Trade JR to the Nets for Tony Battie and Courtney Lee
by ben_h on Feb 17, 2010 2:19 AM MST
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The Nuggets are not going to be able to win a championship with JR Smith playing a significant role on the team. He needs to mature before he will be a contributor on a championship team and the Nuggets would be better served by trading him for a big man, a solid role player, and salary cap relief next year than they would be by keeping him on the team.
This is the trade (or some variant of it) that I absolutely want to see- JR and Malik Allen to the Nets for Tony Battie and Courtney Lee:
http://games.espn.go.com/nba/tradeMachine?tradeId=yl5twwd
The Nuggets get two quality role players and do not lose anything on the court by giving up JR. The Nets get a bonafide scorer in JR and the chance to avoid becoming the worst team in NBA history. They are in full salary dump mode so they can try to sign two guys to max contracts this summer and while JR would cost the Nets ~$4.8mil more next year than Courtney Lee, setting the NBA single season record for losses is not a way to attract premier free agents. Besides, if the Nets still want to cut salary, JR and his contract are still going to be a wanted commodity and they could move him before/during when they start trying to sign free agents. This seems like a win-win trade for both teams and I really hope that the Nuggets could find a way to get it done.
That's the gist of the post- the rest of it here is just my reasoning for the trade that you don't need to read if it's tl;dr.
As a side note I've been reading Denver Stiffs for a long time but I haven't posted until now because I only recently discovered the magic of the ESPN trade machine and this particular trade.
The primary motivation for this trade is that -even as well as he has played recently- having JR on our team right now is not going to help us win a NBA title. The dude has the tools to be an All Star but he doesn't have the mental toughness to be an All Star OR even to be a solid role player right now. He's still young and he can work on his mental game but I don't see him learning championship-level toughness on this Denver Nuggets team before his contract is up at the end of next season.
The Nuggets do not need JR to win the title. Ty Lawson can do most of the things JR did last year that made him valuable in the Nuggets Western Conference Finals run. While Ty doesn't have JR's offensive polish (can you call it polish?) to create his own shot consistently and he doesn't finish as well as JR does I think the Nuggets have the offensive firepower to win games without JR's 15 points/game now that Carmelo is back. JR was suspended for the first few games of the season and the Nuggets did well without him until they got worn down from only having 7 guys who could give them quality minutes
Courtney Lee would replace JR in the rotation and I honestly think he'd be a more useful piece on a Nuggets championship team than JR. Last year in the playoffs as a rookie, Lee played with composure and was a solid role player on the Orlando team that went to the Finals. His game is really similar to Arron Afflalo's: he's got the same desire to play D, same ability to knock down the corner 3, and same solid basketball IQ. Getting Courtney Lee would seriously be like cloning Afflalo and I think having two Afflalo's would be a good thing.
Tony Battie is an experienced big man who is comfortable coming off the bench and he'd be a legit 4th big on the team. He could give the Nugs 10+ minutes per game of solid D and rebounding whenever we need it and he even knocks down 70% of his free throws.
The last thing the Nuggets gain with this trade is that Battie's contract comes off the books next year. This year the Nuggets are above the tax line by ~$5.4mil and that's gonna cost them $5.4mil in tax PLUS ~$4.5mil in money that they would have gotten if they were under the tax. Take a look here - that all adds up to ~$10mil that the Nuggets organization is just gonna have to go without this year. But we'd be in a better place next year if we had Battie's expiring contract instead JR's. The salary cap+luxury tax is expected to drop and as Andrew pointed out in the KMart-for-Shaq post, the Nuggets do not have any salary cap wiggle room next season. Trading JR for an expiring contract and a useful piece could be a boost for the Nuggets in the future as well as the present.
Plus I think Kiki still owes the Nuggets for including 3 (three!?!?) first-rounders in the Kenyon sign-and-trade.
Write respectfully of your SB Nation community and yourself.
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Well...
This is, as far as I can tell, a salary dump. You say that the Nuggets can replace JR and Tacos with Lee and Battie while still maintaining championship hopes, but I highly doubt that. Here’s why.
To start with, Tony Battie. He’s terrible. He’s played in — get this — 15 games for the awful, awful Nets. His FG% is 35%. Defensively he is nothing special. He’s a big body, and that’s about it. Kinda like an older, worse version of Stone Hands. Playing 10 minutes a game for us, he’d average less than 2 rebounds. In short — no thanks to Battie, at this stage of his career, he is a garbage time player (not one you’d give meaningful minutes to). You’d be better sticking Malik Tacos there, at least he can defend decently.
