The Ringer NBA Show - How This Week’s Patrick Beverley Trades Explain the NBA

Episode Date: August 20, 2021

Chris Ryan is joined by The Ringer’s Rob Mahoney to discuss Patrick Beverley getting traded twice in a week. Then they discuss the financial and competitive realities of several teams around the league. Host: Chris Ryan Guest: Rob Mahoney Production Assistant: Isaiah Blakely Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's good, everybody? I'm John G. Stremski, host to New York, New York with JJ, the first podcast on the Ringer and Spotify, dedicated to you, the New York Sports fan. We've got episode three nights a week, plus bonus episodes whenever news breaks. So make sure you follow the show on Spotify. Oh, and welcome to the Ringer NBA show. It's The Answer. I'm Chris Ryan. I'm joined this week by Rob Mahoney. What's up, Rob? What's going on, Chris? Well, what's going on is nothing. It's the dog days of the NBA. They said it couldn't be done. They said you can't make. NBA content in the middle of August. And I said challenge accepted because while you and I are probably having some pretty like low-key weeks, you're catching up on peak TV. I'm just doing my thing out here.

I'm trying to make a really perfect chicken thigh on the grill. Patrick Beverly played for three NBA teams this week. I mean, he didn't play. So on Sunday, he was a clipper. By the end of the day, he was traded to the Memphis Grizzlies, which if there was ever a team that he should go to that embodied Patrick Beverly's qualities as a player and as a person,

that grit and grind identity that the Grizzlies have admittedly left behind somewhat was definitely that and he seemed to embrace that. And then on Tuesday, he was traded again, this time to Minnesota. So when he was traded to Memphis, it was for Eric Bloodsoe, he was traded alongside

Rajan Rondo and Daniel Latourou. And then he was traded to Minnesota for Jerich Culver and Wancho Hernon Gomez, which makes three teams in one week, for Patrick Beverly, so he is now a Timberwolf. And this got me thinking that in some ways, what happened to Patrick Beverly is like a perfect vessel to discuss a bunch of different financial and competitive realities

in the league. So I wanted to talk to Rob about that this week. Rob, like, does Patrick Beverly explain the world? Like, does the movement of a guy making about $14 million in the last year of his deal, a 33-year-old point guard who, in a lot of ways, qualities are are intangible right like the things that he brings to a team like feist and competitive nature and you know an assumption that he's a great defender

although I wonder if certain defense defensive analytics suggests otherwise and also like the way in which this contract has now ping ponged around the league and and it's meant different things when he's on a different team for 24 hours what what are what do you think about this Patrick Beverly movement that we saw this week Well, it speaks to the differences and positions that these three teams are in, certainly, in terms of their competitive timetable, what their needs are, what they're looking for. Pat Beverly is interesting because he's one of these players who's theoretically useful to almost anyone. Any team could use a guard who's going to get into the ball, who can hit some threes,

who again, as you mentioned, can be feisty, can be competitive. That's a guy that's useful to a lot of different teams, but he's not so useful that you don't trade him when you want to shake things up. And so, I mean, that's what we're seeing with the Clippers in particular. and then as we go down this chain, I think there are questions as to why the Grizzlies participated in that trade in the first place

and they became a little clearer once they made the second trade with the wolves to get Jared Culver in the door, take a look at him. But Beverly is the vessel. He's the medium for all of this stuff for understanding all three of these teams for understanding a lot of where the league is

for these kind of mid-salaried players right now. Yeah, like to just take it the human factor before we get into the trade marketing and the salary ramifications. I will say that in each step in the process, Pat Bev has expressed enthusiasm for his situation when Reggie Jackson re-signed with the Clippers. He tweeted, yes, sir, gang back.

And when he was Delta Memphis, he tweeted grit and grind, let's go all caps. Like he seemed psyched for that. And when he finally wound up in Minnesota, he tweeted, obviously, maybe having learned to measure his expectations, extremely excited, let's go, all normal capitalization.

So obviously, I'm sure he's happy to be on a team that wants him Minnesota and he's got a relationship with Gerson Roses like the the GM over in Minnesota. But this is a guy who's like I said in his in his he's 33. He's in the final year of a three year contract in which he'll earn 14.3 million dollars. And I want to start by talking about what this means for each team involved because I think that given the behavior of each of these teams you can learn a lot about a cluster of teams that are sort of doing similar things and have done similar things over the offseason. We tend to go into these, these, uh, free agency off seasons,

the trade, the trade off season thinking everybody's going for it, right? Everybody is, is in the market trying to figure out if they have the pieces to get a Ben Simmons, to get a Bradley Beal to get a Damien Lillard, do they have the cap space to sign a Kyle Lowry? Can they do it? And then once all that dust settles, there's a lot of just kind of like, I don't know, would you call it expectation setting? Would you call it book cleaning? Like, there's a lot of just like, dirty work that happens at this time of year so that teams kind of go into the season with all their eyes data and their T's crossed, right?

