Meeting the Deadline

 

This is one of the slowest parts of the year for sports stories, unless you like to pretend that you can do a serious breakdown of curling or the biathlon. I suppose I could write the umpteenth article criticizing Tiger Woods for being a robot, but my opinion could be summarized in far too few words for an article: who cares.

Instead, I’m going to break down the 5 biggest trades from the NBA trade deadline and how they will affect their respective team this season (when relevant) and beyond.

(Note: I'm going to be discussing things that affect teams' salary caps. If you aren't well versed on how these work, suffice it to say that there is a limit to how much a team can spend, and trading for expiring contracts takes money off of the books, allowing a team to spend as it chooses.)

5. Knicks trade Nate Robinson and Marcus Landry to Boston for Eddie House, J.R. Giddens, Bill Walker and a future conditional second-round pick.

I don’t really understand this trade from the Knicks perspective, other than receiving a second round pick. All the contracts are expiring this year, and they certainly got less talent than they gave. Still, Robinson is a headache, and getting a pick for their troubles was probably enough to convince them to help Boston.

Boston, conversely, needed to do something to revitalize their team. Trading Ray Allen was probably necessary if they were going to win a title this year, but they couldn’t find anyone willing to give up quality talent for the cap space Allen’s expiring contract would provide. Hopefully they can sign Allen cheaply this summer, or use him in a sign and trade to acquire talent, because as I noted last week, their window is slamming shut.

Robinson will possibly provide enough scoring off the bench to propel them a round deeper than they deserve to go, but I wouldn’t expect much more than that. A nice move, but not a great move.

4. Washington trades Caron Butler, Brendan Haywood and DeShawn Stevenson to Dallas in exchange for Josh Howard, Drew Gooden, James Singleton and Quinton Ross.

Quite the stellar trade for Dallas. Haywood is an underrated big man who scores efficiently, plays solid defense, rebounds, and doesn’t need or want to be treated like a focal point of the team. Butler is injury prone, has slipped considerably on defense, and doesn’t score efficiently anymore. That said, he is going to a considerably better situation in Dallas, and he should be able to consolidate his roles to defense and good, open looks on offense, thereby alleviating those problems. He is also someone his teammates will actually like, unlike Josh Howard.

Short term, this trade is interesting for the Mavericks, but ultimately inconsequential. They aren’t going to win a title, or possibly even make it much further in the playoffs with this group as opposed to the old one. They simply aren’t as good as the Lakers and Nuggets, and they are possibly worse than the Spurs, Jazz, and Thunder as well. A nice, necessary move, but it isn’t likely to change much this year.

The Wizards made the first of two moves to gut the team and dump as much salary as possible. The Arenas situation has completely destroyed that team, and they will be lucky to salvage the situation within 5 years. Barring free agents this summer inexplicably deciding to sign with them, the Wizards have a long road to recovery ahead.

3. L.A. Clippers trade Marcus Camby to Portland in exchange for Travis Outlaw and Steve Blake.

The Clippers save a little money and get a chance to look at Outlaw and see if they want to keep him. Like nearly every trade they make, this one wasn’t about getting better, it was about the bottom line.

The Blazers got the big man they desperately needed, even if it is only a short-term solution. Maybe they will re-sign him and try to make a run next year with a (theoretically) healthy team. This year, they are one of several teams that simply can’t match up in a deep Western Conference, and while a first round upset may be a possibility, anything more would be miraculous.

2. Cleveland trades Zydrunas Ilgauskas, the rights to Emir Preldzic and 2010 first-round draft pick to Washington for Antawn Jamison.

The second move the Wizards made to gut their team and save money. The first round pick may be useful, but it will be a late pick and probably only bring a marginal talent. The team will buy out Z to allow him to sign with a contender, most likely the one he was just traded from. It’s one of the NBA’s sillier rules, and one that they allegedly want to change in the near future.

Rant:

As for the Cavaliers, they needed to make a trade. Them stupidly sitting on their expiring contracts last year led to them being too evenly matched with the Magic (and would have led to something similar had they played the Lakers), and ultimately their demise. If they had made a similar trade a year ago, they would be playing for a repeat instead of continuing to wonder if they have enough to beat the Lakers. It was an indefensible decision at the time, and it has only made the organization trying desperately to retain the services of the best player in the world look all the more foolish with hindsight.

/End rant.

As far as the Cavaliers are concerned, I don’t feel like this particular trade has been accurately assessed thus far. At first, everyone lauded them for making such a smart move. Everyone said that they needed a power forward that could stretch the floor, and Jamison seemed to fit the bill.

