This is a good point and I have been wondering it myself. I think it is obvious that this team needs to get younger, more athletic, and have better shooters. Yet we are only armed with the MLE and a 1st round pick. And our only tradable assets (non Yao/Tmac) are Alston/Swift/Head. And with our PG problem you can bet Alston wont be moved leaving Swift the prime tradable asset. We need role player help all over the board. Particularly at SG, backup PG, and PF still has yet to be resolved even though we have Howard/Swift and how Hayes. Barry and Anderson are gone. We dont know if Sura will ever come back and Wesley's 5M expiring contract will expire and he will be a FA. In fact we dont really have jack to show for our expiring contracts of Spoon/Wesley/Moochie/Baker etc. That added up to like 20M in expiring deals. All we have is a 3M trade exception which isnt bad but chances are it will only be used at the trade deadline next season. It is going to be interesting to see what JVG/CD do to dramatically improve the role player talent base on this team.
I don't think we would have missed out on Yao. The three first-rounders we gave up for EG would have been rookies, and therefore would have been unlikely to help us in 01/02. Our season would still have been a bust, and we would still have gotten Yao. The benefit of keeping the first-rounders would have come later, like around now. Can you imagine us having Richard Jefferson, Gilbert Arenas, Jamaal Tinsley, and/or Tony Parker on the team now? All of these players were available at our drafting positions.
