Brooklyn Nets: 3 trades team should make before deadline
By Alec Liebsch
2. Biting the bullet
Everyone knows the overarching goal for this season and the past few: maintaining flexibility. The front office has done a good job of that to this point, with the one simple blemish being Allen Crabbe‘s contract.
Acquired from the Portland Trail Blazers in the summer of 2017, Crabbe was a player Marks wanted all along. The summer before, when Crabbe was a restricted free agent, the Nets made an albatross offer sheet to Crabbe (four years, $74.8 million), forcing Portland’s hand.
After one season of that egregious overpay, the Blazers couldn’t handle paying Crabbe that much, so they shipped him to Brooklyn. Questionably, the Nets did not receive any asset compensation for absorbing the last three years.
The Nets liked him a lot, but he has been uninspiring this season. In tandem with his pedestrian scoring and shooting stats, Crabbe also has a PER of 7.5 on the season. He finally eclipsed above league-average from 3 (38.7 percent) before the knee injury, but it took far too long to do so.
Once he is healthy, the Nets need to look into a trade involving him. If they can get off his $18.5 million player option for 2019-20, they can really make a splash in free agency.
Granted, very few teams will want to incur that cap hit at a time where no one has cap space, but Brooklyn has a few incentives. It finally has control of its own first round pick, plus the Denver Nuggets‘ first-rounder this season (top-12 protected, likely to convey).
One team that would make a push for Crabbe is the Dallas Mavericks. They lost their 2019 first-rounder in the Luka Doncic trade, and Wesley Matthews hits the open market this summer at the age of 32. Crabbe can step right into Matthews’ role, plus the Mavs can get a pick out of it:
Matthews does have some value for Brooklyn, but in reality he’s the only salary that makes sense in terms of matching Crabbe. This is basically a swap of bad contracts at the same position, but Dallas gets a first round pick for taking on an extra year.