Charlotte | Atlanta

Charlotte Hornets Send
Anderson Varejao - $8,000,000
Aaron Afflalo - $7,750,000
Ramon Sessions - $4,000,000
Total - $19,750,000

Atlanta Hawks Send
Rudy Gay - $19,317,326
Phil Pressey - $492,548
Evan Fournier - $854,389
2017 IND 1st
2015 MIL 2nd
Total - $20,664,263

We finally get a deal done with BI - haha - it took way too long!

Charlotte accepts.

We accomplish quite a few things with this trade. We have been interested in going small, and Rudy will help us do that. We expect Gay to slot in at power forward and, as a result of his closer proximity to the basket, we expect his FG% to increase.

We also have had to admit something with this trade - our offseason free agent acquisitions simply didn't improve our team. You would have thought that Sessions/Evans/MKG/Stoudemire/Varejao and a deep bench would be an improvement over Bryant/MKG, but.... it wasn't..... for some reason.

With this trade, we send our recent free agents to the new Eastern Conference favorite. I'm sure they're thrilled to jump from our ship to BI's.

Finally, this trade gives us flexibility going forward. We will have significant cap space this offseason and we acquire an early 2nd rounder this year and Indy's 1st in 2017.

All in, we're happy with the value here. Now we'll see if we can increase our FG% as a team with our small-ball lineup - SSOL anyone?

Fricken awesome dealing with you BI - so pumped we finally found one - good luck against the Pels in the finals!

Confirmed.

We give up the Gay penetration and finishing ability of Rudy for Sessions with Cousins. To bad we don't have caproom for Kevin, so much for Love not costing a thing. Hehe.

Anyway, Rudy Gay has quietly been super efficient and isn't that far off from an allstar berth this season, he'll flourish with the Hornets. For us he wasn't a great fit due to his high usage rate and the unexpected emergence of Harrison Barnes. With Varejao we get a PF/C who will play starter minutes off the bench behind Hibbert/Cousins. He's averaging 11/10 on 1.2 stls and is one of the best defensive/rebounding big men in the league. He's low usage and our big man rotation all shoot 70 FT% or better and draw fouls at a high rate.

Sessions and Afflalo are shooting 37% and 38% from 3, given that our team plays inside / out we wanted to make sure we couldn't be zoned. Lawson is a drive and kick PG and 3 point shooting isn't his strength so the ability of Sessions/Jack/Thabo/Meeks/Afflalo/Barnes to space is key to our offense. Sessions is also an above average playmaker, as is Jack and Lawson is #7 in the league in APG (over Paul/Curry/Westbrook) so we have guards who can find the shooters on the perimeter and get the ball down low to Cousins.

The roster is finally complete going into the trade deadline and given the age of our core + no key players expiring we hope to replicate what OP's Heat did the past 2 years. Win back to back titles.

Good dealing SS.

APPROVED