If Last Year Was This Year..

We've all talked about the time-share and the crunch at SF and the potential loss of trade value for players on the short end of PT, but what would happen if, just if..

Last Year WAS This Year

What if, instead of facing a trade-them-while-they're-high sort of situation, our beloved GMs thought long and hard about the upcoming prospectus of their situation and - lo and behold - outsmarted us?

To Put It in Other Words

Where we stand right now, the concern is "player value minus timeshare equals bad", right? Well, as we all know, last year was what everyone expected to be a scrap season with Oden's injury (or possibly even without). We're still young. We're still learning. An intelligent GM (and I think we all believe we have one) would give run to his tradeable players a season ahead of time, right?

So, what with all the threads concerning dumping our players while the time is right (of which I am also guilty, by the bye), perhaps we ought to look at our current tradeable assets and take a long look at how they got there.

Travis Outlaw - I can't be objective here, because I've got an undying #25-love for the man. I would only wear an Outlaw jersey, and don't think I'd change stance if he were traded. That said, what if all the late-game star-turns were predetermined? What if we (a blatant misappropriation of pronouns) were to have given him some star-time run to up his trade value? What if the Trout we've all come to know and love as an unstoppable scoring force was only let loose to up his trade value in the offseason? To me, it's travesty. It's also what might keep me awake all night.

Martell Webster - Again, a little biased, because I think we SHOULD trade him, if the trade is right. But still, he'd be shelved on the bench on any self-respecting NBA team, and would have been developed a la Detroit's Stuckey (i.e. limited minutes - and yes, I know he's not a rookie) had we been putting our best squad on the floor.

Channing Frye - This is a bit of a wildcard. He came up big towards the end of the year, and only played major minutes because of injuries. I only list him because he rounds out our biggest "not-explicitly-contract-related" trade assets.

So, You're Not Really Making a Point

Yeah, not really. I was so excited once I had the idea that I just had to make a fanpost to share it with y'all. Somehow, I seem to have contradicted myself, proved myself sorta wrong and pretty much made myself look stupid. Still, I think I'm putting something out there a lot of people aren't thinking about; at least it hadn't occurred to me until now.

So, to recap, here's the general gist:
Ideally, if we ARE to trade one or more of our players this season, we'd like them to get as much time on the court as possible, so's they'd have their highest real-life (not speculative) value, right? Well, what if that was what last year was, and our leaders KP & co. were doing it all along?

Food for thought, at least, right?