The coaches were announced for the All-Star Game Gay, for his part, made a memorable Raptors debut, leading the team with 20 points in a win over the Los Angeles Clippers. Still, Rudy Gay gives Raptors fan possibly their first big name player to cheer for since the loss of Chris Bosh. Nowhere is this divide more apparent than with normally more reserved Yahoo! Sports contributor Adrian Wojnarowski who, in a reaction piece very critical about the trade, describes Hollinger as "a statistician who worked for a cable sports company".Īs far as the Raptors, the move makes very little basketball sense in the long term, what with the $37 million dollar contract and the fact that the Raptors won't be serious contenders at any point during it. Reaction to the trade has been almost neatly divided between those who see themselves as more "old school basketball" types and analysts who are warmer to Hollinger's more statistically minded approach. (Of course, what else would you expect the owner to say in this situation?) In some quarters, reaction to the trade is influenced by the fact that current Vice President of Basketball Operations and former analyst John Hollinger is seen as one of the architects of the trade. Some of this hostility may be against new Grizzlies owner Robert Pera, who took to the internet recently in response to the backlash, saying that the trade made the Grizzlies "a far more dangerous playoff team today". (Certainly Harden didn't mind that trade, there's very little possibility that Harden would have had the opportunity to score a triple-double if he were still with the Thunder.) The Oklahoma City Thunder made a similar decision right before the regular season when they traded away James Harden to the Houston Rockets when they couldn't come to agreement on an extension that would work for both sides. If this move allows the Grizzlies to keep Mike Conley, Zach Randolph and Marc Gasol in the long run, that alone could make it a successful one. Plus, Gay was owed $37 million over the next two years, when, it should be noted, changes in the salary cap in the new collective bargaining agreement would have made it prohibitively expensive for the Grizzlies to have kept their current roster together. Meanwhile Rudy Gay, making $16.5 million this season, was averaging 17.2 points and 5.2 rebounds, very good but not superstar numbers for a player who doesn't contribute much else beyond scoring. After that 12-2 start, the Grizzlies went 17-13 before the Gay trade. What these critics don't take account is that the Grizzlies, who were overachieving in their hot start, have cooled off quite a bit since. The Memphis Grizzlies, a contending team, traded away the deal's best player for reasons that were mostly financial. In some respects, the critics of the trade were right. Not finished there, the Grizzlies then sent Calderon to the Detroit Pistons for Austin Daye and Tayshaun Prince. Memphis sent Gay and backup center Hammed Haddadi to the Toronto Raptors for forward Ed Davis, guard Jose Calderon and a second round pick in the 2013 Draft. The Grizzlies, despite being serious contenders in the Western Conference, traded away one of their biggest scoring threats in Gay for reasons that were at least as much about money as they were about basketball. If you heard the post-trade analysis, you would have thought that the Memphis Grizzlies had pulled out a full-on Miami Marlins fire sale when they traded Rudy Gay to the Toronto Raptors last week.