Yeah, and you don't want to be caught in a position where you're not able to pivot if you need to. You know, if you're in this space, you want to be good enough to give yourself a shot to go into the season to see what's what with your roster to see if maybe you can overachieve a little bit relative to those expectations. But if, you know, if things really start to go sideways,

you want to have movable contracts. You want to have players who are going to be attractive on the market, all those kinds of things. That really feels like what the clippers are doing here, not only, you know, saving themselves some money in kind of flipping contract for contract. And I think there's, there is a basketball value in trading, you know, Pat Beverly and Rajan Rondo for Eric Blood. So like that there's a reasoning there, at least an ostensible reasoning. It's not like the reason they're doing this deal per se. You know, there's no overwhelming need to make this trade beyond let's try something a little different. Let's shake things a little up on

the edges of what we've got going on while Kauai's out. I think that's kind of been the hallmark of this most recent era of Clippers team building is the churn around the edges, right? So when they went from that last sort of iteration of, well, sort of that the doc iteration that had, you know, no expectations and wound up being like a super fun team and you develop all this value for guys like Montrez-Harrul or whatever. and then that sliding into the last doc year in the first Tailu year,

I now think that they obviously are just like a lot of our money is tied up in Kauai and Paul George and we are just going to constantly be like moving through players on the outside of those two to create something that we think is sustainable and viable. And Tailu is actually the perfect coach for that kind of philosophy because he's so adaptable because he kind of maximizes everything that he's got around him, right?

Definitely. No, Lou is a great fit for exactly that kind of philosophy. And, I mean, it helps in terms of if you're going to go in that direction. None of these guys that they have on the edges have been essential to who they are. And Beverly is part of that. Like the biggest impact that Beverly has on a game is probably in energy alone, just in terms of getting into guys' heads, getting into the game. I think the clippers are past the point where they're rallying behind that with him specifically.

Those days are a little bit gone. As you mentioned, there was a point where he was this important figure in the organization, this totem for further identity, he's not that anymore. Now they have other needs. They, you know, that magic has lost its luster a little bit and they just need like a little more juice on the ball. They need somebody who can dribble a little more who's going to have a slightly different skill set. And so then it makes sense, you know, even when you do have a coach like Tailu who's going to swap in all these interchangeable parts, let's give him some different parts to work with and see if the results look any different. Yeah. So he gets back Bledsoe who's obviously a more

useful offensive player than Rondo and Beverly. But he's also been a little bit in the desert. Like he, he has become kind of like a pinata for like spacing maniacs in the NBA where it's just like you can't have Bledsoe on a team where like other guys need space and other guys need the ball. And that I wonder whether or not he, he has kind of like reached the end of his rope in the NBA.

But like, I think, I think that like if he's going to probably if he's going to discover another a new leaf here, it's going to probably be in the LA. Because in a weird way, Kauai's out this season. So he'll probably get a couple more opportunities to suit his offensive game than he would in another situation, right? Yeah, I mean, there are the levels to the Eric Bledso experience where there's the obvious spacing concerns that you mentioned. And then there's, you know, if he's in the desert, he's somewhat in the desert of his own making. Because when he was in New Orleans, he just like stopped defending hard. He stopped buying in.

He stopped being focused because when he's locked in, he's a really good defensive player. If you have that and he's doing some stuff in transition and he has opportunities to drive because other guys can space like there's still the outline of a good player there but he has to be bought into what's going on and I think he's going to be a little more bought into this kind of rule than what we saw with the Pelicans. So for you with this trade and it's like

is it possible that you can see this trade as like a mild upgrade for the clippers but at the same time also a little bit of a white flag waving on their part because clearly Kauai is not going to play at least for, I would have guessed, the regular season and possibly even deep into the postseason if you actually just say it's a 12-month injury from when he suffered it in the Utah series and from whenever he got his surgery and now he's re-signed his deal. But the clippers know that they have Kauai under some amount of control now. So is this kind of like, if it's not like a white flag, is it like an eggshell flag? Is it like a bone white flag of like?

Toby. We can get into maybe the second round if we're really lucky or maybe we, you know, I've seen some people think like the Clippers are in danger of being a play-in-game team. But do you think that this is a way for them to get some money off their cap to reduce their luxury tax by $30 million and to kind of just like settle everything down as they go into the season? I mean, it's definitely an acknowledgement of something of some of that. And at the same time, like, I mean, it's basically like an Eric Bledsoe. gap here is essentially kind of what they're going for here. And you can see that, I mean,

when you have a team that's built basically to play without a traditional point card and you lose one of the primary kind of unconventional ball handlers you have in Kauai, there's just a huge void that needs to be filled there. And so like you could give all that responsibility to Rajan Rondo if you really wanted to wouldn't be my pick. Clearly it wasn't their pick either. And they like bloodsoe better for that kind of opportunity. And so that's kind of what makes sense is, okay, you have blood so to fill this clear need that you have in your team that suddenly emerged from Kauai's injury. And at the same time, you create a trade exception that you could use, you couldn't use, depending on how your season's going. Like maybe $8 million gets you a decent role player that can help kind of complete your team and then it will not complete, but fill out your team in the middle of the season.

