Payt10 wrote:JeremyB0001 wrote:Payt10 wrote:Sigh... Such a bad trade. Marcus Smart is a nothing prospect. Jae Crowder is a nice player, but not a high potential player, and the Nets picks could just as likely turn out to be the next Alex Lin or Ben McLemore than they could be the next Anthony Davis..
If I'm trading Jimmy, I want at least one semi-established young stud (like Wiggins, for example) AND a top 3 pick in the draft. I need some sort of security that even if the draft pick is a flop, the young player you got in the deal is at least All-Star caliber. Boston has zero young players that fit that description. I would be so pissed if we made a deal with Boston.
I think you're underrating the Nets pick this season. They have the worst record in the league by a whopping six games and thus are likely to stay in that spot. That puts the pick at a 41.5% chance of landing in the top two. I expect both Fultz and Ball to be far better NBA players than Wiggins, who's wildly overrated. The lowest the pick would fall is fourth, so it should yield a much better player than Len or McLemore who were drafted fifth and seventh respectively in far lesser drafts. I'd want more included but, if it were me, at the end of the day, I'm probably going to move Jimmy for a package that includes this season's Nets pick. A close to 50-50 chance of rebooting this team with Fultz or Ball is just too hard to pass up when it's hard to map out Jimmy Butler ever leading the Bulls to a championship absent some miracle that lands the team another star.
Regardless of what pick they get, you're taking a huge gamble anytime you trade away one of the 10 best players in this league for unresolved draft picks. The likelihood of that pick becoming a better player than Jimmy Butler is right now is not great. This is why I would never trade Butler in the middle of the season before we know how the draft lottery shapes up, and it's also why I would never trade Butler without receiving a high level prospect in addition to BKN's pick[s]. Marcus Smart, Jaylon Brown, Jae Crowder, Avery Bradley? None of those guys do much for me.
What would the Bulls be risking? Right now, if you were to ask me to set an over/under for the most games the Bulls win in a season with Butler assuming that they hang on to him, I'd probably set it at 48. Now, there's an argument that it should be a few wins higher, but I have a hard time seeing this team getting to 55+ wins at any time in the next two seasons before Butler become free agency or, assuming he re-signs, even in the three to five seasons before he begins to experience serious decline. I can see sense in the position that winning 40-some-odd games each year is valuable and we shouldn't take lightly the possibility of several consecutive seasons of 50+ losses, which can be demoralizing as Bulls fans learned in the late 90s and early 2000s. That's been my position for most of this season but it's getting harder and harder to enjoy this team.
It's also worth remembering that there's risk in keeping Butler around. He could have a devastating injury. He could experience some swift and unexpected decline. The Bulls could sign him to a supermax contract and watch it quickly become one of the worst deals in the league.
I don't think there's more risk in trading for this year's Brooklyn pick than in other potential Butler trades - not if the goal is to get a player who's someday as good as Butler, which you mentioned. I think that drafting Ball or Fultz is the Bulls' best shot of accomplishing that. You mention a "high level prospect," which I take to mean someone who's already in the league. I don't see landing a player already in the league - I don't see the Bulls landing a player already in the league who has much of a shot of being as good as Butler. There are the young players who are obviously headed in that direction - Giannis, Embiid, Towns and, perhaps to a lesser extent, Jokic and Porzingis. Those players are off limits. Then you have players like Wiggins, Lavine, Jaylen Brown, etc. who have shown some promise but just haven't been nearly good enough to raise a significant probability that they'll ever be as good as Butler. Maybe there's a sweep spot in between those groups, say Myles Turner or Clint Capela, but it's unlikely. I think that there's a lot less risk in taking the nearly 50/50 gamble that the Brooklyn pick lands in the top two and the small additional uncertainty that the success of these elite prospects might somehow involve some smoke and mirrors.
