Trade Day: In Review

This year marked a more exciting than usual, but still not as exciting as some hoped, trading deadline. Nevertheless, some exciting things happened. Keeping with this blog's storied tradition, I thought I would examine the day through the solipsistic lens of what it means for Jazz fans. First of all, it seems the Knicks cleared house, getting rid of (in rough order of importance) Nate Robinson, Darko Milicic, Cash, Jordan Hill, and Jared Jeffries. And acquiring in their stead Tracy Mcgrady, Edie House, J.R. Giddens, Bill Walker, and Brian Cardinal. This is important because the NBA trade rules allow New York to dump all the money they've splurged on nobodies (see above list) all at once when McGrady's (and others') contract runs out this summer. That'll leave them with a huge amount of money to land LeBron, Dwayne Wade, or Chris Bosh or maybe even two of those dudes (more on that below). But all that future of basketball in New York stuff aside, this is good news for the Jazz. It looks like New York has completely and utterly given up on this season and is now willing to take a knee, muddle its way through till the end, and recoup during the off-season. That will rise the value of their first round draft pick, which the Jazz own.

And, speaking of the Jazz, they had a spirited day of talks with Miami. The Heat front office came at them with a crazy-desperate-last-minute, non-stop list of names for a possible Boozer deal. The Jazz held their ground, as they have all season, even when Chalmers and Beasley were added to sweeten the deal. What this tells me is that the Jazz think they've got this season locked enough that they can attract real talent next year on the strength of their green jerseys and Deron, Don. It also tells me that Miami is seriously and severely worried that D-WADE! will leave them if they can't acquire anyone whose presence would put the heat in serious contention (I write Dwayne's nick-name like that because it's the least respect I can show him, his normal, terrible nickname being not worthy of his skill). And while the ship has not yet sailed on that (they might sign Stoudemire, whose Suns turned them down today and yesterday, in the off-season). It's looking screamingly likely that the Heat's management are too incompetent to hold onto their golden god. I see him in NY along with Bosh (after my dream finals of Nuggets vs. Cavaliers, I see both LeBron and Anthony sticking with the teams that brought them this far [oh shit, they're playing as I type and are tied 102 -102!!!!]).

The Jazz also traded my favorite puppy-dog/explosive dunker Ronnie Brewer for some garbage Memphis pick and cap-space relief, so we'll see how I feel in a few days. But as of right now I'm cautiously optimistic that this was a pretty good day for the Jazz. Our show runners seem to know what's up, New York is conspiring to help us, and while nothing happened to really shake up the West (possibly sinking our foes), such a shake-up might have spelled our doom. We know where we fit in this West, and that's as the third best team. We can beat all of these teams with the dual exceptions of Denver and LA. Nothing about Trade Day drastically changed that.