among the many wrinkles spawned by the harden acquisition, the first thing that came into mind after seeing the players we gave up was how imbalanced our roster is now. we gave up pretty much all of our rotational wing depth besides mann for harden. we now have 6 guys who are worthy of guard minutes in the rotation with westbrook, harden, mann, hyland, george, and powell. we only really have 3 wings that are worthy of consistent minutes in klaw, pg and mann. we also have tucker who honestly looked washed out there tonight.

i’m anticipating us initially with westbrook and harden as our starters with bones, powell, and mann being the 1, 2, and 3 off the bench for the time being, but i loathe the idea of more 3 or 4 guard lineups especially with plumlee out there with them. i think eventually, we’ll shift to mann or potentially even kobe/tucker replacing westbrook as the starter to relieve kawhi of defending PFs and give westbrook more opportunities to have the ball in his hands coming off the bench. regardless, the bones/powell/westbrook/plumlee lineup has proven to be hot garbage statistically, and i feel like some of those guys would be better off traded off into a better fit, ideally a wing/big type player. i think out of those guards, powell is the most expendable and likeliest to be moved.

i’m just thinking now about guys we could potentially add with what little assets we have left. realistically, we can’t really add a pf/sf/c that were as good fits for us like Rico, but all we really need to add is a player who is at the very least a big body who isn’t a defensive liability and is also a willing shooter who you can’t comfortably leave wide open. i’m thinking about guys like kyle anderson or larry nance. who are some other players that we could also look to swap some of our guard surplus for?