Embiid, the Kings Trade and the NBA's Stupid Moratorium

The news that Joel Embiid will "probably" be out for the season is yet another stomach punch in the now-excruciating Sam Hinkie rebuild.

Hinkie supporters have always pinned their hopes to Embiid and his potential. And, surely, we all saw that potential. But the kid never even finished a season of college basketball and will now be out for two straight seasons (more if you count the missed time at Kansas). To say that this guy is a foundational piece is to build your foundation on a really shaky foot.

I hate to say that I can't be optimistic about this. As much as Hinkie preaches "patience" and "process" what he did in the 2014 Draft is inexcusable. He nearly broke the professional sporting world's losing-streak record to grab the 3rd pick in that draft and decided to double down on injured centers. Every fantasy owner knows that you don't want to bet on too many injured guys...they tend to get REINJURED. They also tend to stay out longer than you hoped and produce less than you hoped. Noel was a nice get. Saric may be too. But how do you destroy your team and then use your two first rounders on guys that won't play for AT LEAST TWO YEARS??? Then, you go and trade your starting PG in the hopes of showcasing a guy you scouted, Isaiah Canaan, who by all accounts is not better than fringe NBA journeyman Ish Smith.

It seems that Hinkie's words post-Draft were very telling. The guy whose followers praise for his "best player available" strategy said: "I hope we would have" when asked if he would've still taken Okafor if Embiid weren't injured. Okafor was probably the best player available, but Hinkie knew this was major. He put out a freakin' press release about it. 

He is actually showing signs of desperation. Papering over the Embiid debacle with talk of seeing every doctor in the world (whatever). As if doctors visits will somehow translate to championship rings. Going to see if Dario Saric can somehow wriggle out of his Euro contract (he couldn't). Giving interviews! And talking about his process and plan. Releasing the Embiid news over a lazy weekend and trying to package the news with the Stauskas trade. 

The OKC rebuild everyone wants was predicated on the Blazers taking Oden and the Thunder taking Durant. Doug Collins' downfall came when he took Evan Turner over Derrick Favors and Demarcus Cousins--and then traded Iguodala and Vucevic for Andrew Bynum to try to cover that mistake. In 2014, Wiggins went to Minnesota (via Cleveland) and Embiid (that year's Bowie/Okafor) went to Philly. In 2015, Hinkie finally went for a more sure thing taking Okafor.

But it's one step forward two steps back with this rebuild. In year THREE, the teams starting point guard will either be a wild Tony Wroten, the unsigned Ish Smith, or a tiny guy (Canaan or Pierre Jackson). The starting two will probably be Stauskas (or Hollis Thompson). Robert Covington will be the three. The team is rejoicing over the picks it got from Sacto but Sacramento, a perennial bottom dweller, had no need for Carl Landry, Jason Thompson or Stauskas and who knows what will come of all the pick swaps?

The Sixers put out a This Starts Now marketing campaign just before the trade deadline this year with a pic of Embiid, Noel and MCW. Guess what? Only one of those guys actually plays for this team. Embiid is the anti-Iverson: he only practices, never plays games. MCW is gone. Noel and Okafor provide some hope but how is the team's roster so threadbare going into year three of the Hinkie remodel. 

Yes, LUCK plays a part but luck is what Hinkie has based this rebuild on. The luck of the draw. The luck of the lottery. The luck of drafting the right 19 year old player. 

Let's not pretend that Embiid is an established Hakeem Olajuwon sitting on the bench. By the time he plays he'll be rusty and behind the developmental curve. Perhaps his star will emerge eventually but while we wait, Rudy Gobert solidifies the Jazz bench, Giannis Antetokounmpo looks like a stud, Elfrid Payton throws lobs to Aaron Gordon. The Sixers passed on all of these players. Let's think about that next time Hinkie is lionized as a hero just for gathering potential.

2016 will surely be a big year now with Saric, maybe-Embiid, and four firsts probably joining the roster. So in Year Four potentially this team will be a couple years behind Boston and Orlando, and a couple more years behind Utah and Minnesota. Playoffs in Year Six? Who the hell knows?

