What the Nets and Mavericks did wasn't a trade, it was Manhattan for $24. Even worse: It's a talk-radio trade.
Vinny from Passaic: "Aaah, look, I'm a Nets fan and I think we oughta' go and get somebody who can score 25 a game, a guy who could be the best sixth man in the league, a point guard who's won a couple of NBA championships, a good three-point shooter and a seven-footer who can throw a well-placed elbow."
Talk show host: "And who should the Nets give up, Vinny?"
Vinny: "Let's give 'em Shawn Bradley 'cause he's a stiff, Robert Pack because he's always hurt, Ed O'Bannon 'cause he can't play, and Khalid Reeves 'cause, you know, that way it won't seem too one-sided."
Don Nelson, ladies and gentlemen, has made the dumbest, stupidest, most idiotic, ill-conceived, moronic, one-sided trade imaginable.
These are the players he unloaded: Jim Jackson, a 26-year-old swingman who has averaged 20 points per game through his career; Sam Cassell, a 27-year-old point guard and key member of the two-time champion Houston Rockets; Chris Gatling, the 6-10 forward who's a virtual lock for the league's sixth man award and who made the all-star team this year; Eric Montross, a serviceable 7-foot center with good work habits; George McCloud, a late-blooming three-point bomber who has become one of the most reliable long-range threats in the league.
Not a single one of these players is 30 years old and all of them would be welcomed by two or three of the best teams in the league.
In return, Nelson got: Shawn Bradley, a huge talent but a man with no discernible work habits. By April every year, Bradley looks ready to break through. By October, it's evident he spent the summer doing nothing; Ed O'Bannon, the nicest kid in the world but a player who has no semblance of a game; Pack, a fine assist man who's been injured three years straight for four teams; Reeves, who has made a career of being included in big trades. There's not one guy of the four who's even a front-line player. Okay, maybe Pack when he's healthy.
Here's how bizarre the trade is being perceived around the league: "One of the NBA executives going over the contracts wanted to call back to see if I was sane," Nelson said.
Poor Jim Cleamons. If ever a coach didn't deserve this, it's Cleamons, who went from perhaps the most stable franchise in the league in Chicago to this mess in Dallas.
Though Nelson, to be fair, was once a very worthy coach, he's always been overrated. And now he appears to be turning into former Cleveland owner Ted Stepien, who made so many bad trades in consecutive years that the NBA created a rule that said you couldn't trade your No. 1 pick in consecutive years. If two is a straight line, three is a pattern. Nellie, having unloaded Mashburn, Jackson, Gatling, Cassell and McCloud for nothing, in two deals, is dangerously close.
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