The only reason you trade Bradley is if we can bring in a key big man (Josh Smith or Al Jefferson or something) that we know can contribute and fill our biggest holes.
The problem is that our biggest hole right now is not rebounding, it's not inside scoring, it's defense. Bradley fills that hole, so why trade him for a player that is older, that will cost us more money, and will fill a different (less important) hole?
Yes, our rebounding sucks this year - it sucked last year too, and we almost made the finals.
Last year we had a dominant defense, and that gave us a chance. The main things last year that stopped us from getting further were (in order):
(1) Lack of scoring - we were in the bottom 2 among all 16 playoff teams in scoring. We stopped opponents from scoring, but it wasn't enough because we couldn't score ourselves.
(2) Lack of depth - in the last game we competed throught the entire first half, but our lack of bench production meant our key guys (two of whom were injured) had to play massive minutes, and after a 3rd straight series going at least 6 games they were utterly exhausted. We were the stronger team in the first half of game 7, then in the second half we were out of energy, and then Lebron just destroyed us.
(3) Lack of rebounding - this would have either given us extra posessions or limited the Heat's extra positions, and either case would have been valuable without a doubt. At the end of the day though the ability to score is more important because a basket is a guaranteed score, while an offensive rebound is only an
opportunity for a score.
Ultimately this year our scoring has improved
dramatically. Even in our worst offensive games we have been no worse then 'on par' with the offensive numbers we put up last season, and in our better games we have been vastly superior. From memory we we are averaging around 98 PPG this year which is far superior to what we averaged last year.
The problem is that even though we are scoring more points, we are ALLOWING more points. In fact we are allowing more points then we are scoring, and that's becuase our defense is horridly worse then it was last season. If we got our defense back to where it was last season and continued to score at our current rate we would be right around the top of the league regardless of our rebounding situation.
This is why Bradley is more important for us then many people appreciate. He may even be more important to us then Gortat because now that Dooling, Marquis and Pietrus are gone we have
no perimeter defense at all when Bradley isn't in the game.
Gortat helps our interior defense which is great, but KG already doing a great job there. Yes extra defense won't hurt, but it's nowehere near as critical because it's more "padding" a hole rather than filling a hole. We can fight through 15 minutes of no interior defense and still beat playoff teams, but we can't fight through 48 minutes of zero perimeter defense and beat playoff teams.
Oh and before somebody mentions Courtney Lee, his defense has been somewhere in between 'inconsistent' and 'utterly insufficient'. Right now I'd trade Lee for Pietrus in a heartbeat - and I'd tell the other team to keep the extra 4 million in cap space as a gift.