2025-26 Team Developments: Trades / Free Agents / News / Rumors / Ideas

The report on Smart wasn’t out there before a couple days ago, I doubt that’s why. They’ve been reportedly trying to do a consolidation trade for weeks, I just think Rob just doesn’t like to do those kinds of trades, to give up any assets whatsoever to clear roster spots, just like we didn’t do one last year and were stuck with Cam, Wood, etc for a lot of the season.

 

It’s the same excuses as usual, “without sacrificing significant draft assets”, meaning we treat 2nd round picks like gold unless we’re trading them for a player we eventually plan to just let walk. Our FO is good in areas, but this doesn’t seem to be one of them, and yet again the margins suffer.

 

This has been an A grade off season as far as I’m concerned. Sure I would have liked to keep Goodwin but not at the expense of just giving away Knecht. If someone told me we could get Smart and Ayton for basically free and all we had to do was cut Shake and Goodwin, I would take that deal 10 times out of 10. I just find it had to understand why people think this was not a great off season for us. No we didn’t get an MVP or Joker but get real, that was never going to happen anyhow for our trash. We still have our 2031 FRP and nothing is stopping us from continuing to see if someone shakes loose before the trade deadline.

 

Who says we have to give up Knecht though? We have Gabe and Kleber’s expiring contracts, we have Rui as a nice trade piece, we had Milton’s expiring money, and we haven’t done anything with it. I’m not freaking out here, so please nobody take it that way, I’m just saying, teams make deals with that sort of stuff all the time. No, Goodwin isn’t a star, but he’s yet another solid player we found and watched progress to a rotation guy, and who is now just gone because we couldn’t make room another way. We have had a very solid offseason overall, but it doesn’t mean small things like this don’t matter. We also now have an open roster spot like we like to have going in, but we don’t have any money under the apron to actually sign anyone with it. Something still needs to be done at some point to improve this roster, a bench of Gabe, Smart, LaRavia, Knecht, Vando and Hayes isn’t very balanced and honestly doesn’t make much sense on paper.

 

True, I do think a consolidation trade will happen before the deadline to address the bench. You could start with bench backcourt of Gabe and Smart but they both play PG really. That proposed trade to Portland just makes way too much sense if possible at all. Gabe, Maxi and Knecht for Timelord and Thybull would be ideal.