In a challenge trade of wings entering the final season of lavish four-year contracts signed in the free-spending summer of 2016, the Portland Trail Blazers upgraded their shooting with Kent Bazemore while the Atlanta Hawks will add playmaking with Evan Turner.
Does the deal make sense for both sides, and what does it imply about their future plans? Let's take a look.
Hawks get: Evan Turner
Blazers get: Kent Bazemore
Get more trade grades for every deal here
Portland Trail Blazers: B+
Bazemore was my top target for the Blazers back in 2016, so it's amusing to see him land there now. As it turned out, Portland wasn't able to offer more than the Hawks paid Bazemore then, and he was also loyal to the franchise that had developed him into a rotation player who merited that kind of contract.
Much has changed since then in Atlanta, now in a rebuilding phase, and Bazemore lost his starting job to rookie Kevin Huerter last season after missing most of January due to an ankle sprain.
The fit with the Blazers, by contrast, is still similar to that in 2016. With high-scoring Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum in the backcourt, Portland needs a floor-spacing small forward who can also handle the toughest defensive assignments. Bazemore is OK on the former criteria despite slumping to 32% beyond the arc last season. He's a career 35% 3-point shooter and knocked down 39% of his attempts in 2017-18. If the Blazers get that version of Bazemore, this was a huge upgrade.
As a defender, Bazemore isn't quite as versatile as Turner. At 6-foot-5, he'll give up size to most opposing small forwards, though a 7-foot wingspan helps him play bigger defensively than his height and he'll frequently defend guards if they present the greater defensive challenge.
More importantly, though, Bazemore's ability to play without the ball enables him to simply stay on the court with Lillard and McCollum -- something Turner rarely did last season. Terry Stotts changed his rotation to play Turner largely with other reserves, and his playing time dropped from 25-plus minutes per game the previous two years to 22 in 2018-19.
The experiment with resting Lillard and McCollum together didn't really work during the regular season, as Portland was outscored by 7.8 points per 100 possessions when neither of those players was on the court and Turner was. Improbably, however, Turner played a huge role off the bench as the Blazers beat the Denver Nuggets in a seven-game conference semifinals matchup. I thought that might prove a template for how Turner could be effective by defending power forwards and running the offense. Instead, it was a last hurrah for him in Portland.
The most interesting element of this swap for the Blazers is how it sets up their plans in free agency. Four of the seven players who saw the most minutes during Portland's run to the conference finals are unrestricted free agents: guards Seth Curry and Rodney Hood, forward Al-Farouq Aminu and center Enes Kanter. Because the Blazers have only non-Bird rights on Curry, Hood and Kanter, they'd surely have to dip into their taxpayer midlevel exception to re-sign any of them. Meanwhile, Aminu could become pricey for a Portland team that starts the summer just $1.7 million below the luxury-tax line with 11 players under contract.
One possibility is the Blazers moving Maurice Harkless to a role at power forward, in which case Bazemore could serve as a replacement for Aminu. That would seemingly leave Portland looking for a lead ball handler for the second unit in free agency -- possibly Curry, though he mostly played off the ball last season with Turner as a point forward. Alternatively, perhaps the Blazers plan to entrust the second-unit backcourt to Bazemore and second-year guard Anfernee Simons, meaning Bazemore essentially replaces Curry and Hood.
Whatever the answer to how Portland plans to use Bazemore, he should be an upgrade over Turner. Too much of the value Turner provided as a playmaker and defender was undone by his inability to space the floor or score efficiently enough with the ball in his hands. Turner's true shooting percentage over three years with the Blazers (50.5%) is in line with Bazemore's weakest marks. And Turner made fewer 3-pointers last season (11) than Bazemore did in October 2018 (12 in seven games).
As it turned out, neither Bazemore nor Turner was a good investment in a summer that featured few of them. But Bazemore should be a better value than Turner next season.
Atlanta Hawks: C-
It's a little more difficult to see the Hawks' motivation for making this trade, which doesn't save them much money (about $660,000) and seems to give them the weaker player. Perhaps the best explanation is their wing rotation had filled up a bit with the drafting of De'Andre Hunter and addition of Turner's former Portland teammate Allen Crabbe, whom Atlanta will get from Brooklyn in a deal for Taurean Prince that will be completed next month. (Crabbe's is yet another contract from the summer of 2016 that hasn't aged well.)
Turner could play some backup point guard for the Hawks, and perhaps he'll be happier with a reserve role on a building team than Bazemore -- who signed on back when Atlanta was still contending in the East. Still, those are minutes I'd probably rather give to a developing young player than Turner. As it stands, the Hawks' roster features a combination of young talent on the rise and veterans (Crabbe, Solomon Hill, Miles Plumlee and now Turner) in the final seasons of their contracts.