In other news:

• The Embiid debacle is a bitter pill to swallow any way you cut it, but the trade with the Kings was great. Carl Landry is not very useful to a team that has Furkhan Aldemir, Jerami Grant and Arsalan Kazemi. But Jason Thompson is a decent player who unlike Jason Richardson can ball some in addition to mentoring. The Sixers wanted Nic Stauskas and now they got him. That's a nice reset of the 2014 Draft and hopefully the kid can add some much, much, much needed shooting (just watched them play LA Lakers in summer league and Sixers have no shooters!). The 2018 pick (unprotected in 2019 and on) will be nice whenever it arrives and the pick swaps may or may not have value, they're like added fuel to the lottery. On the pick swaps: Sixers don't get them if Kings are out of the top 10 since Kings owe Bulls their pick in that case. I think the Sixers will be worse than the Kings this year, so perhaps next year the swaps go into effect. A great trade overall. Ultimate value will be predicated on the play of Stauskas and Thompson and whatever the swaps and picks become. On the downside: I know everyone is pillorying the Kings over this but, from their perspective, they could say that they gave a pick and some guys they don't want/need for A LOT of cap room that they used on some decent guys (Belinelli, Rondo, and Koufos). If Stauskas and the pick swaps don't amount to much, then perhaps the Kings weren't so nuts after all. Either way, a great get for the Sixers though I'll reserve judgment until I see how good Sauce Castillo can be on the court (he only averaged 4.4ppg on a bad Kings team).
• The NBA moratorium on free agent signing where everyone comes to verbal agreements has got to go! The DeAndre Jordan saga, funny as it was, is just one highlight. More important I think were the Kings and Suns salary dump trades that were done to free up cap space even though neither team knew who they would or could sign or even how much cap room they would have. The cap amount ended up being higher than expected and the Suns didn't get Lamarcus Aldridge, so why did they still trade Marcus Morris to the Pistons? Just weird. At least announce the cap figure first if you want to have a hokey verbal-agreements period.

Sam Hinkie's Plan Part 3

I think the naysayers are a little off on this one. Hinkie has said repeatedly that he believes in optionality meaning keeping your options open. The scuttlebutt says that Hinkie would have liked to have Andrew Wiggins, Dario Saric, Nerlens Noel, Avery Bradley, and D'Angelo Russell at this point. That would be a very good and balanced team.

The problem is that you don't create a team in a vacuum. There's competition. There's also chance where the draft is involved. So instead of the above the Sixers have Joel Embiid, Jahlil Okafor, Nerlens Noel, and some other stuff. Saric will come in next year along with what could be four other first rounders (at least two will be low firsts as Miami and OKC project to do a lot better this coming year).

A few predilections of Hinkie's that we've divined so far:

• He likes to draft players with athleticism who can't shootc yet. Will he teach them to shoot? We shall see. MCW and Noel examples make this a question mark.
• He doesn't mind renting his cap space for first rounders.
• It's unclear if he's loyal to any of the players he currently has. First it was the triumvirate of Embiid, Noel and MCW then just Embiid and Noel now is Embiid on the outs?
• The rebuild, everyone thought, would succeed or fail based on the projection of Embiid. Now with Okafor  either one can succeed and the Sixers will be in great shape. To this end, it's clear that Hinkie may be one to hedge his bets.
• He seems to not be concerned at all about on-court product, chemistry, the point guard position, or veteran leadership.
• He likes second round picks. He got some great ones in 2014. Most second round picks are crap though.
• He has sat out free agency two years straight and it's unclear if he'll do anything this year.
• He is tight-lipped and feels like being tight-lipped is a strategy. It certainly adds to the talk of a Plan.

So is there a Plan?:

• Most evidence points to there being a strategy not a point-by-point plan.
• Evidence for a Plan comes from Hinkie's acquistion (or, rather, Morey's acquisition) of James Harden via a series of asset grabs and maneuvers. The Rockets though are in a perpetual wind turbine of trying to attract every big FA out there. Philly was never a big FA destination. The Sixers always had to acquire big names via trade with the exception of the Elton Brand signing. I don't see big FA acquisitions in Philly unless the team becomes a true contender.
• The whole Joel Embiid thing is bordering on ridiculous. Has Embiid deep-sixed the whole rebuild by (1) falling to the Sixers at 3 instead of Wiggins, (2) being out a year-plus, (3) giving hope that he's the next big league star despite scant evidence, (4) forcing them to take a third center in 2015? Was his pick a mulligan in 2014? 
• In sum: if there was a Plan, it's met some detours. So far it's unclear that there's a point-by-point plan. There is a strategy. It's unclear when that strategy hits Phase 2. Phase 1 is blow-up/asset acquisition. Phase 2 is going for it. On trade deadline day 2015 the team put out a new marketing campaign saying "This Starts Now" featuring Embiid, MCW, and Noel. Will things start in 2016? This is the big question, when will Hinkie finally play a hand.

