Maybe they didn't want to wait for this year's trading deadline because of injury risk. Jason was just coming back from knee surgery, so there's no telling if that had anything to do with his immediate trade.

But, all feelings set aside, I am happy we made the trade. Wright very well seems like he's going to be one hell of a player for us.

Assuming that a deal will be there at the trade deadline is a risky maneuver.  It may, or it may not.  The buyers cannot be identified as readily and in season, there are far, far fewer teams under the cap to deal with.  This is an important point if the move is to shed salary.  It's not like any team can just take him off our hands without sending something back.  Most teams are capped during the season.  Some get under the cap for periods during the summer, not many, but more than will be under at the trade deadline.  The deadline deal almost guarantees that his salary (with the equivalent in trade coming back and thus being figured into tax consideration) counts against the lux tax for the season.  That's risky and expensive for a borderline playoff team.  It also means shopping with teams with expiring contracts and may mean a more complicated deal where we take an expiring contract and a lesser, longer term deal.  It's possible that we wouldn't be able to shed all of his salary or would have to involve other players to make things work.  

Charlotte was an ideal trade partner for dumping salary because we didn't have to bring anything back for them to be able to take on Richardson. Furthermore, we knew their draft position at the time the deal was agreed to rather than trading for a pick of uncertain status in an upcoming draft.

The move was a financial decision probably based on both the short term-stay under the tax this year and longer term-be able to pay Biedrins and/or Monta in a year combined with the general feeling that, as good as Richardson was, he plays a position that is regarded as easier to fill.  Whether this reasoning is correct or not, it did appear that they would have the option of filling his minutes at the 2 and 3 with guys under contract (Jackson or Monta), guys who would were restricted free agents (Pietrus) or available on the cheap (Azubuike), or through the draft (Belinelli).  Obviously, not all of these options are necessarily going to be as good as Richardson, but I suspect the feeling was that as long as they were already committed to Jackson and Monta for a year or more at less than what Richardson made, testing these guys as a 5-headed off-guard combination and seeing if they could turn Richardson into future value made more sense than keeping Richardson at considerable financial cost short and long term.

That communication gaffe thing seemed to me like a columnist with shoddy information taking it as fact.

This move is and always has been about increasing financial flexibility. You're right, the TPE is just something that exists but isn't on the books - but SHOULD a player become available, the team MAY have the means to pick him up. The intention of the deal was to give the team options and the means to pursue those options.

If we are to assume that the teams goal is to reach the playoffs this year, the J-Rich trade does not make sense other than it was a salary dump. I don't understand why we are all so concerned with staying out of the luxury tax. Cohan will make more than what he would have paid with this team, even more if we still had Richardson (Merchandise sales.)
To say that keeping Richardson would have meant we would have to sign some scrubs on the bench is a little confusing. Isn't that what we ended up doing anyway? Croshere, Hudson and Mbenga aren't exactly your super subs. None of them are in are 8 man rotation.
I think we should have kept Richardson for one more season at the very least and then re-evaluate what we needed to do. Wright will be a nice player for the future but we should have been more worried about right now.

Boston regardless.  

let's bring up this topic and argue about whether cohan is cheap or not EVERY WEEK!

wait

the world is round right?

This was just about opening up options for future moves. Was anyone going to be able to predict what specifically that move was? No, but the ABILITY to make a move is what was important.

Luxury tax or not, the Warriors wante FLEXIBILITY. That's been the case since the trade was made several months ago.

we all need to think big picture here. Does this trade increase our likely hood to resign AB, Monta and Baron? Can we make trades to improve our team? Will it make us potential 50+ game winners?

We can't answer any of these questions now, but i'm a patient person, i can wait.

Um, if the Warriors had to pay the luxury tax, ultimately that bill is passed to the fans. Higher ticket and merchandise prices are inevitable because that's the only changeable revenue stream for the team. The TV deal has been in place for a while and they're not going to get more from FSN for now and other than corporate sponsorship, which the team has been good with (Norton, Southwest, etc.), there's no other way to make money.

The idea that this is "Cohan's money" is absolutely ridiculous. Cohan makes his money off of you. He's in business and thriving because he makes money off of you.

I wouldn't cry over his spilt milke, but I'll certainly cry over yours. Unless, of course, you're a millionaire. In which case, wanna hook it up?

I'm truly amazed at some of the comments posted.

First of all, being a good crafty GM of a successful franchise in this league does not go hand-in-hand with throwing absurd, over-priced contracts at just any player (especially a replaceable one) who has shown flashes of being above average and not give a damn about the salary cap nor the luxury tax.  I'm sorry, the NBA has these things called rules and regulations.  This would make for a nice little read for many of us: http://members.cox.net/lmcoon/salarycap.htm
This isn't the MLB, you can't just throw money around everywhere and excpect to not face the consequences of it.

You want to know why the Warriors were so bad for so long? It wasn't because of a "cheap owner", it was because of the recklessness and carefree big spending on the contract signings of Adonal Foyle, Troy Murphy, and Mike Dunleavy; contracts that still indirectly and directly financially cripple our ability (via the rules of the NBA salary cap!) to get more talent on our team to this very day.

The main purpose of my diary was to justify that Mullin had to do what he had to do in order to make sure that the recent years of horrible basketball (along with the financial bad financial decisions that caused them) don't ever happen again in the near future.  You could see it on the sad look on his face when he was interviewed when the JRich trade went down; he wasn't happy, it wasn't something he wanted to do, it was something he had to do.

People should read the link I posted that discusses the salary cap and the luxury tax, think it over for a few minutes.. and if you still think JRich's salary dump was such a horrible basketball move than I suggest that you never ever even think about handling your own finances.

Look at it this way..

The luxury tax is not just there to keep teams from over-spending and making the playing field unfair.

I believe the another reason for the luxury tax is it's there to save certain GM's from their own stupidity.  The Luxury Tax is like the barbed wire past the fence that is the Salary Cap that warns GM's "No you idiot you've gone too far, you're going to get yourself hurt!"

I'm quite sure the NBA doesn't want bad teams in the NBA, bad basketball = bad ratings = less money.  But the Knicks are a prime example of what happens when you don't read the warning on the barbed wire fence.  They're deep into the luxury tax territory, with no good young talent, not many attractive trading chips, and all they can ever hope to do is shuffler around their bad contracts (Steve Francis) for other teams' bad contracts (Zach Randolph) and hope for the best.  They're stuck with what they have and it's their management's fault for the contracts they handed out.  And they're going to pay for it until the horrible contracts they handed out expire.