screw the draft picks route, get good players

[alexftbl8181 [enjin:6648741]]

Trading Love for a package based around draft picks are always a distater. Draft picks is too much on gambling that they might be great players. They are just as easily wind up being busts. Screw getting cap space relief too. There is no reason for a team like the Wolves to have a ton of cap space. Your not getting a superstar player to sign here. You have to overpay for guys, then fans complain that they are overpaid, then try to trade them to get more cap space to start the cycle over again.

The only trade out there that I would feel comfortable with is a Love/Martin for Barnes/Lee/Klay and a 1st round pick.

[Q12543 [enjin:6621299]]

Yeah, I'm kind of leaning that way too. Lee/Klay makes sense for a lot of reasons. I'm not sure what you see in Barnes other than he's still fairly young. He's been pretty mediocre so far and would only add to our massive glut of SFs (Brewer, Budinger, Mbah Moute, and Shabazz). Do we really need another mediocre small forward?

Klay on the other hand would be a nice upgrade at SG and allow Martin to strengthen the offensive punch coming off our bench. It also gives us a career 40%+ 3-point shooter, something we desperately need. Lee is a poor man's version of Love, but still pretty darn good. Lee + Klay doesn't fully replace Love, but it isn't that far off, plus it balances out our roster. Throw in another pick or two and it's probably the least bad end result out of a pretty shitty situation.

[mjs34]

I don't want Barnes, but I do want Green along with Thompson, and if we need to take Lee I am Ok with that. A future first would seal it for me.

[Camden [enjin:6601484]]

Lee/Thompson/Green/1st is a done deal for me too IF there's no chance we can trade Love to get a pick for Wiggins/Parker.

[SameOldNudityDrew]

It's tempting to go for the pick, especially if it's in this draft and if you can get a top two pick and get Parker or Wiggins. You can put your hopes into young guys becoming superstars, and totally remaking your team. I think this is what's behind the tanking mentality that teams have had recently, and even I've argued in favor of this, that if you can't get to be great, it's best to get really bad to get picks and cap space and rebuild.

But the more I look at it, the more I think that's the wrong approach, and that your suggestion Alex, makes more sense. I think teams overvalue draft picks, and they are most overvalued at this time of year. I also think they overvalue cap space, when really only a few lucky teams are able to use cap space to really land the best free agents. I read a study recently (sorry, no link) that showed that mediocre teams that essentially blow it up and start over with picks and cap space almost always do worse than mediocre teams that try to keep going with the good veteran players they have, even when a good player leaves. Those teams not only are (obviously) quicker to make the playoffs, they actually usually go further in the playoffs than those "blow it up and start over" teams that eventually do make the playoffs.

As such, with a team that already does have a good amount of talent locked into contracts for the next few years and was a .500 team in the tough Western conference, if we're going to lose Love, we should just get the best players we can get for him that fit what we're doing and move forward.

With a new coach, Love gone (and with him the whining and speculation that always seemed to follow him), and a few new players, we would be a different, but still talented team next year. One poised to make a playoff push? It's possible. If we got 2 or 3 good, solid players for Love and plugged them into this roster, who knows?

I didn't read all of Rubio's interview, but I heard snippets, and what he was suggesting seems to have been the truth. Kevin Love has been the leader of this team for a few years now, and we have not only not won, but we don't seem to have a very good team culture and rumors about his leaving always seemed to follow him and add to uncertainty. In this respect, Love is more like Carmelo than Durant (or Noah, recently) in terms of their impact on their teams as a leader. That's probably not totally fair. Chris Paul is one of the best team leaders out there and he basically did the same thing to New Orleans. But in terms of his impact on the team as a leader on the floor, I think Kevin has not measured up to his stats. People have usually pointed (fairly) to Love's defense as his biggest weakness, but I'd say his leadership has been right up there. If he goes to a team with another star or two (like Rose and Noah in Chicago, Curry in San Fran, or Kobe in LA), I don't think it'll be as big a deal. But as "the man," he couldn't handle it. In that regard, I actually think now is a decent time to trade him (it's just a shame Kahn let this happen two years earlier than he needed to, because we'd have had a TON more leverage if we had Love locked up for 3 more years rather than just 1).

[bleedspeed]

I would go for Love/Budinger for Thompson/Lee/Barnes. Plus a 2016 1st.