I am not saying EC is better than Z, I am saying we trade Z for Curry and Crawford, and we are a better team against physical inside teams like detroit, Miami, the clips, and even dallas. In this trade we also improve on Flip, and we still have our MLE and draft to secure a true point guard. It is clear Z was struggling with elite teams like Detroit. Teams we will have to get through to reach a championship level. Effectively, against detroit we were an AV, Gooden, Marshall team, with Z coming in to rest them. If you are watching the heat dismatle a detroit that beat us inside out, and you are watching Ben and Rasheed being dominated in the paint, you have to be thinking about the tools we have being inadequate to take another step. The press is saying Z is on the table, not me.
I am curious to know Max and Karma, where you see the potential to trade Z. I see very few situations where Z would bring us much of value. As I have said in other threads, there might be something in Toronto, but after that I see a lot of bad teams with bad contracts or the wrong kinds of personnel for us.
We know we are going to make the playoffs next year, and we know we will have to play through teams like detroit and the Heat. We know we struggle against these teams because we are soft inside. we aren't going to fix that next year with a draft pick at no 25, so it follows we can only fix it through the MLE and trades. In my mind, there is no way we trade AV (too valueable) or Marshall (not valuable enough) so the logical bigs are Z and Gooden. We have already explored gooden trades out the Wazoo and there are a few ideas that might really work. So lets see where a Z trade actually works.