There have been any number of what I would consider "reasonable" rumors/suggestions thrown about that could help us get out from under the "3 actually pretty good SGs who can't play a lick of D" problem we've found ourselves in.
One is the longstanding idea that DDR is a good fit in Miami, and especially given their (rumored) dissatisfaction with Jaquez' off-court behavior there's been plenty of speculation that Miami might move Jaquez, #20, and salary for DDR.
A second is the Vecenie suggestion (not sure it rises to the level of a rumor) of a Kings/Orlando swap where Monk goes east and Isaac and the #16 pick come west. Since this has been suggested by a disinterested third party, it seems like it might be fair value.
A third is that following Tatum's achilles tear the Celtics may well be looking to shed salary and try to reset their tax situation while they're not exactly in contention (next year and probably the year after because an achilles usually takes one year to heal and one year to get all the way back). They could do that, most likely, by salary dumping the aging Jrue Holiday.
Now, I'm not going to go back into the trade machine right now, but assuming all of these deals are basically of interest to MIA/ORL/BOS and ourselves, it's actually possible to make all three happen in a single deal with minimal (but some) extras. Starting from these three reasonable ideas, we could have a deal that looks about like this for us:
Outgoing: DDR, Monk
Incoming: Holiday, Isaac, Jaquez, '25 #16, '25 #20
Suddenly you're looking at something like:
Holiday/Carter
LaVine/Ellis
Murray/Jaquez
Isaac
Sabonis/Valanciunas
with two decent picks and free agency to fill out the forward rotation. Now that's a much, much better defensive team, and you don't have to spend most of your game with at least two obligate scorers at the SG on the floor simultaneously. Sabonis is who he is, LaVine is the scorer, Holiday is the defensive lead guard, Murray does everything (and is asked to score a bit more than last season), Isaac covers the paint defensively for Domas, Carter, Keon, and Jaquez bring defense, defense, defense. And two picks.
Assuming we could make this happen with all three teams, this is addition by subtraction and addition. How is this not better than blowing things up and trying to trade Sabonis for peanuts?