You have to wonder about the NBA sometimes. When your team trades it’s leading scorer and their serviceable starting center, who combined for 29.3 ppg last season, and all they get in return is an 8.5 ppg scorer with conditioning issues, two scrubs, and a conditional future first-rounder, you shouldn’t be happy about that. But when WFAN did their sports update on my way home from school and announced that Ricky Davis and Mark Blount had been traded to Miami for Antoine Walker, Michael Doleac, and Wayne Simien, I was ecstatic. It really is a shame when most of a league’s player movement revolves around swapping your team’s syphilis for some other team’s chlamydia, and the big selling point of the deal is how fast you can get rid of the players you just traded for. Yet that’s the state of the current NBA with it’s nonsensical salary cap and luxury tax. Oh well, at least at the end of the day I feel my team came out ahead in the deal. No amount of Valtrex in the world is going to cure Miami of the Mark Blount Herpes for the next three years.
With that being said, here are some things I like about the trade:
1. No more Blount! "Cancer" does not begin to describe Mark Blount. As I mentioned above, painful genital ulcerations is more like it. I was certain we were stuck with him for the next three seasons, and now we’re free. This must’ve been like what Elizabeth Hasselbeck felt like when Rosie quit The View.
2. As a Wolves fan, any time the words "Kevin McHale" and "trade" are used in the same sentence, and you actually gain a draft pick, you should be doing backflips. Unbelievably, this deal now marks two consecutive transactions in which this has happened. I feel like I’m living in bizarro world.
By the way, you may now mock me for using a "View" analogy on TWolvesBlog. Seriously, that had to be a new low point for me.
3. We got to spread out our expring deals. The Wolves had Theo’s 11.6 million and Ricky’s 6.8 million set to expire at the end of this season. Seeing that losing all that salary still wouldn’t have put Minnesota under the cap, it’s good that we won’t be taking over 18 million off the books this year. We’d never use all that salary space as leverage in a trade deadline deal this season. It’s simply too much money. We’ll be much better off losing Theo’s 11.6 and then another four from the Doleac/SimienWilkins combo this season, while being left with Walker’s 8.3 and Howard’s 6.8 to play with next year. This trade effectively gives the Wolves two seasons in which they can be major players at the deadline. Having that much money tied up in expiring deals could put them in the position to make the next blockbuster trade, much like the Iverson and KG deals.
4. Wolves fans now get to witness Antione Walker and Gerald Green go head-to-head in an all-out war to see who can chuck up the most ill-advised shots. As there may not be very many close games in the 4th quarter this season, at least fans will have a reason to stick around and watch this incredible sub-plot play out. I can only imagine how many times this season a highly-contested three by Green will be followed up by an "Antoine Special" from the bullseye in the Target Center logo.
5. You just have to appreciate the dark humor of the Wolves, already one man over the limit, completing a 2-for-3 trade, days before the deadline to trim rosters.
Add The Sports Daily to your Google News Feed!
