Friday, January 22, 2016

Pointless Trade Idea

Kings get Love (4yrs/$114m); Cavs get Gay (3yrs/$40m; player option third year) and Belinelli (3 yrs/$19m).

Sacramento replaces Gay's scoring production within Belineli's style. Love can score at a high level but he'll get further from the basket, thus keeping the lane open for Cousins and giving Rondo a perimeter target.

Cleveland gets a scorer who likes to play closer to the basket than Love thus he won't overlap with Lebron the way Love does and he offers an offensive counterpoint to Kyrie. Gay is arguably a better wing defender than Love, certainly no drop off on that end. Belinelli brings nice wing scoring off the bench (can never have enough of that these days) and over the next three years is reasonably priced.

Getting Love out of Cleveland seems to be the thing to do, hard to imagine that only one sacrificial lamb will be enough to appease the basketball gods. Love has a big contract and hasn't exactly dominated anything since he left Minnesota but I think there's still plenty of GMs and coaches out there that believe in him. Gay gives the Cavs another crafty veteran scorer that has played with both Lebron and Kyrie for USA. Not sure Gay is an upgrade necessarily but this is addition by subtraction: getting ride of Love's expectations, demands and paycheck give the Cavs a leaner, more aggressive gameplan. And for the Kings a Rondo-Love-Cousins lineup is kinda sexy. If I were the Cavs I'd try to make it work with Love but if they're truly looking to get out, Rudy Gay isn't a bad replacement.  

(I had a thought earlier about Love and Mozgov to Denver for Faried, Arthur and Chandler which I kinda liked because for the Cavs it would split Love into 2 players (Faried the rebounder, Chandler the wing scorer) and for the Nuggets it would consolidate 2 nice players into 1 reliable star. Then I remembered Chandler is out for the season, which nullifies the whole thing. Dang. But, hey, nothing can beat that 'Gay Love Swap' headline that I proposed above)

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