Lol so why the hell we did this trade if all these players are bad defenders? Lol we are fucked!
Well, it's undeniable they're bad defenders.. We're lying to ourselves if we say otherwise.
But, the Hill and Hood trades did make a great deal of sense.. Hill was nothing more than a salary dump, and we traded Jae Crowder for Rodney Hood. You could argue we should've targeted Derrick Favors but, as I said in another thread, it didn't seem as though the Cavs wanted to deal with too much uncertainty heading into the draft beyond LeBron James' free agency. With both Nance and Hood being under team control, they only need to worry about James.
But the point of these trades is to hedge on LeBron leaving... IMHO.
If James stays, you have the Nets pick, a showcased Cedi Osman, Hood under a market-favorable deal, Nance under hopefully a decent contract, and Kevin Love. That's a good amount of assets; in fact, it's probably better than what we had yesterday, especially if the Nets can bottom out. So we'll have the assets to make a trade; however, it's risky because we don't even know who might be available. There's only so many players in the league worth the Nets pick and I don't see many, if any, of them being available.
And ultimately, the other aspect of the trade is that, if James leaves; we've got all these contracts expiring in 2019-20; we took on no large deals (see: Batum); we have very little guaranteed salary after next season... We have the Nets pick, and we have young players like Hood, Osman, Zizic, Clarkson, and Nance who, for the most part, should be on movable deals and mostly carry positive value moving forward.
So we've basically kicked the can down the road to the offseason. If this draft goes poorly, or if we can't make a deal work for a superstar; my expectation would be that James would start to consider his options rather carefully. He can do only 1 more 1+1 before the Over-38 rule will start costing him money.