That's something that could be helpful to them. So we'll see how all these things kind of balance out in the end. But in terms of the guys they're sending out and what they're getting back, I just don't see a lot of opportunity lost here. So the Clippers go from being a contender last year where I think a lot of folks were like if they're healthy, like they're going to be incredibly hard to beat. And I think at their best in the playoffs,

you know, I was pretty, I was pretty blown away by what they were capable of. Like even though you never knew what team was going to show up on any given night, I think once they rounded, once they turned a corner in that Dallas series, like at their best,

I was pretty thrilled with what I saw from them. And then they're going into the season with many of the same players, but probably lowered expectations, maybe not internally, but I think around the league, are there any other teams out there that you think are like in that pretender contender lane?

Like we are sort of disposed to think of them as contenders, but in reality they're probably a year away from being a year away, or maybe they're in the Brad Beale sweepstakes, or maybe they're trying to do some cap work or they've got an injury. Are there other teams out there that you think fit into that mold? I mean, the nuggets are probably the clearest,

a log for that, right? Just with Jamal Murray out, you know, in the meantime, they have to kind of spin their wheels in the same way and just do the best they can. So they opted to kind of keep their team mostly together, bring in Jeff Green on what's basically a one-year deal. It's a two-year deal with a player option for Jeff Green. So who

knows how long he'll ultimately be there, but he'll help them in the meantime. And they're going to do the best they can. They have the reigning MVP and Nicola Yokic. They have a lot of good pieces, but as we saw in the playoffs, there's a pretty articulated ceiling in terms of what that group can do without Murray. Unless, you know, Michael Porter Jr. pops off unless, you know, one of the other guys on the team really over, you know, surpasses all reasonable expectations for what they could be or some opportunity comes up in the middle of the year to trade for whoever.

maybe Aaron Gordon clicks in a different way than he did last season. So they feel like the clearest analog to me to the Clippers, but honestly, there's a lot of teams in this bracket, because right now we see a lot of teams kind of going for it. There's less incentive to tank. The group right out the playoff bubble is pretty thick, but right above that, I mean, there's six, seven teams in each conference trying to talk themselves into the idea

that they're playing for the whole thing. Yeah, you know, we were talking, I think when you and me and Seer talked a couple weeks ago, I made a, you know, under-informed, but I think useful comparison to the buyer-seller market and baseball and how teams will get to that trade deadline and just sort of say, like, are we three games under 500 and out of the pennant race? All right. Then, like, everybody is up for grabs.

Are we overperforming maybe our own expectations? Okay, then maybe we'll go out and get a useful bullpen arm and like another bat, like a left-handed bat. And the same thing I think might be the case for teams like the Clippers, although I think the clippers are going to have a tougher time making noise this season. But Boston, even Golden State to some extent, which I think,

depending on whether or not you're taking Laco, but is word, are in this sort of dual track development of, we've got these three young kids, Moody, Wiseman, and Camingo, but on the other hand, we've got the three wise men of Draymond, Steph, and Clay.

Clay is, I don't really know if we have like a return date for Clay, but based on timing, it might not even be, 2021, right? Like, he could theoretically be coming back after Christmas because of whenever he injured that, re-injured the knee, right?

Like, he might not be fully back for a while. So the Warriors are maybe a team that's like, yeah, we think we were like on our best night among the best teams in the league, but we may not have everything lined up right now and we want to maintain our flexibility. They're a tough team to read because I 100% believe that Joe Lake of wants

the Warriors to be good forever and wants all these young guys to pan out and wants to build this dynastic superpower. But this is also the same franchise that swore up down and sideways that they traded for DiAngelo Russell because they saw him being a part of their core and then basically traded him as soon as they could for the next reasonable deal they could get. So I would take everything they say about their young prospects with a grain of salt. I'm sure they like those guys. I'm sure they they envision a certain future with them. But if the right player becomes available, they're going to jump at that opportunity. And they're the team that I'm watching of this group for sure because, you know, for a franchise with this high of expectation that just took two teenagers

in the draft, are they really patient enough to stick it out if things start going sideways? If they get into January or February without clay, they're kind of bordering on the bubble kind of area for the Western Conference. Are Draymond and Steph really going to be cool saying, let's ride this out, let's see how we are healthy going into the playoffs and not try to get more veteran help in there. That's a big ask for those guys. Yeah, the two things I thought were noteworthy this week were obviously, Kaminga popped a bit at Summer League. And I was thinking about never underestimate, like, the hubris of a billionaire who, who, like,

had a lot to do with the draft pick. You know, like, perhaps you're right. Like, like, Lake of is just out there selling his wares and being like, we love Kaminga. We think Kaminga's amazing. But he was not shy about being, like, I was involved in the Kaminga pick. Like, I had dinner with Kaminga before we drafted him. And I could see him being like, no, this dude is the future of the franchise. So unless I'm getting somebody who I know will put us right.

