It's the Lockdown Podcast Network, your team every day.

All right, welcome on to a special Supermax contract trade edition of the Hollinger and Duncan NBA show.

It seemed like this trade was kind of fade accompli down to what the compensation was going to be,

what the protections were going to be.

People were kind of debating that before the trade even happened.

But, John, what were your initial impressions of the John Wall-Russle-Westbrook trade. I was a little surprised that it only took a

protected first from Washington in order to pull this trade off. I thought Westbrook had much more

left in the tank than John Wall does. We'll see how that plays out over the course of the year.

But it was almost the only way out of this situation. As I wrote for the Athletic today, almost the only way this situation could end was

with these two guys being traded for each other. There were very few other avenues for these

contracts to be swapped just because of their size and their length and the positions of the

two players involved. Both teams are at least giving

lip service to trying to win this year, but both teams wanted to, or both these point guards,

wanted to relocate. So trading them for each other was really the only plausible outcome to the

point that I had people telling me they were sitting around just basically waiting to be traded for each other.

So that's where we are. I think it's better for Washington than it is for Houston.

But I think both teams are still in a little bit of a pickle regarding their salary caps and their competitiveness.

And what ultimately happens with their all-star shooting cards.

I mean, I don't think this is the move that keeps either James Harden or Bradley Beale in their

locations long term. Yeah, it's really interesting on the price, right? I thought it was the right

price. It was what I was expecting. I think if I were in Washington standpoint, I wouldn't have wanted to give up anything more than this because it is still an incremental upgrade.

As crazy as that is to say, for a guy who was all-MBA last year, I didn't think he'd necessarily, well, maybe I did actually have him as all-M-B-A, at least before the bubble happened.

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