That's really not my first or second option. I've always looked a bit sideways at teams that sign a player as a free agent only to trade him at the first opportunity. It's one thing if the player is obviously not working out or there are personality clashes or the player is trying to leave on purpose (then I look sideways at the player) but I just don't see that being the case here.
Is DDR a great defender? No. We knew that signing him. The plan from the front office wasn't to sign DeRozan and suddenly become a top-5 defensive team. The idea was to supercharge our offense by having 1) a guy who is amazing in the midrange and can get off any shot at any time, and 2) to pick up another high-gravity player to give our other players more open three opportunities. #1 has worked out as hoped. #2 has not, but it's not because the opportunities aren't there, it's because our entire team has seemingly forgotten how to hit a three.
On the defensive end, we are obviously having significant issues stopping the three ball - but we had those before DDR showed up, too. It's not obvious to me that DDR is contributing to those issues any more than any other player, but those can be hard things to see and I'm not going to claim to be good at seeing them all the time. The scheme itself, however, is obviously not working, and that's not DDR's fault.
So in my eyes, we wanted him, we got him, he's exactly the player we hoped to be getting, and he's not responsible for our woes. Shipping him off - especially for lesser talent - that, I think, would fit quite neatly under the ever-present "KANGZ" label. So, no, depending on what "open to" means, I'm not really open to that. I don't really think this team is fixed by bringing in roleplayers at the expense of front-line talent. I think it's fixed by figuring out a defensive scheme that works (so, yes, though it doesn't usually happen mid-season I'd be open to demoting Loucks so we can try something else), getting our players to hit open threes (no idea how to make that happen outside of devoting more practice time to shooting drills), and reducing the number of possessions where we just iso or weave with no set action being run. And if that means that Doug has to have a set of at least five actions that we can start and then develop based on how the defense reacts, and he has to call them out every time we go down the floor, great, that could help. This crap where we bog down because the other team goes on a run and they can set their D, so we can't push it down their throat and we don't know what else to do really has to stop. But none of that is on DeRozan, and I don't see how giving up on him this early helps us.