back in that like KD zone like I'm I may not he may be loath to move off of them because for him it's like comming is the like his guy you know what I mean like a lot of these dudes before are are the previous administration's draft picks even though they wound up delivering the title to to the warriors so it's it's interesting situation and then the other sort of wrinkle with the warriors thing and I don't know how much weight I put on this but obviously a lot of people have been talking about this, uh, Katie and Dremont podcast that it went up chips this week. And, you know, I, I wouldn't like overreact. I'm sure a lot of the stuff that they have said on that podcast was stuff that was that Steve Kerr and Bob Myers and Jokelake over the Warriors folks were aware of. But Draymond was kind of

like, yeah, they like the Warriors front office and coaching coaches fucked up the KD relationship, fucked up our like spat that there was like that that was that didn't necessarily send KD out the door, that it was a sign of things to come. And that was like one of the first times, I think I've heard Draymond specifically kind of roll his eyes publicly at the team. Did you get that impression as well? Oh, yeah, but I don't think that's the first time.

No, I guess not. Especially with Steve Kerr, I think he tends to roll his eyes quite a lot. But, I mean, those conversations were definitely interesting. I think they both put a perspective on it they hadn't before. It also felt like two guys, like trying to shy away from blame in that entire situation saying, oh, no, no. We argued, but it was their, fault for punishing him in the wrong way or yeah i mean if if all that matters is as they said

getting back together in the room the two of them and hashing it out then why didn't they hash it out right right i mean maybe steve cur was like what do you want me to do about this you guys had a fight like it was interesting that they they invoked scotty pippen in that conversation and it was like steve kirk played with scotty pippin i'm sure he's aware of like what it was like to play with jordan and scotty pippin at various points um anyway like i i thought that that was a i i i remain like so up and down on the Warriors just because these fluctuations happen where, you know, you kind of go into it and you talk yourself into like Splash Brothers are back, Igwadal is back, Wiggins is more comfortable, Wiseman year two, these rookies look great. They filled out the

roster in a really smart way. And then you can just like step two feet to the left and be like, oh, this team isn't that good. This team's in a lot of trouble. Like what happens if Steph misses six weeks for some reason? Like they're there, it's a nightmare. I mean, they're going to be a smarter team for sure. They're going to be a better three-point shooting team. They're just more capable in terms of, as we were talking about, on the fringes, they've reloaded in a really smart way. But that only gets you so far if you don't have dynamic shot creation with Steph. If it becomes too easy to load up on Steph, or as you're saying, God forbid, what happens if he gets hurt at some point this season? You have to figure things out on the fly under pressure against some of the best teams in the Western

Conference. I think we're asking a lot of this team very quickly, especially when we don't know when Clay is coming back, which I'm kind of expecting, as you mentioned, 2022, going into late winter, early spring is maybe when we see him. If not back on the floor, at least starting to get back on the floor in a way that actually looks like Clay Thompson again. Yeah, I agree with you. So let's go to the second team, Patrick Beverly, was with this week, the Memphis Grizzlies, who, you know, I got to admit I don't really chat a lot about because I

just leave that to Verno on the NBA, on the ringer NBA feed. but I have to say that they find themselves in this incredibly weird place where they are kind of this way station for other teams bad contracts and like in a perpetual rebuild, but also clearly one of the smarter teams out there and at least one of the best developmental programs in the NBA, like hands down, like you can't argue with that. I don't really know, like you said, you alluded to this in the beginning of the podcast. Like, why are they getting into this Patrick Bev? Is it because they thought they had this Culver deal lined up?

Is it because Culver as a number six pick at that kind of taking a flyer on a guy who was obviously very disenchanted, you know, unhappy in Minnesota is just like a no-brainer into their model of how they want to build the team? I mean, I would guess if they didn't already have it lined up, they had a strong suspicion they could get something like this, which is we're going to trade him to a team. that wants to get better, that's trying to improve this season, and they're going to send us, you know, their draft guy who didn't quite work out,

who, you know, rates Willie really well by our models and we think could be an NBA player. That's probably the range they were gunning for, especially when you're talking about, you know, the precursor to this was the trade they made with New Orleans in the first place, where they were trying to move up in the draft in the Jonas Valenchunus, Stephen Adams, Eric Bledsoe mess.

