Or significant salary cap space last summer. Instead, we’re finally getting out from under KT’s deal, as well as SAR and Mikki—both of whom wouldn’t have been signed, even if Webber was as unproductive as some say (unproductive enough, I’ll repeat, to win the Player of the Month award right before he was traded).

I would still do the Peja/Ron trade, in fact, I would have traded Peja sooner. Right after his “MVP” year, when he failed again to do anything in the playoffs.

Coulda, woulda, shoulda, I know. But I reject the revisionism I’m seeing around here lately.

is like arguing the Ralph Sampson-Jim Petersen trade. Many forget that Petersen was done shortly after the trade, and the overall net impact to the Kings was about $600,000 a year for two years.

The Webber exoduse trade is really a non-deal. The idea was good – break the $20 million a year contract into three smaller and easier to manage/trade contracts. If not for the Kenny Thomas factor, it might have worked. But it didn’t, and the Kings have to ride out an extra year of K9(woof!). On the other hand, they did free up some money over the past few years by dealing Webber, which has come in handy when it was time to extend Martin (yea!) and sign Mikki Moore (boo!).

Webber’s injury had a castrophic effect on this franchise. The trade was just a bi-product of that catastrophe.