Leonard for Adebayo, Duncan Robinson and Tyler herro with a bunch of heat picks going to Clippers

Leonard for JJJ, Desmond Bane, Steven Adams and Tyus Jones (I don’t think Memphis would do that as it doesn’t leave them with a playable roster)

Leonard for Towns, Beverley (i miss beverley) and a bunch of picks

I think anyone who says leonard is more valuable than any of those packages is overrating leonard and the value of his contract.

These guys are both early into their contracts and their value might never be as high as it is today. They have never proven that they can play well together (last playoffs, the team only started playing to the sum of its parts once Leonard went down; we almost lost to the mavericks in round 1 with everybody healthy and then clobbered the jazz as soon as leonard went down). Neither seems to be able to stay healthy for that long and I can’t imagine this will improve as they age through their contracts and who knows what leonard will look like when he comes back from injury.

The healthy talent pool in the league hasn’t been as shallow as it is today at any point in the past 10 years. Lebron is finally past his prime. The net’s can’t seem to get a full line up together. It’s almost laughable when you consider who are the favorites to win the title this year. The current suns, bucks, nets, warriors, bulls and heat teams are nowhere near the contenders that were the warriors, cavs, heat, and spurs of the 2010s and even those teams were upset here and there. The league is wide open!

This would all dictate that we should be all-in. Conventional wisdom would focus on maintaining roster consistency, hope that leonard/pg are ready for the playoffs and maybe make room around the edges. I don’t feel that confident that we can get those guys back healthy and that even if we did, they will never develop the chemistry they need to win. They kind of have the same lack of chemistry as tatum/brown. We all thought two elite 2-way players would be ideal in today’s league, but it clearly hasn’t played out this way.

I think trading one of these guys could put us in a much better position to win. Last post season, we were way closer to winning it all than anybody gives us credit. Morris was awful in the first 2 phx games and clearly needed more time to recover from the onslaught of games he was coming off of. By the end of the series, he looked way better, but by that point, PG was completely gassed from going all out for so long. If we had normal rest last post season, I’m very confident we would have crushed phoenix and potentially beaten the bucks. These teams are super overrated and Ty was amazing at using our pieces to pick apart the opposition.

Ty is an awesome coach and our roster is really good and extremely versatile. With one of PG or Leonard, this team is elite. With both, we aren’t that much better. I think it would make sense to trade cash in on one of them, the same way we did with Harris a couple years back (the clippers were super competitive when they traded their best player in Harris a couple years ago and continued to play great after the trade).

Assuming we get market value for either player (i.e. leonard is more valuable than PG), my preference would be to trade Leonard. PG showed that he has awesome chemistry with the rest of the roster. He also has proved that he is able to play huge minutes and carry the team without doing it in a way that causes everyone to disengage (leonard’s iso offense often leaves everyone standing around doing nothing). I don’t know who I would target in a trade though and I don’t want to embarrass myself any further with hypothetical trades. Last year’s PG led team was so close; it wasn’t obvious to me what that team was missing other than a couple days off. I guess I would want a defensive minded shooter that could move really well off ball (someone that would fit really well in Ty’s system and could play off reggie and PG) and rebound well. I know it’s against conventional wisdom to trade a dollar for 4 quarters, but that dollar, in my opinion, is only worth 65 cents on our team and I would rather have the 4 quarters. As elite as Leonard is, I enjoy watching this team more when PG is playing with him.

Really his deal could be more valuable at that time when teams are looking to create the capspace to sign players. For a capspace team, they could take back a $19M (or bigger) deal and the receiving team could create like $15M in capspace.

That does make me feel like the Clips aren’t going to feel that much pressure into making a move to trade Bledsoe at the deadline. I think they’ll go for some players, but if they can’t get a good deal, they’ll just wait for this summer.