Well, the trade as proposed was Z-bo and McLemore for Wiggins straight up. Obviously I have no idea whether Minnesota would put this sort of deal on the table or not. I think this may be a more interesting deal from the Minnesota side than it is from the Sacramento side. From the Minnesota side, they're looking at signing Towns to a max extension, and having to resign Butler and Teague potentially next year. If they want to do all that, they'll be capped out and approaching the tax with only 8 players starting next year. Now, if they're willing to let Teague go, or somehow decide to go with Wiggins instead of Butler it's pretty moot, but otherwise they'll definitely want to get rid of Wiggins and the only question is what they're willing to give up to get out from under his contract.
From our side, we don't really have ANY bad contracts. Obviously Z-bo and Shumpert are taking up almost $23M that we don't want to spend on them, but they're only under contract this year. Starting next year we literally have nobody under contract that we aren't interested in having under contract as it stands right now. The biggest dump-back we can plausibly do would be something like Z-bo + Shumpert + McLemore - but I just don't see additionally dumping Shumpert's contract for this year as moving the needle that much. He's gone after this year anyway and we're probably off the FA market at this point so his $11M is really a drop in the bucket compared to Wiggins' $146M. The only thing we can really do to make a trade for Wiggins more palatable to us would appear to be to wrest some draft compensation out of them. But I don't think they're that desperate, not yet.
In fact, I'd say that odds are that they're not really ready to pull the trigger on a Wiggins trade just yet, so they'd have to see something better coming back than the usual salary dump fare. In that case, if we would have to sweeten the pot and not them, then I don't really see how to make the odds move in our favor.
In the end, this is the type of trade where talent evaluation is utterly crucial. Some deals you look at are by-the-numbers deals, and those are pretty easy to gauge whether it's a good value or not. Here, if Wiggins turns into a perennial All-Star, it's a great deal. If he continues on his current career arc, it's an unmitigated disaster. And there's no way that the roulette on the deal falls on anything other than the talent evaluation. There's just no way to mitigate against a $146M flop.
