I’m trying to reset the market. I’m making it my personal mission to shift the league's thinking on the value of players. My theory is fairly straightforward.
Good teams get 6 or 7 good years out of a good player, then at the end of his prime, ship him out for another good player that they can get 6 or 7 good years out of; then they rinse and repeat.
Bad teams continually ship out rookie contracts for 1 or 2 years of old below-prime players. On occasion (which I will get into in part 2), this might be a good idea, but if you are constantly doing it, it will leave you near the bottom of the food chain more often than not. (This is often called “going all-in,” and there is a significant amount of pressure to do this.) Cashing in rookie contracts is fine, but not for equal talent on max contract deals at the end of their career. Assets should be valued over the life of the assets, not just their current value.
While I’d like to see the league shift to moving rookies of equal potential for players at the beginning or mid of their primes, I’m not holding my breath.
This is not a hard and fast rule for me. I did like the trade of past-prime Paolo Banchero for rookie Henry Widener, but only because Henry Widener will never be as good as Paolo Banchero. I hope the league starts moving toward trading like this; lesser rookies for better but older past-prime players. (If in their primes they would be as good as one another, I would not like this trade.)
(I definitely would have tried to make a trade like this except I have way too many SGs and SFs, and I can’t see Paolo Banchero playing any other position.)
But if you think Henry Widener, regardless of contract, is straight up better than Candace Parker, please trade with me more often.
