Choose your own adventure: Which star should the Rockets acquire, or none of them?

I think we're just having differing opinions on how much KD will cost and/or how much it's worth giving up for a rental like that. I think giving up a good young player and multiple draft picks is seriously harming our future flexibility and our ability to build around our best young players. And I think the deal would realistically look something like FVV + Tari + multiple Phoenix picks. To me that's just not even remotely worth it. Those are assets we can instead cash in a couple of years from now, when our players are fully developed or close to it. At that time, KD will probably be retired.

If I'm wrong and it's like Brooks + a bunch of salary filler and this year's Phoenix pick, then fine, that would be great. I'll do it, provided KD isn't wanting like a 3 year $180M guaranteed extension or something.

 

Didn't vote when I initially made the thread, but I think I'm falling more and more onto the side of "run it back with minor upgrades".

If we were to trade for Giannis, and the price made sense, I'd get behind that move, but I'm concerned the price will be far too high. He's still an incredible player, but you need to have a roster around him, you can't just put yourself in the same spot Milwaukee is in.

Guys like Booker, Brown, KD, I just don't think are good enough to be the best player on a championship team. I don't know if they push us over the top, and again, I think the price will be too high to make sense. Again, at a bargain-bin price I would be happy if we acquired any of those three, but at their realistic market value, I don't think I'd pull the trigger.

So unless we can do something that's a clear upgrade where we aren't effectively going all-in by trading too many assets away, I don't know if I see a great fit.

The most likely best path for me would be to mostly keep the same core intact and try to make some less-drastic moves around them. I will say that I think we definitely need to upgrade our shooting. And the path of least resistance there is the in backcourt, which I don't think is as bad at shooting as it seems on the surface, but also definitely could stand to improve. There are some things that make this tricky though:

1) Trying to upgrade from Jalen Green might make sense, but we've already talked about the issues with trading for a Booker or a Brown, who aren't that much better (if at all) as jump shooters anyway, though they are much better in some other areas. Trading for a guy like Coby White, Quentin Grimes, etc and trying to have him replace Jalen would be quite the gamble because I don't know if the front office is going to see them as a clear upgrade so much as a lateral move with a chance at being better. It's hard to see them doing that. We might be stuck with Jalen for a little bit longer for these reasons.

2) Upgrading from FVV is something a lot of people are banging the table for, but despite the surface numbers looking bad, dig a little deeper and he still looks like one of our best 3P shooters. He was also probably the best performer we had in the playoffs overall. And he's a great "coach on the floor" who steadies the team on both ends. It just doesn't sound like the front office is ready to move on from him, either. We're probably going to have to accept him getting some sort of extension or having his option picked up for next season.

3) If you don't move those guys, any upgrade to the backcourt has to come from the bench. And then the front office has to confront the question of--"how much do we believe in Reed Sheppard"? I don't envy them that. Between Aaron Holiday and Reed Sheppard combined there were about 18 minutes per game last season. If you could add a sharpshooter like Luke Kennard to replace those minutes, maybe that could make sense, but then you're effectively giving up on Reed.

4) The other possibility is to try to add a stretch 5, but the difficulty there is that those guys, especially ones who play any defense, are still pretty rare. Maybe you could go get a Vucevic to replace Steven Adams, and that might make some level of sense, but you're downgrading our rebounding, defense, and PnR screens in the process.

I think it's going to be hard for the front office to work through these decisions and figure out where they want to try to upgrade. These are really challenging questions because they may require consolidating less-critical members of the young core into a trade just to free up minutes (let alone to get a trade done).