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Brook Lopez Trade to Include Hornets?

By John Woodcock

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The Brooklyn Nets are shopping the large contract of Brook Lopez to anyone who might be interested. The Nets weren’t dumb, so they made sure to talk to the Charlotte Hornets. Why the Hornets? The Hornets made a big deal about shopping Lance Stephenson earlier, but could not wrestle up any takers. The Nets are now possibly to go about a change of ownership and Lopez is replaceable with Mason Plumlee playing well now.

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Brook Lopez On The Block

This story first broke yesterday in a report from Yahoo Sports’ Adrian Wojnarowski and intrigued me slightly. I headed over to the NBA Trade Machine on ESPN and looked what it would take to deal Lopez for Stephenson. With the Nets possessing several trade exemptions, Lopez could be had for a combination of Lance Stephenson and Bismack Biyombo.

Lopez is a guy that the Hornets/Bobcats passed on in order to draft DJ Augustin back in the day because Larry Brown needed more ball-handling and did not trust Raymond Felton yet. The move makes some sense in a video game way, but in really in real world way.

The problem is that Lopez is really expensive ($16 million this year, $17 million next year), plays little defense, and occupies the same space as Al Jefferson on offense. So I was really hoping that we would not get conned by the Nets into doing this.

Enter the Thunder

However the two teams were smarter than that, they dragged in a third team. A report by Chris Broussard of ESPN said that the Thunder had entered the picture. The Oklahoma City Thunder, in some desperation because of injuries to key players, have always looked for post help in the Durant-Westbrook era. Lopez might actually work out for them.

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    • The problem is what player do the Hornets get? In this new scenario, the Hornets only lose Stephenson and pick up Jarrett Jack from the Nets and Jeremy Lamb from the Thunder. I have always liked Jack, a big point guard, who could spell or play with Kemba Walker as needed. However he makes Brian Roberts kind of superfluous.

    Lamb is a 6’5” wing who is not a three point shooter. He shoots threes at 34% which the statistical version of breaking even. Sure it’s better than Gerald Henderson’s career percentage, but a downgrade from Stephenson’s career percentage.

    So I can’t really justify this trade either. It just looks like the Hornets are dumping Stephenson. Perhaps this is setting up a future deal. Anything else would be an admission that the Hornets have really given up on this season.

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