I don't know if I can possibly give a letter grade.
When I was a much younger lad, in a day when we didn't have constant alerts on our cell phones (or even cell phones at all!) I remember coming home one day and being told by my Kings-fan-lite roommate: "We traded Jason Williams." My heart sunk. Then I asked, "Who did we get for him?" "Somebody named Mike Bibby?" Immediately I felt quite a bit better.
That's kind of the reverse of how I felt on Tuesday when I saw the news about the trade. "The Kings get Sabonis..." - wow, this is great! But uh-oh, who did we give up for him? Buddy...OK...Tyrese, Thompson...no picks, how did we manage to...did that say "Tyrese"? Oh.....yeah, that's how we managed it.
I think we all knew that Fox-Hali-Mitchell was not going to work long term and we were going to have to deal from a position of strength to shore up our weaknesses. That said, I was prepared to move on from Fox and to anoint Tyrese as our PG of the future. I will miss Tyrese dearly, and I fear we have given up a lot to get a lot - but I also recognize that the trade gives us a much better fit than running 3 PGs with no real post scoring. Right now I figure that in terms of talent, the swap was probably close enough that both teams will be happy down the road, but obviously there are years yet to come and we'll find out then whether the Kings or the Pacers or neither regret this deal.
Everybody probably knows that I was one of the last few vocal defenders of both Buddy and Bagley here. For all his deficiencies, Buddy is an amazing shooter in a league that values shooting over just about everything. Bagley is young, athletic, with great size and solid skills and just hasn't been able to put the package together yet. I still think he will. But, as best as we can tell, neither of these guys wanted to be around anymore, so I was already quite resigned to them being gone at the deadline.
Of course, I wish the other three guys the best, but I think it was abundantly clear that they were not in the team's long-term, or even short-term, plans.
We saw what Sabonis does for a team last night. I won't bother to say any more.
Holiday, and Lamb provide swing size that our team has been missing. Now, even if we play Barnes largely at the 4, we can run out a rotation including Holiday, Lamb, and Harkless at the 2/3 instead of three-guard lineups that have Tyrese or Buddy guarding a 6-8 guy on the other team. That's a step up. We almost feel big again.
I figure our rotation probably looks something like this, with King and Queta probably back to Stockton for the most part:
Fox, Mitchell
Holiday, DiVincenzo (Davis-IL)
Harkless, Lamb (Jackson)
Barnes, Metu (Lyles)
Sabonis, Holmes (Jones, Len)
Maybe DDV takes the starting spot, but for right now he's definitely rounding back into form and should be coming off the bench. We've lost some of the ability to go small (I won't really miss it!) with our smallest three-guard lineup we can even muster now being Fox-Mitchell-DiVincenzo - anything else has a reasonable-to-legit SF at the 3 (Holiday, Harkless, Lamb, Jackson). But with some heft at the C position, we can protect against foul trouble and go big if we really need it - a Fox-Barnes-Metu-Sabonis-Holmes lineup might not be unplayable in the right context. We've got a decent mix of vets and young talent, and we've already seen a team that began to move off the ball in ways that the Kings have rarely done since the glory days - only for one night, so far, but this without even a practice together!
The pieces fit better, the attitude on the team has clearly changed for the better, and we're very obviously gunning for the play-in. Whether we regret giving up Haliburton in the long run I don't know, but we're quite clearly better right now. Monte pulled that off, and only gave up one piece we're truly going to miss. Pretty impressive.
