According to team sources, the Warriors are preparing to make a play for Milwaukee’s center. He’s high on their list, but one source didn’t sound too optimistic.
First off, Bogut is hurt.  Thanks to an injured left ankle, he could be done for the season. Ideally, the Warriors would like to trade for someone who can help  now.
Also, Bogut’s price is high.Â
A common theme in reports of rumored trade deals is the overwhelmingly arduous, difficult work that a significant NBA trade requires to reach completion. Aligning money and player additions to a trade in such a way that is both pleasing and possible for two or more teams is a considerable task, one that often necessitates revisited details upon revisited details. Because of the wide variety of variables in play and the reluctance of many GMs to take on significant risk, most discussed trades never reach the final stage of actual completion.
Upon first glance, this trade appears to fall in line with others that never reached completion. The Warriors desperately need a center like Andrew Bogut. Bogut isn’t the player he once was, but he remains one of the best defensive centers in the league, and capable of strong offensive production, though no longer with regularity. Though Ekpe “Plus-Minus Superstar” Udoh has acquitted himself well defensively for the Warriors, he’s undersized and often a liability on offense. The Warriors need a transforming center, one that can fully change the game on defense and who matches up well with offensively-focused power forward David Lee. If he’s healthy, Bogut could easily be that player, a player who shifts the Warriors from perennial mediocrity to something more hopeful, something mired in playoff contention.
But with so many moving pieces, things are always more complicated than an immediate solution.
But even if the Warriors come up with a package the Bucks might like – for instance Andris Biedrins, Kwame Brown’s expiring, Dorell Wright and Ekpe Udoh — Golden State would have to take back on of two players they really don’t want.
Stephen Jackson or Drew Gooden.
When “Stephen Jackson or Drew Gooden” becomes a necessary concession, things become infinitely more complicated.
But maybe the Warriors would, and should, be willing to accept the 3-year, $20 million cap-draining deal of Gooden. If the Warriors give up Udoh and Biedrins in the deal, as Thompson suggests in his post, the team will be left with one less power forward or center in the rotation. Gooden has served as a decent rotational player for the Bucks this season, but his all-too-frequent stretches of odd ineffectiveness and inefficiency make his sizable contract appear as a timid albatross. Still, the Warriors could do worse than adding a player like Gooden to act as the team’s third or fourth big.
Is the possible price of one intermediately bad contract and the lurking threat of continued injury to Bogut enough to keep the Warriors from finally adding a significant interior defensive presence? In the realm of necessary change and the coalescence of players that meld well together, as Lee and Bogut likely would (and as Monta Ellis and Stephen Curry unfortunately do not), it isn’t an overly high duty to pay, especially for the sum of transformative defense. But it involves tangible risk and sizable change, something the Warriors’ franchise has often shied from in years past.
Faced with an opportunity to break free from an unsuccessful trend, the Warriors must either choose the path of Andrew Bogut and the unknown, or the understood path of waiting and hoping for a preferable, safer opportunity. Risk duels with stagnation within the confines of a franchise, and the NBA wheels continue to turn.
