chrispatrick wrote:Oh man, nothing fires me up more than a "it was a right move at the time". (Which, to be fair, seemed to be at least half of this board's thinking).
All moves operate on a continuum of unknown variables. People tend to look at the results and then pretend that they knew this would happen all along, but those same people cannot predict all the results from today to 2 years from today. They just predicted this one thing.
Take any event, and there is someone who will have predicted it, but that same person can't be relied on to predict the next thing or all things. I state this, just so we can drop the notion that "I called this, so of course I'm right", because no one, not me, not you, not anyone else, is predicting things at such a rate that they should take up this stance.
If you then remove that, and operate on the idea of what Butler's skillset was and what his contract was, and those of the players we got back and the position of the franchise you're left with something like this:
1: Butler looked like a low rung all-star type guy. Definitely highly questionable whether he could be a franchise guy. Had clashes with a lot of people as well. He was on a sweetheart deal with two years left due to the cap change and would be looking for a 5/200M supermax if he stays.
2: LaVine / Dunn were two young players on rookie deals. Dunn was just drafted 5th in the previous draft and had a rough developmental year, but there was reason to believe he still had good upside. LaVine was a guy with obvious star potential that just needed to get healthy. #7 pick in the draft probably wasn't expected to yield all that much, low end starter type guy was probably a reasonable guess what you'd get out of it. #16 was probably projected as a low end rotation guy.
3: The Bulls context is they really have nothing around them and no immediate way to make the team better. They've won 40ish games for a few years now and fans are sick of the treadmill, they need to make a big leap forward and probably can't do so around Jimmy in the following year and maybe or maybe not the year after that. There is a threat he will leave or a threat you will have to pay him 40M to stay, and again, at that point he looks like a low run all-star not worth 40M.
What happens after the trade:
1: Jimmy's stock as an individual continues to rise.
2: Dunn's stock after an initial boost goes to zero.
3: Zach's stock probably ends up a bit higher than it was.
4: Lauri ends up about where you'd expect (after an initial boost where he looks like a big win is now about where you'd think).
After a year, this trade still looks good for the Bulls, and probably really bad for the Wolves, whom now have Butler demanding out and get even less for him than they gave up which is also a sign that Butler's value has decreased and if the Bulls waited to trade later they would have ended up with even less.
Butler leaves the team that trades for him in a S&T, and so the Bulls may have ended up in the same boat had they kept Butler and had to trade him, which would have also still gotten them less than they got at the time they actually traded him. Alternatively, they may have Butler on a 40M per year contract now, and they'd probably still have a tough time figuring out how to win.
Butler is on his 3rd team since the Bulls, and only the 3rd team has found a way to make it really work so far, and that team wasn't permitted to sign him to the supermax so didn't have our downside.
With all that said, the question then becomes what would the Bulls be had they kept Butler instead of trading him? I think history shows this:
1: The Bulls got better value when they traded him than Minnesota or Philly did when they traded him, so the opportunity to trade him for more later did not appear to exist. Ie, the Bulls got as much value in a trade as they could have expected to get.
2: The Bulls still didn't have a path forward that looks like it would have led to more than the 40ish win performance they had with Butler and this wasn't a path fans wanted to go down.
The Bulls mistake IMO was not in trading Butler, but in not aggressively tanking when they did trade him and not aggressively trying to get more picks to rebuild with. We didn't even mean to tank for a single year, but we ended up tanking for two years. When you decided to go with this rebuild, you should have committed hard to it instead of trying to immediately rebuild into an average team. If you wanted the average team you could have just stuck with Butler.
In the end, with 2017 information, I would still make that trade, but I would have had drastically different follow up actions philosophically. I would have committed to being bad and ended up with a top 5 pick in 2018 (by being one of the worst 2 teams) and would have likely had something similar in 2019 (unless I drafted Doncic in 2018 whom would have single handedly stopped that from happening).