Sure, trading a player when his stock is low is less than ideal, but the degree of disappointment with the following players was so severe there are reasons to think their trade values will never recover.
Obviously, no one feels great about how the season played out for Lonzo Ball or Zion Williamson, but when good fortune on the health front is all they need to avoid further disappointment, then unloading them now wouldn’t make much sense.
When the buzzer sounded on his regular season, many of his numbers had dipped to new personal lows.
It was rough, but maybe not so bad that it scared away all suitors.
Sharing the frontcourt with a floor-spacer like Myles Turner instead of the paint-clogging Clint Capela would give Collins more room to operate as a pick-and-roll finisher.
At 25 years old, he is also young enough to fit in and grow with a core featuring the 27-year-old Turner, 23-year-old Tyrese Haliburton and 20-year-old Bennedict Mathurin.
Give them a fire-baller like Hield, a career supplier of 3.1 threes a night on 40.2 percent shooting, and this attack could jump from good to great.
Now, there’s a good chance Minnesota wants to give this group more time or simply thinks it can’t make a move now with all the damage Gobert has done to his trade value.
Dāvis Bertāns theoretically fits the same role, but his defense is so atrocious that he would be in this deal strictly for money-matching purposes.
They could be desperate enough to take a flier on Gobert, especially if the cost is one rotation player and a single future first.
Miami, of course, lost that contest, but it recovered to snag the eighth seed with a win over the Chicago Bulls.
You have to travel back over a decade to find the last time he left such a small imprint on the stat sheet with per-game averages of just 11.2 points and 5.1 assists and a 40.4/34.5/85.9 shooting slash.
Lowry, by the way, pocketed $28.3 million this season, and he’ll make even more during the next one.
They were squeezed for minutes in L.A., but that says more about the Clippers’ depth than anything.
As for L.A., Lowry caught this club’s attention before, and he could still be on the radar, especially if the Clippers move on from Russell Westbrook this summer.
He has battled knee and back injuries for much of the past two seasons, but he made it on the floor 42 times during this campaign and looked lost when he did.
He looks like someone in need of a total reset.
Maybe Simmons and the Blazers are right for each other—if Brooklyn provides sufficient compensation, of course.
Portland, a team lacking obvious direction at the moment, would exit this swap with a readymade rebuilding kit in hand.
And who knows, maybe the Blazers can help Simmons get back to being the player he was.
The Nets, who can’t really build with so many of their picks belonging to the Houston Rockets, would instead try re-entering the championship race with Lillard, Mikal Bridges, Nic Claxton and a deep collection of role players.
