payitforward wrote:wall_glizzy wrote:nate33 wrote:Something like Bertans + Ish for Bledsoe + Hart. Or is that too lopsided in our favor? Hart is pretty good, but he is only cheap for one more year before he is up for a bigger contract, so I don't know if he has that much value.
From a value perspective, that's honestly probably skewed in favor of the Pelicans - I'm almost positive that Bledsoe isn't thought of as a positive value on his contract...
?
1. On his career, Eric Bledsoe has been one of the most productive point guards in the league. Looking at his career numbers vs. last year with Milwaukee, there's been no decline at all. In fact, last year was a slightly above average year for him.
2. Do you think Davis Bertans is viewed as a positive value at (essentially) the same annual salary as Bledsoe -- except guaranteed for one (or is it two) additional years?
3. I assume you'd agree that Josh Hart is more valuable than Ish Smith. &, since Smith is expiring, old, & paid about twice what Hart makes, even considered simply on this year alone he's a far more valuable asset. Moreover, we would certainly want to extend him if possible, though of course it might not be possible. Yet, having his Bird rights can't be ignored.
In short, this trade would be an absolute steal for us. But, I can't see why NO would go for it.
I'm certain that Bledsoe isn't thought of as a positive asset on his current deal. We can agree to disagree on this - I know he does a lot of stuff that you like in evaluating a player - but despite his usually fine counting stats he makes terrible decisions with the ball and is completely worthless in the playoffs, year after year. The Bucks dumped him in the Jrue Holiday trade - he was there to match salaries, not because he had a material effect on the actual value of the trade going each way.
Meanwhile, I'm similarly sure that Bertans is thought of as a neutral-to-positive asset on his current deal - I did completely mis-remember the trade deadline buzz about him last year, as you pointed out (we were apparently asking for two firsts; the Celtics "made several strong offers" which we can assume included one) - but I disagree that he is less value now, as a player under team control for up to five years, than as as expiring deal at last season's deadline. The type of team looking to acquire Bertans is likely to be at a stage of team construction where they're:
(a) above the cap, and thus not looking at opportunity costs in terms of $16 million of cap space, but rather the assets they would need to trade for Bertans and how they could otherwise be spent
(b) more concerned with his production at the front end of the contract (the first 2-3 years) than the back half
Regarding (a), if a contending near-contending team decides that they're a single lights-out volume gunner away from a real shot at a championship (or whatever the team's goals are), there really aren't
that many options likely to be available. The Heat aren't going to move off of Duncan Robinson's expiring minimum deal. Buddy Hield and Joe Harris are locked into even larger contracts ($86 million and $72 million over the next four, respectively). JJ Redick's $13 million expiring... maybe? Or maybe he retires after turning 37 at the end of this season. Seth Curry's on a tremendously valuable deal, but the Sixers just paid a pretty hefty price to get it. Beyond that, I'm not really sure who you go after, especially if your positional or team fit requirements
also necessitate that said shooter have SF/PF size.
For (b), I agree with you that the Bertans deal may well tip back into the negatives by the fourth, or certainly fifth, year of it. For this season and the next two, however, I think he's a great bet to provide surplus value, or at the very least perform to the level of his contract. That's what aspiring contenders care about - teams make win-now moves all the time with the knowledge that they're incurring future consequences, and they're not always wrong to do so. (If they're the late-2010s Wizards, they definitely are, however
).
I'm not saying that this is absolutely optimal team construction, but I'm sure that you're also not saying that the league's front offices tend to perform anywhere close to optimally. I'm just trying to sketch out the context that gives Bertans pretty significant value if we were to put him on the block.
We agree on Hart btw! I managed to forget for a second that we'll of course be an over-the-cap team for seemingly the rest of time, so there's definitely merit to the bird rights argument. I'm not sure that he's super valuable to us in a situation where we still have Beal and already can't get minutes for Troy Brown, but if we're doing this in addition to a Beal sell-off I'd love having those two rotating through the 2/3.
