OK, so we discussed draft strategies and the folly of overreacting to Two DNPCDs to start the season in our last update. Now let's discuss another aspect of your 30 week odyssey into Basketball Geekdom; namely, Trades. I'm not talking about the fantasy trades that only affect how well your opposition is doing relative to your own team. I'm talking about real-world, NBA-League trades. Sometimes, those trades can give a player you have a sudden, unexpected fantasy boost, sometimes, your player ends up losing out. For instance, let's say you have Allen Iverson and he plays for... I don't know, let's say the Nuggets. But then, he gets traded to... just for the sake of argument, let's say he gets traded to the Detroit F'ing PISTONS! Well, then you might see his stats take a hit from a trade like that. Don't worry though, it shouldn't be anything drastic. He shouldn't go from top 5 in scoring with 7+ assists to 17 points and 3 assists. Right? I'm going to cry.
OK, so I'm back. Let's talk about the other side of these NBA Trades. Sometimes, you look at the NBA and there are trades that seem so obvious at the time that they're made that you just ask yourself "Why didn't the Commish (AKA the accomplice) just mandate this one at the beginning of the season?" Al Harrington got traded to New York for Jamaal Crawford. How perfect is that!?!?! This trade takes one valuable fantasy player and creates 3 high-quality fantasy players with a single swipe of the pen. Crawford is a good player. But he's no All Star. He doesn't have the personality or the game to Rule a city like New York. But in Golden State, where they sell out 50 loss teams and stand up rooting like it's the final four? He will be treated like a king. The fact that he shoots too often and doesn't really give your team a chance to win won't matter, which means that Don Nelson will be free to play him at the 3 alongside Stephen Jackson with both of them jacking up half-court fallaway threes with two guys on them. Throw Monta Ellis in the mix, driving into two seven footers and just throwing it off the back-board a la Dwayne Wade, but without the accuracy or the foul calls... a la Flip Murray... Well, Let's just call this team the "7 passes or less" era for Golden State. If the guards make more than 20 passes in a game, everyone in attendance gets a free Chalupa from Taco Bell!!!
Look at New York's end of the Deal, though. Not only do you get a shooting "big-man" to go alongside David Lee, but you free up time on the floor (and thus, shot attempts) for Nate Robinson. Harrington was not happy in Golden State for whatever reason. Now he's going to the only other Coach in the league that will absolutely correctly utilize his exact offensive skill set while gleefully ignoring his glaring defensive deficiencies (read: Steve Nash, 2-time MVP, 438th out of 367 in Defensive Player of the year voting).
Interesting side note here: The two best offensive head coaches, who play nearly the exact same style of basketball made a trade involving players who were built and trained to only play in that type of system. This is like the Rockets trading Shane Battier for Bruce Bowen. It's a once-every-ten-seasons trade that makes perfect sense for every single person involved. From the parties traded, to the other members of the teams they were traded to/from, the coaches and even for the franchises and the fans. And speaking of those coaches, everyone knows that Nelson practically invented NBA Small Ball. I mean, we call it "Nellie-Ball" for defense' sake. But I think D'Antoni has perfected it. Nelson said that he could win without defense, as long as his players could rebound, run fast and shoot. And he was right. But D'Antoni had this crazy idea that his players should also be able to pass to the open man so that guy could take the shot. Simple, obvious, should have been done from the start. Just like this trade.
The NBA: Where "Why didn't I think of that?" Happens
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