So they get Zaire Williams out of that. And then they're trying to flip these pieces to say, okay, what other kind of upside moves can we make here? Because that's been kind of what their timeline looks like, what they're the way that they're operating is as a team that, you know, isn't quite secure in what they have yet. And rightly

so, they feel good about the core guys that they have. They feel good about their ability to draft, but they need guys who are going to push them into that next level. Yeah. And I don't know who that is because they're about to pay, presumably they're about to pay Jackson. They've got to get that deal, the extension done either before the end of

this offseason or they have to wait till next season. Jaws do for an extension, I think, at the end of this coming season, right? So he can, he can get his extension then. And then so you pay Jaron Jackson Jr., who's still getting back to where we thought he could be after his injury, and John Morant, who's amazing, but is maybe not in the zone where you're like, guys are going to drop everything to come play with him. Whereas, like, personally, I would say Zion is somebody who's probably more in that zone where I could, the New Orleans going for Kyle Lowry and Chris Paul to me was not ridiculous. Like for as much as it may, David Griffin may have been deluded about it. I don't think that's crazy to go play

with Brandon Ingram and Zion Williamson. Like that, that seems like you go there and if you're Kyle Lowry and you team up with those two guys, like that's a, that's definitely a, at least a mid-tier playoff team immediately. Maybe not a Phoenix team, but it's, it's pretty good. Whereas with Memphis, I don't know what you can be if you're the veteran next to Jahn Morant and Jaron Jackson, Jr. Does that sound right? It does. I mean, I think what they're banking on eventually is, you know, when they do have their opportunity to trade for a guy to sign a guy and free agency, whatever that looks like, given their situation at that time, they're looking for kind of like the sensible veteran who likes our culture and saw us in the playoffs and thinks Jaws really good, but not like the star who's going to complete our team. And so that's why they're, they have to swing with some of these picks. They have to go for higher upside guys. But the good news is they've just been really good at drafting so far.

And so if they can get even mid to late first, if they can get any kind of draft equity, if they thought Culver was a guy who was worth looking at, to me that says there probably is something there that's worth looking at. So now they have really cool young players. They have some really good, very inexpensive young players, like the Baines and the Brooks's. Then they've got good contract make weights like Stephen Adams. And I do wonder whether, I'm sure these GMs are aware of this, but part of what's happened with the phenomenon of star players

maybe dictating where they want to go play before their contracts are up and saying like, not only do I want to trade, but here are the places that I would accept a trade to, is that that's not going to be Memphis in all likelihood. Yeah. You know, unless Jod does turn into a Lillard-level good player who is single-handedly able to get you to a five, or four seed and, you know, when Lillard is out of his mind, like, can get the Blazers to a

conference finals when things break right for them. But even then, who's been angling to go to Portland, you know? Right. Exactly. Exactly. Like, it's like the Carmelos. It's the picking up a Covington. It's near Nurchitch because Denver, you know, it's like, they're not getting like a stud. They got Norm Powell, but they gave up Gary Trent. And I think that that's exactly right. So if you're Memphis, you have all these assets. You're going to have to start paying these guys like do you actually really think that like any of these pieces become become the formula to get a star or are you really hoping that like maybe we can get wiggins or something like that like maybe we can get like a like a guy you know just outside of that all star range

well i think the formula would be if we get enough of these good young players together and by the time somebody becomes available all these young players happen to be you know 23 24 25 still in that kind of young core range, maybe we can package enough of them together that it starts to look attractive to some team. Yeah. And, you know, that's not an unreasonable thing to want and to ask and to plan for along with the fact that we just don't know how good Jaron Jackson Jr. is going to be yet. He's probably the highest upside piece here where, you know, Jha, I think we have a pretty

good idea of what his game is going to look like, of where his strengths and weaknesses are. Jackson's been so injured. He's been kind of underwhelming on defense since he's coming to the NBA, but he has so much potential given his size and his mobility. Yeah, if you want to believe in that. Like you're, yeah, that's like the golden ticket, right? I guess it, yeah, I guess my, my curiosity is just

I think about this a lot with Oklahoma, where it's just like, okay, so now you have like 25 friggin' first round picks and Shea. And I loved that rumor about like them trying to go to Detroit and say like, take Shea and a couple of first rounders because we want Cade that bad, you know?

