A Couple NBA Trades!

 As much as I try to fight it, this is what the NBA is really about. We had a fairly major trade go down on the day of game 7 of the NBA finals, it's what the league wants us to focus on evidently. Out of respect for the champs, I held off on discussing the KD trade until today, as a result I was hit with another trade to talk about! I think I am going to just quickly talk about all the teams involved and how I view them going forward. The two trades to look at today are: 

Trade 1

Rockets get: Kevin Durant

Suns get: Dillon Brooks, Jalen Green, 10th overall pick this year, 5 second round picks

Trade 2

Trail Blazers get: Jrue Holiday

Celtics get: Anfernee Simons, 2 second round picks

Rockets

I love the KD deal for Houston! Starting with what they lost, as a Canadian I am a big Dillon Brooks fan. He does frequently get his team into trouble by egging on opposing superstars, but other than that he's a great defender and emotional energy guy on every team he's been on and I've never seen him be on a losing team. Most teams losing a 3&D wing like Brooks would leave a massive hole, but the Rockets are better equipped than anyone to fill that slot. I am going to do my best job of pretending like I know the end of bench guys for the Rockets here, but Cam Whitmore is a dude who barely got a chance to play on the Rockets because of their glutton of wings. He's not a guy you're relying on to keep the ball moving, and as of right now Brooks is clearly a better defender, but Whitmore can score the basketball and is an athletic 6'7. That guy is not even going to start for them. Amen Thompson and Tari Eason both are elite wing defenders who can do a little bit of everything on offense. I might even say they do what Dillon Brooks does even better than he does it. For the Rockets, Brooks was a nice to have but not a need to have. Jalen Green is the other big one, and the one that most people would start with. I like watching Jalen Green he is a total wild card. There are nights where he's genuinely one of the best scorers in the league. He can jump out of the gym, hit jumpers and has a lightning fast first step. He's also only 23 years old! So why were the Rockets to eager to give him up? Houston is a team that has a bunch of great defenders, but needed someone to score in the half court. For a lot of regular season games, Jalen Green took that responsibility. But for a lot of regular season games and especially in the playoffs Green came up short. The 7 game series against the Warriors was a perfect example of who Jalen Green is. in 7 games Jalen Green scored: 8, 12, 11, 8, 9, 38 and 7 points. When the shots aren't falling, Green isn't a good play maker, he's not a good defender and he doesn't move around or cause any other kind of havoc on offense. The Rockets are a team with a defense that plays every night, Jalen Green was the weakest link of that. They're a team that was begging for a consistent scorer to compliment their defense, Jalen Green is anything but that. 

Enter KD. Kevin Durant's lowest scoring game in the playoffs for his entire career is 10 points, and it came in 2017, 8 years ago. He's 37 years old and there's all the risks that come with it, but for next season at least I see KD taking the Jalen Green role on offense, and doing it way better than Green did last season. Defensively KD isn't the stopper that he once was, but on the Rockets he doesn't have to be. Just by being tall and smart KD can fit into a ton of different lineup combinations without taking anything away on either side of the ball. I am intrigued by a lineup that features Fred VanVleet, Amen Thompson, Kevin Durant, Alperen Sengun and Steven Adams as just a big mash you up lineup. They could also go with a faster lineup that slides Tari Eason into the Steven Adams slot or they could go with all wings and slide Jabari Smith Jr to the 5. The Rockets defense shouldn't miss a beat, and their offense got a guy who will consistently give them 20 every night. There's the risk that Jalen Green figures it out and becomes a star, he has that kind of upside still at 23. There's a risk that the Suns pick a Derik Queen or someone of the sorts at 10 and he ends up becoming a star down the road. There's a risk that KD gets injured as players that tall this late in their career tend to and there's a risk that he falls off a cliff offensively. If I'm the Rockets though, I am taking all of those risks. The Rockets are built to win now, they were just lacking a star. I don't think they had to give up too much to get one, and now they're contenders in my eyes.

