3 Teams, 2 Point Guards And A Deal Gone Wrong
By Phil Watson
Every team involved in an NBA trade wants to come out on top. For the time being, however, a trade at the NBA trade deadline in 2015 appears to have gone wrong for all parties.
NBA trades are, at best, an inexact science. Pundits and scouts alike can speculate until they are blue in the face about how a certain player will fit with another organization, but the cold, hard truth is that you just never know until it happens.
Ideally, in a trade, the parties involved want to feel as if they won the deal or, at the very least, benefitted from it.
In a three-team swap, such as the one executed last February by the Milwaukee Bucks, Philadelphia 76ers and Phoenix Suns, the utopian ideal would be the proverbial win-win-win scenario.
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As it currently stands, nearly a year out from the blockbuster swap, we’re about as far from win-win-win as we could be.
Instead, it’s looking like a deal that has gone wrong for all three teams.
To review, here was the swap:
- Milwaukee received PG Michael Carter-Williams from Philadelphia and PG Tyler Ennis and C Miles Plumlee from Phoenix.
- Philadelphia got a first-round pick from the Los Angeles Lakers, via Phoenix, that is still top-three protected in 2016 and 2017. The pick was top-five protected in 2015 (the Lakers wound up with the No. 2 overall selection).
- Phoenix received PGs Brandon Knight and Kendall Marshall from Milwaukee.
With the trade deadline less than two months away, it’s a fair time to take a look at the initial returns on what was one of the biggest deadline swaps in 2014-15.
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