76ers get: Alec Burks, Glenn Robinson III
Warriors get: Three second-round draft picks (2020 via Dallas, 2021 via Denver, 2022 via Toronto)
Get more trade grades for every deal here
Philadelphia 76ers: A
The biggest challenge for the Sixers in making a move before the deadline was always finding matching salary. Philadelphia has one of the league's most imbalanced salary sheets, with three players (Joel Embiid, Tobias Harris and Al Horford) making more than $27 million and no reserves making over $4.8 million (Mike Scott).
Enter the Warriors, who could offer the Sixers a pair of contributors to bolster their depth without requiring any matching salary in return. Since both Burks and Robinson were on one-year deals for the veteran's minimum, Philadelphia can use the minimum salary exception to take them in and will need only to waive two players (or trade them elsewhere) to clear space.
Quietly, Burks has been one of the NBA's best reserve scorers this season. In fact, among eligible candidates for the NBA Sixth Man of the Year Award, Burks ranks third in wins above replacement player (WARP) by my metric, behind Derrick Rose and Lou Williams.
By ramping up his 3-point attempts, Burks has scored with the best efficiency of his career. Though Burks had been a reasonably accurate shooter beyond the arc, he had never taken more than 4.8 3-point attempts per 36 minutes before increasing that to 5.8 so far this season. His 84 treys are already a career high by a wide margin. That also makes him a better fit in some ways than Rose for the Sixers, as Burks is also a threat playing off the ball alongside Ben Simmons.
After a disappointing season in Detroit, where he shot just 29% from 3-point range, Robinson too has excelled in the Bay Area. He is back to 40% beyond the arc, bringing his career mark to 38%. A strong 6-foot-6, Robinson can defend multiple positions and will fit in well with Philadelphia defensively.
Adding a pair of rotation-caliber players will give Brett Brown plenty of options the rest of the season -- perhaps too many on the perimeter, with rookie Matisse Thybulle getting playing time because of his defense, Shake Milton performing well recently in a starting role in place of the injured Josh Richardson and Furkan Korkmaz perhaps still the team's best outside shooter.
Last year, Brown joked about a "quiet tournament" after the deadline for wing playing time between Korkmaz, James Ennis III (who is still in the mix too) and Jonathon Simmons. Something similar might take place this season with a far stronger group of competitors. Given that all the deal cost the 76ers was a handful of second-round picks likely to fall near the end of the draft, and it managed to keep them below the luxury-tax line, this was a strong piece of business for Philadelphia.
Golden State Warriors: B+
As with last month's deal sending Willie Cauley-Stein to Dallas, this deal serves several purposes for the Warriors. It saves Golden State money in terms of the luxury tax, clears roster spots, adds to the team's depleted stock of second-round picks and also rewards veterans for playing well in a tough situation this season.
The decision to trade Robinson was perhaps the toughest of the three players moved, since he was the most likely candidate to return to a full-strength Warriors team in 2020-21. However, non-Bird rights -- the weakest form of Bird rights -- would have allowed Golden State to offer only 120% of Robinson's minimum salary without dipping into a cap exception to re-sign him. If so desired, the Warriors can still use part of their taxpayer midlevel exception to bring Robinson back in a 3-and-D role this summer.
As for the tax bill, trading Robinson and Burks and replacing them with minimum-salary players for the remainder of the season saves Golden State nearly $5 million in taxes. More intriguingly, the Warriors are now within shouting distance of getting out of the tax entirely, which wouldn't mean much to this year's modest tax bill but would have huge ramifications by taking Golden State out of the repeater tax in 2020-21.
Being a repeater would cost the Warriors an extra dollar for every dollar they spend over the tax line next season. If they use their entire $17 million trade exception from the Andre Iguodala deal and the entirety of the tax midlevel, Golden State could end up more than $30 million into the tax. So there's incentive to avoid paying the repeater tax, though it would still be challenging because the Warriors have to fill the roster spots they create by trading additional players.
Avoiding the tax entirely would require Golden State to either trade center Kevon Looney or two out of three players from the group of recent first-round picks -- Jacob Evans, Jordan Poole and Omari Spellman -- by Thursday's deadline.
If the Warriors are done, the roster spots they've opened up with this trade would allow them to convert Ky Bowman and Marquese Chriss from two-way contracts to full NBA deals and still have two roster spots left open.