Um, I, whether that was true or not. I, I just don't know if like any any player is going to say yeah cool like i'll go do that i'll go i'll go play with these guys i'll go play for these guys and you know oklahoma seems to be doing these deals um whether it's for the horfords of the kembas and of the world knowing that established star players are not going to want to stay very long and i think that they've actually like turned themselves you know i mean memphis is the better example of like you would like to see a team have a young core, but also remain very competitive while they're taking on the Stephen Adams'ism of the world,

whereas Oklahoma is like, yeah, we're just going to be this, like, incredibly weird collection of, like, Suicide Squad international prospects with Shea, and then we're going to tank at the end of the year so that we can get back in the lottery and not, not, you know, deflate the value of our own assets. So I can't tell which one I think is better. I mean, I don't either way, I just don't think either way, like, you're going to get a star to go to one of those. teams. I mean, the Memphis model shows just how difficult this stuff can be, where they hit on jaw. They at least somewhat hit on Jaron Jackson Jr. And they still might end up kind of stuck in the middle where they're having trouble really climbing into the top levels of the Western Conference at some

point. That's where you really do get in trouble, especially if you're one of these smaller market teams. And Memphis is one of the smallest markets in the NBA. I think what they have going that other small markets don't. And Oklahoma City also has this going in their favor is that patience. Is the fact that they're looking at their team and saying, we're willing to take this at a different speed than some of these other franchises might, whereas those other teams are trading for veterans who aren't on their timetable, are making moves. They don't quite line up with where and how their young players are going to be good. They're betting that Jock can be that kind of talent and that they can make up the difference in the draft and make up the difference with some of these moves on the edges.

I think that's an understandable thing for them to do, given where they are, given how good they already are. They just, they need a little bit of help from one of these guys. And we'll have to see if, whether it's, you know, whether it's Jackson or whoever, you know, kind of hits in a much bigger way. Yeah, I mean, I'm fascinated by some of the other smaller market teams that, like I was thinking of when you're talking, is like Charlotte, who, you know, are in a similar situation in so much as, like, they've got this guy in Lamello who could be generationally good, or he could be somewhat of a thrill to watch, but isn't necessarily going to get you. to the Promise Land.

And then they made some really nice picks, like Book Nights Cool. Like, I think that they have a lot of really good young players, whether or not they can, like, resist bringing on the more, like, expensive veterans, like, which I think has been sometimes their Achilles heel is like,

they overestimate where they are and think bringing in 17 Zeller Brothers is going to, like, is going to take them over the top of the mountain. And then Indiana is also in a similar situation, I think, where I like different players on their team, but I don't think that that combination of guys is going to get them

much more than a six seed. Well, in Charlotte, too. I mean, just this morning, reportedly got an extension with Tara Rozier four years for the max, $97 million, which goes to exactly what you're saying, which is teams in this position,

whether they feel like they have to or they just misjudge or whatever it is, they need to pay sometimes to keep these guys, even if it's just because we can't afford to lose Terry Rozier, because we don't have means to replace him as the Charlotte Hornets, you know?

but I mean the Pacers are definitely in that camp they're kind of on the other side of it almost where they've had to start paying their guys they really had to pay big to bring Malcolm Brogden in the door and now you're looking at this and saying where do we go from here how do we turn this into something that's sustainable and maybe

Rick Carlisle makes something more of that than they've had we'll have to wait and see on that but they seem like a team that's poised to make some kind of trade at some point just to make sense of their roster they could try to trade Miles Turner for like two years and therein lies the problem you know it's like you know you might hold on to as many guys as you can and all these young guys that you like and kind of like,

but they don't quite fit together. And then you get stuck in these positions. Or you're a team like the Bulls who opts into this position where you're paying to get so many guys in the door. And their kind of nightmare scenario is this like, we don't make the playoffs, but we're not really good enough to improve. You know, you could see that happening if everything breaks the wrong way. You could also see them being a pretty good, at least regular season team, maybe a decent playoff team we'll have to see. And I think the uncharitable view of the Celtics would probably put them in this category too. Oh, interesting. They're kind of between these first two classes. You know, the optimistic view of the Celtics is they're like the clippers, they're young,

they're flexible. They had this elite talent in Jason Tatum and Jalen Brown. If we're going to look at them a little more pessimistically, you would say they have their guys. They're locked into a certain amount of money. I don't know how they're going to crack the top four or five in the east without a dramatic move. And even if they make a dramatic move, what is the ballast for doing this? that. Like, who is, who is the player who's going to get you, Brad Beal, that's not going to get your team in the process? Yeah. I mean, that, that next free agency class coming up is, is not something that I would, is not something to write home about, right? Like, the next, year's one. And this Beal trade, this mystical Beal trade, this like, the, the,

mystical is the right word. But the lifelong friendship between Tatum and Beal that's supposed to bring, bring Beal to Boston. Look, and I, I'm speaking from a perspective of somebody who's just like, one of these days, Neil Olshea is just going to be like, sure, here's Damien Lillard for the six. I think that you put your eggs in these baskets and you wake up one day and you're the Knicks. You know what I mean? You wake up one day and realize it's been seven years of hoping for a star player to come to your team. And I don't know, I agree with you. Like there is like a glass half empty version of the Celtics that's like these guys can't

score. Dennis Schrooter is your starting point guard on a contract year making much less money than he thought he was going to make. And yeah, like, I don't know. I think that's an interesting place to put Boston. Let's talk a little about Minnesota before we go. So Minnesota is, I think everybody looks at them, and they're like, you're actually not even as good as Memphis.

