Yesterday’s trade sending Etan Thomas, Oleksiy Pecherov, Darius Songaila, and the number five pick in the draft to Minnesota for Mike Miller and Randy Foye seems like a pretty excellent deal to me. It’s obviously not the kind of deal that turns you into a championship contender, but I think it very well could be the kind of deal that returns the Wizards to the peaks of averageness that the team enjoyed in the 2007 and 2008 campaigns—about as good as you can expect from this franchise.
Of course, a great deal depends on whether or not the team will once again be wracked by injuries. Gilbert Arenas is the obvious question mark, but this deal actually leaves the team incredibly thin in terms of big men so Brendan Haywood’s ability to stay on the floor will be crucial. Also with what will now be a very scorer-heavy team, one hopes Flip Saunders will pay attention to efficiency issues—Miller has a better True Shooting Percentage than Foye or Caron Butler or Antawn Jamison. Arenas was about as good as Miller in this regard at his peak.
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