The First Off-Season NBA Trade

            Avid readers of the blog (all five of you) might recall a series I was going to do outlining what every NBA team should do in the off-season. Three things have postponed this series.

1. Real life
2. The NBA Draft is scheduled to happen two days after Game 7 (it won’t happen, but Heat-haters can feel free to still hold out some hope), which doesn’t leave a lot of time to watch the NBA Finals, blog about what teams should do before the draft, and play TECMO Super Baseball.
3. One of the teams I wrote about in the first column traded two key players today, making that document a worthless waste of bandwidth.

           No Credentials is good at changing gears though, so we’ll discuss the aftermath of today’s trade. In what could best be described as a salary dump, New Orleans shipped Emeka Okafor and Trevor Ariza to Washington in exchange for Rashard Lewis’ expiring contract (which they will buy out) and mid-second round pick in this year’s draft. Before we get to the long-term thinkers, let’s discuss the Wizards.

            Washington has significantly upgraded their defense along the front-line in the past three months. Pairing Okafor with Nene (who was acquired in a trade with the Nuggets) will give the Wizards a solid safety net behind John Wall, while Trevor Ariza still brings enough to the table to match up against quality 2s and 3s. Unfortunately, none of these three guys are elite scoring options. Nene can do a little work in the post, but at best you’re getting 15 points a game out of this guy, not 20. Okafor and Ariza will be lucky to have a combined average of 20 PPG this season. Fortunately for the Wizards, they still have the third pick in the draft. Adding Okafor means that they will likely avoid drafting Andre Drummond (this year’s most likely bust in the first round). Florida’s Bradley Beal makes the most sense if he’s available. He would fill the black hole Washington has at shooting guard.
            As for New Orleans, I love this trade for them. While having Okafor to help protect Anthony Davis made some sense, it’s more sensible to ship off any veterans and burn the forest down. Getting rid of cap-hogging contracts improves the Hornets’ chances of resigning Eric Gordon (who will be second most valuable player on the free agent market). Adding a second round pick in a deep draft isn’t a bad thing either. Look for the Hornets to add another big man at 10 to pair with Davis for the foreseeable future. New Orleans won’t be as good this year as they would’ve been with Okafor, but their long term outlook is brighter.