Viola! New York is suddenly a team. Courtney Lee can step in and make life easier for basically every guard currently on the team. Toney Douglas gets to stop masquerading around as a shooting guard and focus on becoming a competent backup point guard. Landry Fields can visit the bench every once in a while (33.7 minutes minutes a game over the last ten). Baron Davis can continue to deceive the national media into believing he is actually working towards getting back into game playing shape for at least two extra months, and Mike Bibby can quietly retire! Everybody wins. All that, and Courtney Lee isn’t even the best player in the trade.
Scola could realistically step in and put up 85% of Stoudemire’s offensive output, and wouldn’t represent much of a change defensively (especially with Chandler playing weak-side defensive, covering up a fair portion of the errors either way). However, he has exactly zero of the star power.
Jordan Hill and Goran Dragic could also each step in as key role players; Hill as an extra big man to complement (supplant?) the current backups, Josh Harrellson and Jared Jeffries and Dragic as the spark-plug scoring point guard, a position that has seen it’s value increase tremendously over the last few years (See: J.J. Barea’s recently inked four year $19 million dollar contract).Houston finally gets to swap out some of their small change in for a dollar bill, something Daryl Morey has been working towards for more than a year (and would have accomplished this off-season if not for the newly invented Stern Veto). Though on the surface it might not appear to be a great fit, upon closer examination it makes quite a bit of sense.Yes the team just drafted Patrick Patterson, a power forward with sky-high expectations. And yes, they just signed Samuel Dalembert to a two year deal, and he surely expects to start. But Patterson is already in the mindset of coming off the bench (and rightfully so, he clearly needs time to develop)…couldn’t a lineup of Kyle Lowry – Kevin Martin – Chandler Parsons – Amare Stoudemire – Samuel Dalembert compete out west? Look at it again, but this time keep in mind that Kyle Lowry became a top-10 point guard while none of us were paying attention. Then consider that the second team would be Johnny Flynn – Chase Budinger – Marcus Morris – Patrick Patterson – Hasheem Thabeet. Everyone likes to emphasize the importance of depth during the shortened season…wouldn’t that be one of the strongest benches in the NBA?
