key to recent success

never heard of him?

Who is this excellent center of whom you speak?

;)

Take our first round pick and go to the playoffs next year(ducking the stones as I type)

But it could happen.

yep, you don’t trade a key player from a team who just made the playoffs for the first time after only playing about 1/3 of a season together to sign a skinny rookie who doesn’t provide the interior size deficit that knocked you out of the second round. You keep the experienced players and add what you really needed.

Suppose that skinny but promising looking rookie had been Joakim Noah?

What about exploring a trade for an established big that could contribute immedeatly?
With all that redundant talent, you think we could have found a willing trade partner with someone we wanted more than a skinny (but promising-looking) rookie?

Well, that’s an interesting question. For all the clamoring people do these days for want of a low post game, I feel like there’s more than a bit of ex-post-facto rationalization going on here, but …

I don’t think it’s at all clear that Wright wasn’t ready to contribute right away. His TS%, that year, was .580. His rebounding rate was the best its been in his entire career. He didn’t appear to have the rookie fouling problem that a lot of young bigs have.

I’m not sure it’s fair to say he wasn’t ready to contribute that season. Now, Nelson didn’t give him a chance, true, but one has to wonder how much of that was Wright and how much was Nelson. (Wright, it must be said, was not a Nellie-skillset kind of big, and it seems unlikely that he would have been comfortable running Wright and Biedrins out there at the same time in the best of circumstances).

Furthermore, trading small-for-big you’ve got to give something up. You’re not going to trade an established two-guard good enough to be a starter on a marginal playoff team for an established big man good enough to be a starter on a marginal playoff team.

Also, you’ve got to look one move deeper. You look at that team and ask yourself, “Is this built for the long hall? Are we a championship contender as currently constructed?” I think it’s clear the answer to that was no. Therefore, I think it’s a perfectly reasonable to trade old-for-young, particularly if you’re getting a player who might turn out to be a difference-maker. (Again – no ex post facto logic here. Wright was seen as having the second-best low post game in college, after the #1 pick.) In addition to having the potential to help us right away, this was a trade geared towards getting us deeper into the playoffs and building our young core for the future, which, when you’re talking about a marginal playoff team, is a perfectly reasonable choice.

Lastly, it really doesn’t seem like the team missed JRich at all on the floor that year. I think it’s telling that we got very little from Wright and still improved (although, of course, we hadn’t had our core the whole year the previous season, so it’s hard to say how much better we actually were despite the gains in the win column). But do you remember watching the team and feeling like JRich was a missing piece, the absence of which was holding us back? Remember, the year before JRich’s TS% had been .512, which is pretty awful. He looked a lot like a player who was on a pretty serious downslope. His late career resurgence playing with Nash makes it easy to forget that, at the time, there were a lot of people thinking he might be getting close to being done.