I completely agree with this. Just replying to the depth and insurance part, as if Wood would accept that.
if you are a championship caliber GM you MAKE IT WORK, use your negotiating skills, people management skills and make it work! and either play them together or stagger their minutes so they each play 30 minutes and overlap only for a small stretch..and you also have injuries and load management, so you rest them at different times... perhaps one of these guys would even accept 6 man role like ginobily... the only thing you dont do is trade away a great player of a rare caliber once you have found him, except if its a lebron, luka or steph curry trade and even then you go for continuity, chemistry and do your thing cause even these guys dont automatically win and lose more often than not so if you have a uniquely chemistred team you stick with it...
This is the correct take. Wood is a nice player but I think it's imminent that he gets something approaching a max contract for his production alone which is fine but contextually, he isn't good enough to be anything more than a 3rd best player and we are still looking for clear cut #1 and #2 guys on this team. The writing on the wall is Wood is going to get more as a FA on his next contract than what the Rockets should match so the best thing to do now is to try to get value out of what is very much a valuable contract at the moment - he could be a difference maker in the playoffs for some team needing his skill set. For instance - trade him to Portland for Covington, and grab a 2025 first round pick - bet that either Dame forces his way out, or declines enough as a player between now and 2025 that the pick is a likely lotto one. We don't need to tie up max contract money on Wood while trying to grow our lotto picks to be leaders on the team. I would rather pick up a draft pick or two and some role players who fit what we think our core will be over the next few years....also worth noting that the next draft class is loaded on bigs so we likely will need to create space in our big rotation for that next year regardless.
You could convince me that we should trade Wood, but I’ll never buy that the primary return should be draft capital. We’re already having problems giving all our young guys minutes.
Draft capital isn't all that bad considering it can be used for more than just, y'know, the draft. If a young star becomes available that war chest of picks comes in handy. Before the naysayers point at Boston let me remind you that Danny Ainge screwed that one up--he should have moved all of his chips in for AD when he had the chance but decided to go Gollum instead.
1 its whats implied 2 allstar or allstar level player thats his production, whatever, even if you gonna call him a really good player(only 5 bigs/players/whatever shoot more than 37% on 3s and avg 20/10), you dont get rid of him just because your coach doesnt know how to coach
Is he shooting 37% from 3, though? For his career, he's a 36.4% 3-point shooter, and this season, he's only hitting 34% despite a lower volume than last year. Also, I think looking at just his raw stats, you're not getting a full picture of how productive Wood has been as a player. I've heard a lot of people reference Wood as an empty stats guy this year, and to some extent I would agree. But I also think it's a matter of what stats you're looking at. If you look at just raw points, rebounds, blocks, etc., dude is solid. Not a lot of bigs in the league averaging 17/11/2/1/1 this season. But his efficiency (53.5% TS%) has taken a massive hit this year from the two years prior and most advanced metrics, like WS/48 (.090), BPM (-0.8), VORP (0.3), RAPTOR (-1.9), etc. say he's an average to below average player. Every single one of those advanced stats above say Sengun has been the better player this season. And it's easy to point to Wood's prior years and question if maybe he's just having an off year, but remember that his 21/10 peak season last year came in a whopping 41 games where he also posted pretty pedestrian advanced stats. I'm not sure Wood is this "top 5 big" you're suggesting he is, and most metrics say he's almost certainly not.
Go back and read what you wrote there and answer this question - what about a 2025 first round pick impacts our minutes crunch today? Wood won't even be under contract with us by then - this is about collecting for the future and there is nothing about draft capital that says you have to use it - trade it for a role player, trade it to unload unwanted bad contracts, trade it with a team for a future pick consideration. What I'm hearing you say now is "I have something valuable today(that won't be as valuable later) but I don't want to sell it today because I don't have enough room in my wallet for the cash right now". Wood has a decent amount of value now(with just under 2 years on a great contract) and likely isn't a part of our future plans - trade him for what you can get and move on. We can't be too precious about this - we need game changing players and while Wood is a nice player, he isn't game changing but can be flipped for something we can leverage in the future to either draft or trade for that player OR to draft or trade for a complimentary role player who fits our needs as our team starts to solidify around our future leader.
