I'm wondering whether he'd trade Bradley or Lee (and possibly Bass) to get a halfway decent big.
I think trading Bradley requires the return of a big who is more than "halfway decent".
Agreed. I value his contributions to our perimeter defense too much. In part is why I'm more willing to trade Rondo than Bradley.
In the 2010 playoffs Tony Allen played terrific defense against all three of Wade, LeBron and Kobe. As good as TA played he wasn't anywhere close to being one of our 4 most important players in those playoffs. Wanting to keep a role player over someone who plays like Rondo does in the playoffs won't do much for our chances of being contenders.
Yes, because we're trading Rondo for potato chips.
All that said, the guard rotation, depth, and amount of ball-handling this team has is superior to what we had back then.
I would hope that you're not comparing our current guard rotation without Rondo to our 2010 guards. Even aside from Rondo, Ray was significantly better than anyone else we have and the combination of Ray, Nate, Quis and TA would easily hold up in terms of depth and ball-handling to what we have now.
Well, was really putting more weight on our preparedness of a team without Rondo.
Of all Nate clearly has the better handles, but gives up too much size as defender. Tony Allen, turnover machine.
Ray is the interesting one because he is indeed the superior offensive player, but he really can't fill in effectively as a ball-handler for us.
Quis is the X factor for me because he's really the SG/SF role we're currently missing, and been calling for Ainge to fill since the season began, and he has pretty good ball handling.
TA and Quis are also very limited offensive players, they gave us no floor spacing. Nate, well who knows what the heck he was going to do once he got on the floor.
I much rather have the balance our current team has, defense + ballhandling + shooting + capability of creating shots from multiple places on the floor. But since we have an incomplete roster at the moment, I'm at a disadvantage particular since Barbosa went down, he would've been another player capable of filling the role.
Also, still haven't filled that SG/SF role. Closest we have is Terrence Williams on a 10-day contract, but we'll see what he will manage to bring, but on a skillset level, he's a superior playmaker than all of the above. Maybe we should give Green some consideration? But I'm not going there. Lastly we have Crawford who can also do some ball-handling, and it's as wild as Nate was pretty much (probably even wilder), but he's just an extra body at this point.
But most important of all, we have Bradley, Terry, and Lee all at least under contract for at least 3 years, other than trade plans Ainge has, there's zero uncertainty of what we have with them and what our guard rotation would look like in the coming years if we decided to move Rondo, and what it would mean for our ability to run an offense. They take care of the ball much better than TA, Nate, Quis, Ray.
So yes, if the exercise is what team is better prepared to lead a team without Rondo, I'd take our current situation over that one. I'm still a bit on wait and see mode on how they'll look in the playoffs, but I'm fairly confident they'll do just fine.