Ben DuBose

But if you're the Suns and you're not close to winning a title anyway, how much sense does it make to invest in a 37-year-old who doesn't have an unlimited time window left when instead you can improve the other aspects of your team and give yourself a longer window?

And so they made the trade largely for the culture, the leadership, the consistent effort, the things that Dylan provides from an intangible perspective.

And then Jalen Green provides some of that.

He competes much more defensively than people think, but he's also an upside bet because he's still relatively young in the grand scheme.

And so that's why the trade made sense for them.

They needed to reset with where they were organizationally.

And from a Houston standpoint, you got to the playoffs, but you just didn't have that high-end shot-making potential there.

to beat the great teams.

That was pretty clear after that series against the Warriors.

And so enter KD, and the hope is that you can get back to a similar situation to what you were in a year ago, and then KD can put you over the top.

But then you do lose Dylan and Jalen, and...

We're also talking about trading two for one.

Well, who has been the guy that's stepped into, you know, KD has largely filled Dylan's minutes, especially with DFS being relatively unavailable.

So who has filled Jalen's minutes?

To a large extent, Reed Shepard.

And Reed Shepard is even more volatile than Jalen.

Like, we always talked about Jalen being volatile.

Well, Reed's floor is even lower because with his size and just 21 years old, year two, defensively, there are nights when he's borderline unplayable.

But then the upside is even higher because of the ability to hit threes at volume.

So you lost the consistency.