Sam Hinkie's Plan Part 2!

In the 2014 Draft, Hinkie collected Joel Embiid (injured), Dario Saric (2 years away), KJ McDaniels, Jordan McRae (sent to Australia), Vasilije Micic (Euro Stash), and Jerami Grant. Instead of adding as many as five good players in a very deep draft, the team immediately added only two second rounders.

There were then a series of deals (in the season and off-season) that brought in-and-out players like Ronnie Turiaf, Marquis Teague, and Andrei Kirilenko, none of whom played for the Sixers. All of these deals exacted Hinkie's "troll toll" of a second round pick.

The only free-agent acquisition the Sixers reportedly attempted was a move toward the Celtics' Avery Bradley.

The only first-rounder the Sixers obtained was for Thad Young in the Kevin Love trade.

Now Hinkie had completely blown up the team with a mess of second rounders to show for it, a first rounder that would come from Miami, an out-for-the-year center, a Euro stash guy, a center coming back from injury, and some prospects like Tony Wroten, Hollis Thompson, and Jerami Grant.

Wishful thinkers thought the team would be loaded soon with an Embiid that was the next Hakeem, Dario Saric who was the next Toni Kukoc, Nerlens Noel swatting shots, etc.

Pessimists saw a bare cupboard full of "assets."

I worried that the Sixers, like the Rockets before them, would become a revolving door team that players would avoid. No one wants to be a chess piece in someone else's game. You want to be a respected employee of a loyal organization.

The team began coalescing around MCW and Noel and new-addition Robert Covington until the 2015 trade deadline when Hinkie hit reset again. The (really) poor-shooting MCW was traded to the Suns for the Lakers first-round pick. JaVale McGee was added with a first-rounder from OKC coming to Hinkie for his troubles. Then, KJ McDaniels, who looked like a low-cost keeper, was swapped for Isaiah Canaan and yet another second-rounder. Hinkie, on that trade, said that he'd essentially gotten two 2nd rounders for one. Well, whoop-de-freakin-do. He also seemed to be high on his latest Rockets pick-up Canaan like he was on his previous Rockets scoop-ups Royce White (never made the team) and Furkan Aldemir (playing despite performance saying he shouldn't).

This reset was yet another stomach punch. What started with a bold move: Jrue for Noel and Saric, now looked like his only move: trade budding players for future picks. With no PG, Brett Brown became depressed for the first time and said he didn't want to coach a bunch of "gypsies." Isaiah Canaan looked worse than pick-up Ish Smith. Thomas Robinson, another pick-up, looked decent. Noel raised his game. Covington flitted in and out of being a good player. Aldemir got some minutes. The season ended with a whimper.

Then came the 2015 Draft. What could've been as many as four first-rounders turned out to be 1 when OKC and Miami fell out of the playoffs and the Lakers made sure that they optimized their chances of keeping a top 5 pick. The Lakers got pick 2, the Sixers pick 3. The draft went: 1 Minnesota (now with Wiggins): Karl-Anthony Towns; 2 Lakers: D'Angelo Russell; 3 Sixers: Jahlil Okafor. The Sixers then forewent their usual wheeling and dealing in round two and instead went for two low-ceiling players (JP Tokoto and Richaun Holmes) and two Euro stash picks that didn't sound like they would ever come to the US (Hinkie never really talked them up).

Now some of the "dividends" from the original blow-up were coming to fruition and none were actual material things. A bunch of detritus in the 2015 second round, some Euro stashes for later. On the court chemistry, cohesion, and consistency were thrown out the window. And, yes, Hinkie now had three potentially elite centers and no decent point or shooting guards and only Covington at SF.

Obviously Hinkie backers can say he got SOMETHING for Evan Turner, Lavoy Allen, and Spencer Hawes but when that something is a Euro Stash pick that will never come over that something is actually nothing.