Unfortunately, this fails to account for a few significant factors. Jamison has never been a particularly good rebounder, something all Cavaliers forwards excel at. He has never been a particularly efficient scorer, relying on volume to score his points. His defense is atrocious, and defense is Cleveland’s bread and butter.

Lastly, and most importantly, he is 33 and turns 34 in June. The Cavaliers only goal is to re-sign Lebron, and getting someone like, say, Amare, who is 27, would have gone a lot further in convincing Lebron that Cleveland was the place to be if he wanted to win games. Jamison might have another year or two in him, but he is clearly on the decline, and not someone James should count on winning a series of titles with.

Just the same, the people who overreacted after Jamison’s initial performance with the team were equally wrong. Jamison isn’t a terrible player, he just had a bad night. The next game he shot 9-14, and the truth lies somewhere in-between.

I think it was a useful and necessary trade for the Cavaliers. They are better now than they were a week ago, and when the team figures out how to play together, I imagine that will become clear.

However, long term, the decision to keep Hickson and forgo the opportunity to acquire Amare may cause irreparable damage. It will be worse if Lebron leaves this summer, but it will sting nearly as much if they cannot win titles as currently constructed.

1. New York acquired Tracy McGrady from Houston for Jared Jeffries, Jordan Hill, a protected 2012 first-round pick and the right to exchange first-round picks in 2011. Houston received Kevin Martin and Hilton Armstrong from Sacramento for Carl Landry and Joey Dorsey. Sacramento received Larry Hughes from New York for Sergio Rodriguez.

This was the biggest trade of the season, and one that has become the subject of much controversy. Let’s analyze it team by team.

New York: The team that had the most work to do. They have put all of their eggs into the 2010 free agent basket, and without this trade they would not have been able to clear the cap space needed to sign as many of those players as possible. They gave up quite a bit, but McGrady is actually playing well, and if he will re-sign at an affordable rate, the Knicks will have gotten even more out of this deal than they could have hoped for.

Sacramento: The team that needed to figure out who it was. Tyreke Evans and Kevin Martin weren’t co-existing, and since their coach is too dense to realize that playing Udrih at point guard and those two at the wings might have worked, they traded Martin. Anyone who thinks that they got robbed, though, is sorely mistaken. Yes, the deal was largely about saving money (a lot of money, at that), but Carl Landry is an excellent post player who can actually guard people, and no one on their team fit that description prior to his arrival. Landry, Evans, and Casspi form a solid young core of players to build around, and while the Kings still need a great deal of work, they could certainly become a successful young team (similar to Portland) sooner rather than later.

Landry is also considerably cheaper than Martin, and given some dubious facts about Martin that I will enumerate shortly, this may turn out to be more a theft of Houston than Sacramento (though I doubt it).

Regardless of how we evaluate this trade in the future, the manner in which Martin was traded was very confusing. The Kings insisted that he wasn't available, and then gave him up for what might turn out to be a good haul, but was almost assuredly less than another suitor might have offered had they been aware of Martin's availability. A confusing development from a team that was on the verge of collapse less than a year ago. Let's hope they know something we don't.

Houston: The team that had everything to gain. Financial relief in the form of expiring contracts is a hot commodity in the NBA, and McGrady’s whopping $20 Million expiring contract certainly qualified. Houston maximized their leverage, receiving a pair of first round picks, Martin, and Jordan Hill (the 8th pick in last years’ draft) for Carl Landry and a player (McGrady) that wasn’t even playing. You can’t do much better than that.

I would like to temper expectations a bit, though. Martin is not a savior. In 07/08 and 08/09 he missed 21 and 31 games respectively, and this year he will have missed at least 30 by season's end. His shooting percentage has gone down by about two percent a year each of the past four years. He doesn’t play defense, he doesn’t rebound, and he is 27.

He is also the scorer the Rockets desperately needed, and a player who was likely a victim of poor circumstance in Sacramento. He scores incredibly efficiently and he draws fouls, which will allow Yao to take easier shots or more free throws since the Rockets will be in the bonus that much more often. With Martin, Ariza, and hopefully a healthy Yao, the Rockets have an excellent core and a 3-5 year window in which they could, given good health, win a title. Their role players are both excellent and cheap, and they seem to be able to find replacements whenever necessary.

Of course, McGrady was an even better shooting guard joining the team in a season in which he turned 26. To that point, he didn’t have much of an injury history, either. So maybe this is all wishful thinking by the Rockets, and they need too much to go right for them to succeed.

Regardless of the outcome, I’ll give them this: they tried. That’s more than a lot of teams can say.

Image via Turner.com

You can email Chris with questions or comments at TheSportsKiosK@gmail.com