Suns

I guess this is what it is for the Suns. Everything looks worse because when the Suns traded for KD they gave up Mikal Bridges, Cam Johnson, 4 first round picks and a 2028 pick swap. Mikal Bridges was later traded to the Knicks for 5 first round picks, meaning the last team to trade KD got 9 firsts and a pick swap. The Suns got back 1 first, their own this year, as well as a young player at the absolute bottom of his value so far and a fine 3&D wing in Dillon Brooks. The Suns already have 2 shooting guards, in fact that was their biggest issue last season they had guys who could create their own shots but nobody distributing and creating for others. Jalen Green and Dillon Brooks do not solve that problem. The other biggest issue they had is not having a viable center. Jalen Green and Dillon Brooks don't solve that problem either. There's a good chance the Suns use pick 10 on a big man to hopefully fill the roster out and I wouldn't be surprised if they move on from Brooks, Green or both before the offseason is out. At the end of the day, unless pick 10 or Jalen Green becomes a star that immediately fits with Booker, the Suns KD experiment has been a disaster. Without other moves, I see the Suns as a 12-13 seed next season, but I've been wrong many times before. 

Celtics

I thought about making this post its own, but Jrue Holiday for Anfernee Simons is kindof more of a footnote at this stage of their careers than it is it's own post worthy thing. For the Celtics, they have a weird season coming up with Tatum slated to miss the entire thing. Jrue Holiday's contract is fully guaranteed for 3 more seasons at a big number. He's a guy I 100% want on my team if I am going to try and win a championship, but next season that outlook is a little bleaker with Tatum out. With that in mind, the Celtics needed to try and get off of Jrue's money to duck under the second apron. Simons is on an expiring contract and is pretty good! Simons is a bad defender, one of the worst in the league, and for his size you'd love for him to be a better playmaker, but for all that he lacks, he's a lights out shooter and super athletic finisher that is exciting to watch. I don't think it's crazy to think he could be an all star in a weaker Eastern Conference with the Celtics media backing him, and at that point he's a perfect pump and dump candidate should they try and move him to retool when Tatum comes back. That being said, I don't think Simons is on the next Celtics championship contender, at least not in a starting role. He fills the scoring gap that Tatum will leave next year, but gives the Celtics a guy that other teams will target on defense every possession. I don't hate it because I think it gives them a better chance to win in the regular season during this gap year and it clears the salary table for next year, but I don't see it as the Blazers just volunteering to help the Celtics like the internet seems to think. 

Trail Blazers

To most people, this was a headscratcher for the Blazers, and maybe that's justified. They traded Simons who is 26, for Jrue Holiday who's starting to show signs of slowing down at 35. Holiday is on one of the hardest contracts to swallow in the league with a $37m player option in 2027/2028. His offense is inconsistent at best, even when he was in his prime. The thing is though, Jrue is a DAWG. He's still the guy I want to go to if I need a guard defender in the NBA. I don't have any problems having him guard up multiple positions and as just a leader on defense he's incredible. I see this as more of the Blazers either flipping him this off season to a contender for more picks, or pumping his trade value the first half of the season then dangling him to a team who needs a point guard. I think Jrue still carries more value than Simons. As I mentioned for the Celtics section, in the playoffs Simons is going to be targeted relentlessly. Unless he improves a ton on defense, he's not a guy you can start on a team with title aspirations unless you have elite defense at the 4 other positions. Jrue is the opposite. He might not be a guy you can rely on to win you regular season games on a consistent basis, but come playoff time if you have a team with stars, there's not many role players I can think of who would help compliment that. Who knows though, maybe the Blazers want to keep Jrue around as an expensive mentor for Scoot Henderson as they try and push towards the playoffs after a fun scrappy season last year. Many people thought that Simons should've been shopped and they could've gotten more for him, I actually think that he's just not valued that highly around the league and come February, I think Jrue will be. 

That's that! The NBA offseason is great cinema. Crazy that the draft is freaking tomorrow, barely any time to digest the finals before we're right in the thick of it. Maybe tomorrow I'll aggregate all the media rumblings about the Raptors pick, low quality content I know but sue me I'm not gonna watch film on all these guys lol.