It’s actually entertaining reading people trying to convince themselves that naaaaaa, this trade is actually pretty good.
Let me be 100% clear what my position on this trade is.
San Antonio got an absolute steal. San Antonio won this trade and it's not even close.
That said, there's a reason that San Antonio was able to get Fox for, from their side, a box of crackerjacks. That reason is that Fox stabbed us right in the back with a big ol' knife. We managed to stagger our way over to Chicago Hope, and they were able to pull the knife out of our back, and stitch us up, and we didn't bleed out, and it turns out that we don't have a punctured lung, and we can hope that there will be no infection and no permanent damage. If Chicago Hope hadn't been around, we were screwed. That knife was gonna kill us.
So was this a "good" trade? As in, would I have liked this trade if we had a happy star player who totally intended to sign an extension with us and just out of the blue we traded down like this? (Not looking at any other Texas teams here...) Hell no! But we didn't have that. We had a knife sticking out of our back, and with that knife in there, and getting twisted even, this trade is
definitely a good outcome. Circumstances being what they are, we did good.
And we were only able to do good because we had a very different valuation of the LaVine contract than the Bulls did. The Bulls aren't interested in winning right now, so they don't want to pay LaVine a kajillion dollars. We
are interested in winning right now, and we were paying Fox like 3/4s of a kajillion dollars anyway, so now we're paying LaVine to be one of our top three instead of Fox. There's actually a decent chance that we can just keep going at a +.500 winning percentage, and make it to the playoffs, because Fox and LaVine may have slightly different roles but their value is not that far off. If we're lucky, something will click with this somewhat revamped lineup and we'll actually make some noise.
But if we hadn't been able to get LaVine, it's clear from what San Antonio gave up that they weren't going to accept anything but a straight fleecing. We would have been forced to either take pennies on the dollar, or try to bumble our way through the end of this season, and the offseason, and maybe next year with this millstone around our necks. Turmoil in the ranks. Domas unhappy. DDR unhappy. Keegan looking for greener pastures once he's done with his rookie deal. Fox could have absolutely ruined us. And we found a lifeline. So yeah, we did good.