The 2015 trade deadline pick-up on two first rounders in addition to the Thad Young trade (Billy King now gets to pay him in Brooklyn!) should turn up 4 firsts next year. Picking best player available should yield some decent players and hopefully begin filling out the roster, but we're talking about three LOST seasons in order to get to a fourth where your roster will still be one of the youngest in the league. Meanwhile, Hinkie has passed on Giannis Antetokounmpo, Rudy Gobert, and Elfrid Payton. These three guys are healthy and can play basketball well.

The next post will deal with the question of whether Hinkie has a plan.

Sam Hinkie's Plan (Part 1)

Let's begin with Sam Hinkie's so-called Plan that has torn apart the city of Philadelphia. We'll start with the history.

When Sam Hinkie came to Philadelphia the Sixers had just suffered the Andrew Bynum debacle. Bynum sat out a full season while Doug Collins tried to thread a roster together with Nick Young and Dorell Wright. You had Evan Turner, Lavoy Allen, Spencer Hawes, That Young, and Jrue Holiday. The big questions, to me and other linear-thinking troglodytes, was "do you re-sign Bynum" and "for how much?" Everyone was like: "if you can get him cheap blah blah blah." Hinkie came in and said something cryptic that turned out to be very smart. He said he'd treat Bynum like the "thousands of other basketball players playing all over the world." No one knew what that meant. It meant that Hinkie wanted no part of Bynum. Bynum ended up being a disaster in Cleveland and then a mere trashcan fire in Indiana.

On Draft Night 2013 (not that long ago, but eons in Sixer Time), the Hinkie Era began. Hinkie traded the one great player the Sixers had: Jrue Holiday for Nerlens Noel (the 6 pick) and a future first. He then drafted Michael Carter-Williams in the first round and Arsalan Kazemi, an analytics wunderkind due to his expert rebounding, in round 2. The Holiday trade, executed while I was in Korea, was stunning--especially b/c it was first reported to me as "Noel for Holiday and a future first." But moreso b/c you just don't trade your only All-Star while he's still really, really young and just shown that he can shoot a 3. This was an outside-the-box trade and Hinkie got the second first not just b/c Holiday is good, but b/c Noel was injured and probably out for the year. So you just lost a starting PG for a guy who won't play for a year.

The Sixers that year burst out of the gate winning and I remember making many jokes referencing the movie Major League. The GM clearly wanted to tank but the team was half-decent. They eventually calmed down as most teams led by Elliot Williams do and Hinkie proceeded to trade everyone Collins had except for Thad Young. ET and Lavoy went to Indiana for pennies (I believe one 2nd rounder); Hawes went to Cleveland for two seconds and Henry Sims (who turned out to be serviceable on an abysmal team); and soon you had a team that literally trotted out line-ups that D-League teams could beat. Year One was stamped as the Tank Year and everyone assumed that the Sixers would draft Andrew Wiggins and one other great player (with the first from New Orleans) and start on their road to redemption.

It didn't happen that way. There were two stomach punches in the 2014 Draft. First was when Joel Embiid was found to have a foot injury days before the draft. This was a stomach punch because the Sixers had the 3 pick and Embiid was supposed to be number 1. The draft order was prognosticated to be Embiid, Parker, Wiggins. Now things were turned upside down. It sounded like Cleveland would take Wiggins at 1, then you assumed Jabari Parker would go to Milwaukee, this left a big question mark for the Sixers. The assumption was that Aussie Dante Exum would be taken despite the presence of Michael Carter-Williams, who, by the way, was reported to be on the trading block. The Sixers bypassed Exum and took Joel Embiid--another center! And then took Elfrid Payton, stomach punch to MCW, who they traded to Orlando for Dario Saric, MCW's OK! Fans are down! This was the second big stomach punch: this one to fans. The team was abysmal, went on a 26 game losing streak and now drafted two guys that would probably not play the next year in addition to some second rounders like Jordan McRae and Jerami Grant.

Part 2 Next!

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Why I'm Rebooting Sixersfiend

Yes, it's been three long years since I last wrote.

A LOT has changed--my last post was about the Andrew Freakin' Bynum Trade!

There's still much to say about basketball and seemingly a plethora of places to get information.

The problem, to me, is that most of them are terrible.