I think clearly, clearly not as good. Right. But are behaving, like they're the bulls, like they're, like, that they are like making moves to like, ready themselves for the playoffs. I look at the West, I just can't see it. I can't see them getting in there. Unless Finch with an off-season

and Aunt Edwards with an off-season and the continuing maturation of towns or whatever, like, unless there's something there that I don't see, Pat Beverly being like, we're going to, Beverly is the edge that we needed to get. I just don't see it with them. Well, they're behaving like a team that has had one winning season in 16 years.

Yes. And that's the trade-off. If you go the Memphis route and you're kind of reshuffling and rebuilding and trying to get to a certain level of competence and then be patient, that can sustain you for longer. You know, some people will get antsy. Some fans will want you to make trades or fire whoever or trade this guy or whatever. That's fine. But it's just more palatable to be at that level than to be where the wolves have been, which is in some cases dysfunctional, in some cases just bad. This, you know, this and lately injured, I think, has been one of their big problems.

You know, they just need to get their guys on the floor to even see how good they are. So they have a long way to go. Yeah, you know, it's worth noting that Hernden Gomez and Culver both left with a really bad taste in their mouth about the franchise. You know, so Culver, I think just was never getting really inconsistent minutes, although I don't necessarily think his play war in it. And Hernon Gomez had like, I hadn't even heard about this. It's like super weird. Like, he wanted to play in the Olympics. The wolves were like, you're not far enough into your medical rehab with your shoulder to do it.

he thought that they had like kind of an agreement to let him play. And he even was in, I guess, the opening ceremony. And then they were like, you're not supposed to play. And he tried going over Roses's head to, there's a really good article about this in the athletic. But like he basically tried to go straight to Glenn Taylor. And Glenn Taylor was like, I'm not overruling Roses. And he was just like, I want out of here.

I feel like that's the kind of thing that happens when you have a lot of young players, a lot of money on the line, you know, around. And they're not necessarily getting the direct. that they need early in their career. I have no doubt that Finch, Finch seems like a really good coach, and they did show some really cool flashes in the second half of the season

once that leveled out, but not the kind that where you're like, man, save room for the timber wolves and the playing game even. Well, you haven't given him anything to play for yet if you're Wancho Heron-Hurne-Gomez. You know, like, if you're looking at my, I want to play for the national team

or I'm going to come back and play a role for the wolves, the national team is going to outweigh that. As it does, even, you know, even if the wolves were good, there are a lot of guys, especially coming from Europe, who that's their pride is playing for their national team. And when you lower the bar on the other side to say, okay, you're going to come back and maybe if you try really hard

and play really well, you're going to be in the playing tournament, those aren't exactly equivalent, you know, in terms of exercising the costs of those things. I totally understand why Hernan Gomez, who, you know, aside from cornering the Adam Sandler market, and I'm looking forward to seeing his starring role in that, this is kind of where he is at this point in his career, trying to figure out who he is as an NBA player,

trying to figure out where he fits into all this. Maybe he can fit into it more with Memphis than you with with Minnesota. But I think you're right that the wolves for a team that's in their position that's been, you know, a lowly team, a pretty bad team. They just haven't figured out a way to even make sense of the young talent they have yet. That's not a great place to sit. And some of that comes down to injuries. Some of it comes down to redundancy or bad luck or, you know, a lot of things have broken against them.

but they just have so much to sort out before they can become a good team. Pat Beverly feels like he might help in some ways, but maybe he's kind of skipping a step before they get their real issues sorted out. I want to end this podcast in Galaxy Brain Mode, if that's okay. Please.

If you're Gerson Roses and you haven't been good, and you've missed the playoffs for all these years, you've been kind of an NBA punchline for a while, what if you just like go out there and try and get the best deal possible for towns. Like, I saw that they were thinking that there was some stuff around, oh, Patrick Beverly is a perfect addition for this, like a proposed Ben Simmons trade. And I guess there's been some talk about like a three-way deal.

I mean, there's nothing that Minnesota has. Like, DeAngelo Russell and Patrick Beverly is not going to be a Ben Simmons trade package. I think that to the Sixers would rather just go try again with Simmons if that came to that. But I was just kind of looking around and I was like, you know, you got Anthony Edwards. and if you think Anthony Edwards is that guy, like what could you get right now for Towns? Because he's so, I think he's almost been like the NBA's forgotten man. Like he's kind of just been whiling away,

not unlike Kevin Love, putting up great stats on a bad team in Minnesota for years now. And you start to wonder whether or not the page turns a little bit and you're like, is this guy, can this guy actually be a winning player or like an all-MBA caliber player on like a winning team? or is it really only just when it's like 16 people watching him in Minnesota in February? And I was kind of wondering, like, if you really wanted to supercharge that franchise and set it on a new direction, you kind of give up the most prized possession.

