently Wallace has some value as a contract that can be stretch waived. If there' is a player out there whose team is looking to drop in a cash dump, Wallace can be a target. Anyway, it remains that it's pretty hard to call the Lee trade breaking up a championship team, or that trade "worse" than other trades that are often the target of criticism.