Let's have a rundown:

• Bill Simmons got fired from ESPN for calling out their boy Roger Goodell. He writes fantastically. He still makes an inordinate amount of movie, porn, and wrestling references. He is a twelve year-old boy. He is funny. He knows his stuff.
• Simmons' replacement Zach Lowe does a great job of taking stills and gifs of basketball plays. This was his thing until it became a lot of other people's thing. Lowe cannot write at all. He is terrible. He uses the following adjectives to describe black athletes: frisky, cute, snarky. He is fond of saying a player does basketball things and he is known for tweeting "Sports!" when a game is getting hot. All of this is nice and meta in his poor man's Dmitri Martin world. He even has a little drawing of himself at the bottom of his articles. A frisky, cute drawing. I can imagine him batting a ball of yarn. In addition to terrible writing, he is fond of pushing a view of "the new NBA" that every horny writer has his hornball on. The new NBA has a ton of pick-and-rolls and super complex strategy. I definitely saw that in the Finals when the Cavs had a lot of complex action setting a lot of interesting stuff when they all stood in the corner watching LeBron. Lowe is tolerable, but barely so.
• Chris Sheridan has a web site called sheridanhoops.com that, to his credit, broke the Lebron-to-Cavs news. The web site looks like it was conceived and laid out in 1992 and usually has passable articles. It is a decent but forgettable site.
• Bleacher Report has burst on the scene with tons of speculative lists such as Top 20 Draft Picks Your Team Might Be Worried About and Top 20 Things We Love About Summer League. Their feed, full of twitter goodness, is great. Their articles are fine. They suffer from the Internet's recent clickbait headline drama where every headline says something like 3 Things You Wish You Didn't Know About Michael Jordan or 20 Hot Moms Over 50 or Things We Thought Were Stupid But Really Aren't. To say this phenomenon is annoying is like saying that teenage boys are pleased with the availability of nude images in the 21st century. It's a massive understatement.
• There is HoopsHype--now populated by massive pop-up ads--and RealGM--where news is broken about Stanko Barac's latest workout for Olympiacos--and NBADraft.net--where European prospects are carefully placed in the second round of the 2018 Draft.
• On the Sixers side of the ledger there are a few sites. LibertyBallers.com is written by people who truly love the Sixers and Philly but who cannot write. Lowe-ian headlines like Robert Covington does Covingtonish Things that make the players into dorky cartoon characters or, worse, cute little kitties litter the site. The Hinkie Koolade has been supped in massive quantities. I'm not trying to be Howard Eskin here, but the press should criticize and analyze not cheerlead. Everything Hinkie does is supported and explained and supporxplained by LibertyBallers. Okafor will play point guard! Embiid is the next Hakeem! Etc. Etc. Hoop76 is another decent Sixers site that looks like what I'm trying to do here but without the sarcasm and cynicism earned in six long years of grad school. Sixers.com is a nice place to find out when the next Sixers Dance Team tryouts will be.
• Finally, the Worldwide Leader trots out Chris Broussard whose hatred of gays isn't bigotry, it's religion. Religotry? Brian Windhorst whose analysis of LeBron's every eye-blink and knee-scratch is excruciating. Literally this fat guy from Cleveland who they call "Windy" (a fart reference?) writes stories where he dramatizes every glare and eye roll LeBron James emits. He uses sources like "veterans on the Cavs" though for some reason instead of his muse since, of course, he is more likely to hear "the real deal" from benchwarmer Shawn Marion than from LBJ. Marc Stein is a mensch who attempts to break real news in this mess. Ric Bucher left a while ago to join Howard Beck at Bleacher Report and both are doing a helluva job making us forget they once had real gigs. ESPN also has a new stable of idiots who babble nonsense, cannot read teleprompters, cannot speak English, do not know anything about sports, etc. etc. Stephen A. Smith is still livid about something Jose Calderon did in 2013 and Skip Bayless is seriously ready to tear into this myth that you need to watch basketball games to analyze basketball on a basketball show. 
• People that are doing nicely: PTI rolls on, the TNT boys are doin' their thing, David Aldridge is still "DA," and NBATV is a nice place to watch Vinny Del Negro creepily stare at everyone like he's at a Maggiano's and he's been waiting 20 minutes for his veal parmesan.

With so much Sixers gossip and news going on, I just can't leave it to the morons. So SixersFiend is back!

BYNUM

My thoughts on the am azing Bynum deal...

