Let's take a look at how the Brooklyn Nets and Minnesota Timberwolves did in their deal Thursday. Here's how the trade breaks down:
Nets get: Forward Thaddeus Young
Timberwolves get: Center Kevin Garnett
Brooklyn Nets: A
Even at age 38, Garnett remains one of the league's better defenders, and in a vacuum I'm not sure he's worse than Young. (ESPN's real plus-minus favors Garnett.) For the Nets specifically, however, this trade is an on-court upgrade. Brooklyn had three players who were truly centers in Garnett, Brook Lopez and Mason Plumlee, making it difficult to play two of the three together. In Young, the Nets get an athletic 4 (if not necessarily a stretch 4) who pairs well with their traditional big men.
The bigger win might be financial, since Young is making $2.6 million less than Garnett this season. While that's less than $900,000 in salary over the remainder of the season, luxury-tax calculations are based on the final team salary, not salary paid. Since Brooklyn is in the tax bracket where salary is taxed at 2.5 times its cost, that means this trade saved the Nets nearly $6.5 million in tax payments, by my math, for a total savings of almost $7.5 million. To accomplish that without giving up a pick is almost unthinkable. There's a slight risk that Young opts into his contract for 2015-16, which would push Brooklyn into tax territory. Barring that, though, it's a huge positive for the Nets.
Minnesota Timberwolves: C
There's really no harm here for the Timberwolves. Young was nearly certain to leave next summer, and the rest of this season doesn't matter to Minnesota. So if the Timberwolves couldn't get any picks for Young -- a reasonable possibility, given the market -- bringing Garnett back home to finish his career and mentor the team's young players is understandable. Flip Saunders' real mistake was dealing for Young last summer as part of the Kevin Love trade. Back in those more optimistic days, Minnesota dreamed of a run at a playoff spot.
Even before injuries took starters Ricky Rubio, Kevin Martin and Nikola Pekovic out of the lineup for an extended period, it wasn't realistic for the Wolves to win the 45-plus games that will be required to make the Western Conference playoffs. Minnesota gave up the Miami Heat's first-round pick (top-10 protected) to get Young from the Philadelphia 76ers, and while that no longer looks quite as valuable in the wake of the Goran Dragic trade, it's still likely to fall somewhere between 15 and 20. To turn that into four months of Young and two months of Garnett is front-office malpractice.