Newsletter

I come to you with a trade that is still in the works. Feel free to weigh in.

Steven is looking to swap Jalen Williams for Will’s Killian Hayes.

Now on the surface, this looks a simple trade. Two guys getting serious minutes and playing way better than anyone thought they would. Will gets a solid 2 guard with potential on a team that has absolutely no qualms playing rookies big minutes; Steven gets one of the surprise point guards of the season who’s taken over in Cade’s absence. But let’s look deeper.

Williams has been starting spottily for a month or so for one of the most erratic teams in the league. No team has as fluid a system with their G League affiliate like the Thunder. They’ll just throw a man out into a real-life NBA game who people who do this for a living don’t recognize. Which makes Williams’ minutes both realistic and tentative. He’s got a good month of eligibility left, bare minimum (supposing he becomes a full-time starter), so cashing in on him might be the right move. But he also might float between starting and coming off the bench all year the same way he (and everyone else on this ludicrous team) has been and give you plenty of quality. It’s impossible to tell.

Hayes is in a similar boat. He’s been starting since Cade went down, which justifies his position in our league. And somehow he’s remembered how to shoot. He’s undisputedly the better player in this trade, actually, just look at his numbers. But, there are rumors that Cade might get season-ending surgery, which would push Killian permanently into the starting lineup. For parity, he would also get a month of eligibility on good faith if this happens, but he’d be what we’ll call a diminishing asset. Time to offload? Hmm.

So, we have two good players who might end up being perfectly usable for the rest of the year, but also might expire in a month. One’s a rookie, and you can’t really trust a teenager to be consistent. The other’s shown us multiple years of the yips. Are Will and Steven just swapping problems? Time will tell.

Now, on to more important stuff. Here we have a segment called “Things I Don’t Understand.”

I don’t understand…

·      How Gary Trent Jr’s been coming off the bench for five games and I haven’t noticed. This is all I do. It’s embarrassing. Shouts out Steven for picking him up

·      Reggie Bullock’s hairstyle. It’s worse every time I see it. Worst hair in the league? It’s him or Dillon Brooks for me

·      How Atlanta Stempien can be 0-7. Go look at that team. It’s genuinely impressive that after flubbing the draft, Kenny managed to pull together that much talent. Bogdan AND Ziaire coming back is gonna turn things around, though. And he’s had the second most points scored against him this season, so that’s not likely to continue. Get your licks in now

·      How Obi Toppin is this bad. I mean he only dunks and Thibs plays him like 15 minutes a night, so I know how he’s this bad. But it’s crazy to me that he’s not more involved in their team. He’s someone to keep an eye on in the long term now that Cody’s dropped him

·      What the fuck Isaac’s doing with Zach Collins. He picks him up and it feels smart because Poeltl’s out. Then he tries to trade him immediately. Then he drops him for Luke Kennard (okay, a good move). Then he drops Kennard for guess who? Motherfucking Zach Collins. Confounding

·      Why the Mavs went out and got Kemba Walker. Old Man Team is having a real moral conundrum. Kemba is precisely who this team was made to go out and get. But we know for a fact that he’ll hardly play and he’ll get hurt again or rest a ton or just not be good anymore. It’s tough

Finally, let’s wrap with some Cuspers. These are the guys that are still eligible for our league but we might need to have a conversation about soon

·      Tim Hardaway Jr. – They benched Bullock and THJ’s back in the starting lineup. It hasn’t been happening for super long, but pretty soon if it keeps up we’ll have to talk

·      Alperen Sengun – Fully a starter now, actually. Not a cusper. Once Kenny wins a game he’s gotta go

·      Bojan Bogdanovic – Same thing. This man’s a real-deal starter now

·      Jeremiah Robinson-Earl – Just like Jalen Williams, it’s impossible to tell what the Thunder are up to. He starts enough to bring his eligibility into question, but they rotate enough to keep him okay

·      Poku – Just read JRE’s paragraph again

·      Bol Bol – This wonderful bastard is certainly a starter, but the Magic are unbelievably injured still, so it might never come to a head

·      Deanthony Melton – Maxey’s injury is “without a timetable for return,” which is hardly promising for one of my best guys