2019-20 Around the NBA: Archived

[SleepingHero]

Question.  How long is KL deal?  And PG has been oft injured this year, playing bad based on his past.  But they do look more built for playoffs.  Jackson may give them the bench boost they need too.

Both PG and Leonard have player options for the summer of 2021, the same summer as the Giannis sweepstakes. 

So the Clips basically have this year and next year to do something.

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Kind of crazy to think about... if the Clippers don't win a championship with George and Leonard, the trade with OKC may go down as the worst ever.

While the Clips did give up a boatload of picks, I don't think any trade will beat the Nets trading 3 first round picks and a pick swap (along with everything else) for 36 year old Paul Pierce and 37 year old Kevin Garnett.

Clips at least got a superstar still in his prime in return for all of their picks.

While it's true that trading for two washed up players is worse than trading for Paul George, at the end of the day the only thing that matters is if you win it all. If Brooklyn made that trade and won the title that year, it would have been worth it. Easy to say it was terrible in hindsight, but on paper, D-Will, Joe Johnson, Pierce, KG, Lopez would be considered a scary lineup that should have been able to at least make it to the east finals.

If the Clippers win, it was worth it. If they fail, the traded FIVE first round picks and two pick swaps. They will be starting their rebuild in 2027 and their GM better hope he has a title or two by then.

That's fair. But if your barometer for every trade is "did they win the title that year?", then almost every trade isn't worth it, which we know isn't true. 

The purpose of the Clips trade was quite clear, and was the ultimate win-now move, just like the Nets, so it makes sense to judge both trades by that barometer, but at least the Clips still got a tremendous player in his prime that they can theoretically flip if they choose to do so to try and recoup some assets. Obviously they won't because it'd be antithetical for trading for PG in the first place, but if the Clips really wanted to, they could definitely get at least 3 picks back for PG. 

But what made the Nets trade so bad was that they did exactly what the Clips did, but they did it for 2 significantly worse, not-even-close-to-their prime players. It'd be like trading 3 firsts for Andre Igoudala today. It left them bereft, and no clear way out when their oft-injured lineup couldn't rise to the task. 

That's why I judge the Nets trade so harshly. I thought it was a dumb trade the moment it occurred, and the fact that you say the ONLY way to make that trade worth it was to win the title, it proves that the trade was terrible, because winning the title is a very hard thing to do. If the Clips don't win the title this year, they're still in a very good place. The Nets couldn't say the same in 2013.