First of all: I thought this deal was pure FICTION when I first read it. I mean, swapping Iguodala and some other stuff the Sixers didn't need/want for Andrew Bynum?! It reeked of the GM just floating something out to get in the press. When it happened, my head was spinning.

I've read a lot since on the trade. The overall opinion of the trade seems to be that the Sixers did very well (while the Lakers and Nuggets did even better). ESPN.com has been perhaps most negative on the deal (though Bill Simmons thought it was a great move). Those that are lukewarm feel that the Sixers took two steps back and two steps forward this summer and may be at a similar place. They focus on the Brand, Lou and Iguodala losses.

To be honest, the summer acquisitions had me confused--particularly after signing Kwame Brown to a 2 year 6 million dollar deal. I liked that Elton Brand was gone and I think that those who poo-poo that move are dense. Brand was not playing well in his last year as a Sixer. Let me rephrase that: he was nowhere near at the level of his contract. Last year he averaged 11 points and 7 boards (plus 1.6 blocks). 11 points! So I don't know where this "irreplaceable" nonsense is coming from. To be frank, an optimistic projection on Lavoy Allen might have him averaging similar numbers.

Signing Kwame Brown and Nick Young (whose a chucker on a one year contract) with the money was crap. But, I do like Dorrell Wright.

Now, losing Lou Williams looks worse than it did earlier in the summer. The team has no back-up PG (well, Maalik Wayns). It also could use a slasher-scorer type like Lou. But Lou went to Atlanta and, according to Doug Collins, the Sixers offered him some deals he didn't end up liking.

Iguodala is certainly a big loss. He was the defensive identity of the team. But his attitude is kind of sucky and whiney--and, again, he was no scorer. In '07-'08 he put up 19.9 points, but that average was down to 12.4 last year. So, with Brand and Iguodala, you were shipping out an underwhelming 23.4 points per game, which I think Bynum by himself could average.

Losing Harkless--who the hype said could eventually be special-- and Vucevic--who almost certainly won't be-- is just the cost of doing business. The first round pick is too.

So, yes, the roster is now misshapen. Yes, I don't think the Sixers were brilliant earlier in the off-season. BUT... the Bynum deal was the best trade I've ever seen the Sixers get.

Review the last time the Sixers traded for a true, capable big man: The Mutombo trade. They gave Theo Ratliff (who was blocking everything... but hurt), Toni Kukoc (who was playing well), and Nazr Mohammed (a decent center). That's two very good players and one decent one. Here the Sixers gave a very good player in Iguodala, two decent prospects (who knows what they'll become?), and a pick for A MUCH BETTER CENTER who is 25 years old!!!!

Bynum instantly makes the Sixers a team with purpose. He is a cornerstone. You can get some shooters and defenders to put around him. Getting that big center piece is so critical to NBA success because so few players fit that bill. Last year Bynum averaged 19, 12, and almost 2 blocks. That's 4 points, 2 rebounds, and a fraction of a block less than Brand and Iguodala COMBINED. Think about that: he's one guy whose averaging what your two main guys got together. And he was on a team with two other All-Stars. On the Sixers? Going for 23 and 12 is doable. Could happen.

As for the rest of the roster and how he fits: I think this year could be a transition year but I think this does a few things for the Sixers:
1. They now look like a definite playoff team, before the deal they didn't.
2. Now they can swap out some of their center depth for something else they need (maybe a PF or PG) during the year.
3. The Sixers will be able to compete every night.
4. They no longer look like a worse version of the Pacers. They look like a team with more potential and a more balanced and exciting roster than Brooklyn or New York.
5. The Sixers will be WATCHABLE. I was worried that they were going south after such a great season last year, but this team will be exciting.
6. For the first time I can remember, the Sixers will play NBA inside-out basketball with 3-point shooters and a center. You know, the type of basketball you see in June not in November.

As for the trade, great kudos to the Sixers on making a move that this cynical fan never saw coming. Getting Andrew Bynum for Iguodala is a crazy get. Remember that when Allen Iverson went out what came back was Joe Smith, Andre Miller (who stayed for a while) and 2 first rounders that amounted to not-much. Here, Iguodala goes to the same team (Denver) and you get back one of the best centers in the game. The only way this was even remotely possible was because Dwight Howard wanted to move. Otherwise the Lakers hang up if anyone wants their dominant, young center.

Amazing, amazing trade.