It would be such a tough call to make. And, you know, there's the basketball part of that, which is, what are you giving up or what are you getting back for towns that's good and young enough that it's aligning with Edwards, that's going to fit whatever the new vision of your team is? And then there's the human part of it too, which is, you know, like Towns has undergone incredible personal tragedy in recent years probably is more directly affected by COVID than any player in the NBA or at least as much as any player in the NBA. The franchise has, you know, tried to support him through all that. Obviously, you know, there's just a different element to that in saying, you know, over the last couple of years and everything you've gone through, now we're going to flip you somewhere else. Now if Towns wants that, if he wanted out, it's a different conversation. I meant it more in like a kind of like, what if, what if they kind of came together and we're like, let's do, let's do each other a favor here.

Like, this is going to still take another two seasons for us to get good. At which point, I don't, Carl, Carl's got like, what, like two years left, three years left on that extension. He's got a bit left, which is, I mean, that would be, if you're in Minnesota, I think the reason to just keep kind of trying to plug away and figure something out. He has, Towns has so many fans in the league in terms of other teams, other people who think really highly of him, there are certainly the questions that you raise. Like, is this guy really a winning player? Is he really somebody who can fit

in this context, in that context? What kind of defender can he be? What does he really look like on a championship level team? Those are all really valid questions. But trading out of Towns feels like a way to get stuck in that middle ground. You know, Edwards might be that kind of score where he gets you so far, but only so far. Towns,

whatever you may think of him, is a transformational type of player. Now, if you can actually follow through and transform in the way that his talent promises is a different question. But he's the kind of player who, if I were running that team, if I had any kind of input on that team, I would say you hold on to him as long as you possibly can and try to make it work because he feels like exactly the kind of guy who if you trade him, if you sign somewhere in free agency, is going to go on to do some pretty great things

somewhere else. Yeah. I mean, you make really good points. I think I was sort of, for a second, I was just like, I wonder if, because, you know, the Lillard putting himself into the trade market, whether it was surreptitiously or because he actually meant for that to happen and have those trade requests come out or have that like soft trade demand come out. It just made me think a little bit about towns because I was like, would you, wouldn't towns be like almost a, if you could put together a package for towns with Simmons, like wouldn't that be maybe a more modern player to get than Lillard?

Like Lillard and Embed is obviously a really seductive idea for pick a role for all these different things. stretching the floor with a four like that is pretty incredible. And I don't know what it would take to prime loose from Minnesota. I would imagine like a lot of picks too. I don't think Minnesota would be like, yeah, please. Why don't you send us your sort of superstar with flaws? And we'll send you our superstar with flaws.

But I kind of was, I'm waiting for one of these teams to do something really, really out of the box. Well, here's the thing with the wolves and towns. If you're sitting there with him, you have this experience with him. you know kind of where his game is. You've drafted Anthony Edwards, who's been pretty good, and it ultimately has not really meant anything for your franchise yet. You haven't gotten anywhere with that. You traded for DeAngelo Russell, hasn't really moved the needle at all

in terms of where that franchise wants to be. Now you're making these kinds of moves. It's like, okay, well, let's get some veteran help in here. Let's get the Pat Beverly's of the world in the door. We'll see how much that really changes for them. I'm kind of thinking, you know, he'll fill a role. He'll be a nice ad for them. You know, fill some of them.

what, you know, Ricky Rubio was giving or could have given them, you know, if that had panned out in a different way in this latest stay with Minnesota. But he's not, he's not changing that team. He's not elevating them as we've been talking about into like a surefire playoff team or anything like that. And so if you've made all of these categories of moves for talent at different levels and it hasn't done anything for you yet, you do have to start asking those kinds of questions. Like, what do we what do we have to do to become a playoff team here? Yeah, exactly. All right, man. Well, look, we talked about Carl Anthony Towns. the Golden State Warriors, the Boston Celtics with Jalen and Jason.

We talked about all these different teams because that's who these Patrick Beverly trades touch. So it's always interesting. I don't remember a week like this where a guy got traded twice, but it's fascinating when these like $14 million deals, I think, you know, like we were talking before the pod started about like this being the most tradable contract. Is this weird, you know, guys who were 14 with either expiring or maybe one year left. And they have a lot to offer a team in the right situation. but are also incredibly tradable.

And we saw that happen this week with Pat Beverly. Yeah, just useful enough that a team like the wolves would want him and just limited enough that he only makes so much that his salary is just totally movable on the NBA trade market. Rob, thank you so much for joining me this week. Of course. It was nice to, you know, scrap for content with you today, a la Pat Beverly. I feel like we did him proud.

Junkyard Doggett. We'll talk to you guys soon.