I promise I didn’t intend to go over a month without updating this, yet here we are.
Now for what will likely be my least favorite trade of this still-young 29-part series.
Boston Celt*cs, your time is up.
One good thing about this hiatus is that we’ve given BasketballGM time to catch up with the real-life results of the NBA playoffs and draft, so that now we can just focus on the fun stuff.
Here is our roster in an alternate universe where we weren’t dumb and held on to some of our best role players in free agency:
This was the best trade I could swing with Boston, since they have so many good players on good contracts and Harris is not a not-so-good player on an atrocious contract:
RIP our future firsts, but we got it done. I can live with flipping Harris for the Sixth Man of the Year and what would be a very quality backup to Embiid in Robert Williams. We could use some more wings, but we keep McDaniels in this reality, so we aren’t as bad at forward as we could be.
Here is our team at the start of the next season:
Ouch. Let’s just get this over with.
So we suck now. We had a great offense again, finishing third, which isn’t as good as our second-place finish after the first two trades but still really really good. Our defense finished 24th, though, which is even worse than what the Brooklyn trade got us. The moral of the story is essentially that wings are important.
We beat Indiana in the play-in tournament and take a 2-1 lead over Toronto, but not even Nurse can overcome the talent of a Toronto team that managed to keep VanVleet and get a huge third year jump from Scottie Barnes. Boston was up 3-0 over Denver then managed to lose three straight before doing the reverse of what Miami did against them this year and winning Tobias Harris a championship. Overall, I give that trade an F. Better luck next time.