On to Courtney Lee. He is a decent option for the future as a role player off the bench. For all we know he might return to Orlando form and become an excellent defender as well. However, would you really be content with him as your backup shooting guard? Sure he can knock down the 3 and spot up for jumpers, but can he penetrate and play off the pick and roll as well as JR? That remains to be seen.
This is a poor trade in my opinion because it really doesn’t give us a ton of hope for this year. While the Nuggets are a longshot to win a title in ’10, they at least have a shot. By making this trade, you are giving up on JR (despite his recent string of solid games) for a low-risk, low-reward guard and an expiring. That does not make the team better. Best case scenario, it moves the team sideways. Most likely it will make the team worse.
I wish I were optimistic about the Nuggets winning a championship with JR
… but I’m not.
Do you trust as one of the 5 guys on the court at the end of the game? Do you trust he’ll make the extra pass that gets the easy bucket? Do you trust that he won’t force a bad pass to Nene out of a pick and roll? Do you trust that he won’t hang his head after he clangs a jumper and then lets his man beat him down the court for an easy layup? The only way he helps us is if he’s A) on fire or B) has his head in the game and plays defense. I wish I could be optimistic about those things happening every single game or even 75% of the time but that hasn’t been the case this season and it was not the case last season. Championship teams do not have a guy who gets distracted, a guy who can get his head out of the game during crunch time as one of their top-5 guys. In fact, I can’t think of a team that has won the title in the past 20 years that has had a guy with a marginal basketball IQ on the floor at the end of games.
I am giving up on JR maturing as a member of the Nuggets. It took Chauncey a while to mature and he actually went to college. He was a “talented journeyman” with a rep for questionable shot selection until he got to Detroit in the right situation to become a leader on the right team. It’s not going to happen to JR here- this team is not constructed to push him to become a solid NBA player while also winning an NBA title.
Before the season started, JR worked out with Chauncey for like 3-4 weeks after he got out of jail. Given the way that he played last season and given the quality time with Chauncey both on and off the court, I was very optimistic that the light would come on in his head during this season but it has not happened yet and I don’t think it will happen while he is under contract with the Nuggets. I do not think we are going to see JR become “good JR” all the time on the Nuggets and I am sad about it because he works his butt off in the games when he’s focused and he’s sooooo freakin’ close to being awesome. But it’s not gonna happen and we need to trade him for a player who will help us win a title.
I’m definitely open to suggestions on the details of the trade but would you agree that if we traded JR for a quality role guy who could play a solid 20 minutes each game and a salary dump that this Nuggets team would be better off both this year and next year?
As for the players in this trade, Malik Allen has been playing pretty well and after thinking about it, maybe he’s got what it takes to bang down low with Gasol/Bynum for 10 minutes per game and give Nene/Kmart/Birdman a breather. I haven’t really seen him get after rebounds with ferocity which is something I’d like to see from the Nuggets 4th big man but on a whole, I’m OK with Allen in that spot. El Busto probably wouldn’t be any better than Tacos in any case. I don’t know if it’s possible but it would be the best situation if we could send straight cash to the Nets as the ‘second player to make salaries match up’ part of the deal instead of Allen. I’m not sure if that’s ok under the trading rules but I’ll poke around and see.
I’m very optimistic that Courtney Lee will return to form as he continues his return from injury and that he would be a solid role player and AAA clone. Do we need our backup SG to penetrate? I do like how JR runs the pick and roll but do we really need that from our backup SG? This is a team with Carmelo, Chauncey, Nene, and Ty and if you take any two of them, they can handle running the offense against another team’s 2nd unit. The Nuggets do not need JR’s scoring and that is the reason that I’m fine with Courtney Lee as the backup SG.
Hollinger says that the trade is worth +3 wins for the Nuggets. Lee is probably rated a little too highly by PER which skews it a little bit but I think that his +3 is still indicative of this trade being good for the Nuggets.
The Nets have been playing this season for John Wall and the free agents of 2010. There are still players of value on that team even though they’re chasing the worst NBA record ever.
Nah I'll pass on this deal too
There’s a reason why NJ hs onl won like 4 games this year.
"Don't chase the money, chase the dream"
the ONLY way JR goes to NJ
Is if Lopez is coming back…. and that ain’t happening so….
by InboundingLobPass on Feb 17, 2010 3:48 PM MST reply actions
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