Trade: DEN-SAC

[fauxcreative]

Proof even the best of them get Paul Milsap’d (throwback reference).

Millsap was such a lowkey baller. One of the best RD2 picks in league history.

[OUDAN]

I am completely fine with Laim letting this deal go through but I cant see anywhere on the trade block where LBJ was posted for a 1st. I for sure would have made that deal.

[JMAC]

I too never saw LBJ for a 1 on any block. I'd have dealt my 1 and 2 for LBJ paid if I had known as well

[Laimbeer40]

So I am hearing people say that would do the same deal for LBJ but not beat the deal? Is that accurate? That tells me this is his value.

I did post a block on Slack but not being a Slack expert I didn't know the messages disappear after 90 days. Faux paid attention and made note of it. Good on him. He worked harder.

[fauxcreative]

It was bugging me b/c I wanted the data. There's so many trades in here your brain just kind of "assumes" what market is at some point, but I wanted to be sure I wasn't just talking to stand-up for my side of the deal. So, I went back through and glanced at trades made between the 2022 off-season and now, so about 1.5-years. There's not a lot of one-for-one comparisons, but here's some examples of trades where a RD1 was a decent part of the return, and the side w/o the pick was largely a single player.

Jrue Holiday (3-years left on deal, 19M/year) for Rui Hachimura, RD1-2023 (LAC)

Derrick White (3-years left on deal, 8.4M/year) for RD1-2023 (CLE) + Goga

Jimmy Butler (2-years left on deal, 16M/year) for Christian Wood (8.0 x3), RD1-2023 (LAL), RD2 x2

Collin Sexton (3-years left on deal, 13.2M/year + cash coverage) for RD1-2023 (TOR), Kai Jones

Jusuf Nurkic (4-years left on deal, 13.6M/year) + 1.23 for picks 1.11 and 1.20

Those trades above are all for varying qualities of players, at varying ages, but the important thing to note is that (1) they're all on multi-year contracts, (2) they're all solidly younger than LeBron's 38+ this year, and (3) they're all for solidly less than LeBron's $21M extension cost he's due right now except for Jrue.

The closest 1-1 deal is actually from KTR and it got accepted a month or so ago:

Nikola Vucevic ($25.5M, last year of deal, fully paid) for RD1-2024 (Phoenix)

That PHX pick projected to be in the 25-30 range b/c that team is damn good, and Vuc/Bron are both somewhere in the 25-50 range for single-season value depending on games played, team build, etc. given that LeBron's kind of a lock to not play the full 82 at this point (50+ is my hope for him to be honest), which is baked in to his valuation.

I totally get wanting to make sure that a League Owned team gets the best bang for their buck, that there's no funny business, etc. etc. so I tried to stick to as close to what I felt was market for LeBron when I made the offer. Based on the trades I found above, I mean, those are all in the same general ballpark/value range to me right? And nobody said anything about them. Like if Laim asked me to add Vukcevic from my G-League to the RD1, I don't know, I probably say no b/c I don't think it's necessary you know? That gets into how people value expiring players with no likelihood of extending them. It's an eye-of-the-beholder/acquiror, and sometimes you have to take what you can get as a rebuilder.

So maybe it seems a little light to others for LBJ (I don't thing anyone's disputing Allen for Murphy+Dieng is fine), and there are other teams that may prefer the Murphy+Dieng+Picks side b/c Murphy's pretty damn good. Generally when that happens to me, it's a "reasonable minds could agree/disagree thing" and the trade is probably fine. That team was clearly ripe for a rebuild/to move on from LeBron, so all it would've taken is a DM to Laim at any time in the past 1-2 months, etc.

Just my two cents with actual data. I'm fine with whatever Laim decides on it.

[thepetis]

Never thought there was any funny business going on, nor calling for a veto… You kinda made the point I was thinking, you just assume market value. It seems no one is going to top this offer, so I’m good with it. I appreciate the thoroughness of the research. My only comment in those deals is it was probably TMurph just ripping people off ?

[fauxcreative]

No worries petis, I knew you weren't. Just meant those comments generally. It's important to question/check League Owned dealings. It never hurts to be sure/ask.

See though now you're making my brain want to check which one of those had IND involvement, lol.