Rockets - Yao is entering the Bill Walton portion his career (repeated lower leg injuries). TMac is also injury prone, never wins & is the most overrated guy in the league. Little else on that squad.

Mavs - Crippling trade last year has their arrow pointing down. Still a playoff team, but barely.

Suns - Nash working his way past his prime. Staudimire talented but won't find his offense as easy as Nash declines & w/o Dantoni's creative sets. Little else on that squad, especially if Barbosa is sold off at a discount.

This teams will be replaced in the West pecking order by the TBlazers, Sonics (but in 09-10) & one of the Northern CA teams (but the Warrior situation has a lot yet to play out FA wise).

Stoudemire averaged 25pts per game his 2nd yr in the league after they traded away Marbury. He is even a better player now then at that point in time.

He will continue to average 20+pts with or without Nash.

But Amare won't "win" without a strong PG. I think after Nash moves on Pheniox will probably find a PG through the draft and form PG-PF duo. They will win a good amount of games every yr but fail in the Playoffs because Amare doesn't create shots for other out of the post nor does he dominant defensive presents. Though he still has a ton of potential in the defensive area.

Thats my prediction.

I agree about Dallas coming up short. Face the facts and rebuild while your aging players like Dirk and Josh still have trade value. That will shorten the time you need to get back to the top.

Posted by franco12:

I thought the Kidd trade was a good one, and it might still turn out as such.

But, the one thing that deal and the phoenix deal point out is making changes mid season in personal is hard- that's why I think if we're trading Zach or Crawford or Curry, better to do now in the summer if possible.

Yeah, better trade Curry, Zach or Craw now... or else... we won't win the title....?

I don't think we're in the category of teams that needs to worry about that quite yet.

I don't think the Spurs future is that bright. Sure they will make the playoffs but they might fall to the 5 & 6 seeds rather the top 3. They really showed their age last yr.

Posted by JohnWallace44:

Posted by franco12:

I thought the Kidd trade was a good one, and it might still turn out as such.

But, the one thing that deal and the phoenix deal point out is making changes mid season in personal is hard- that's why I think if we're trading Zach or Crawford or Curry, better to do now in the summer if possible.

Yeah, better trade Curry, Zach or Craw now... or else... we won't win the title....?

I don't think we're in the category of teams that needs to worry about that quite yet.

no- I am thinking about the teams we're likely to trade with. I just think after what happened last year with some of the teams that made deadline deals, we'd be more likely to pull of a trade of zach now rather than at the deadline mid season.

Of course, there might be some desperate teams.