Breaking down Bill Simmons’ breakdown of the Phoenix Suns’ offseason

Trade Anderson for T Johnson

At first, this trade also did not make any sense.

The Phoenix Suns had just traded a player making $15M in 2019-20, for a player that was going to make $19M+ that season. Why add  salary when they needed as much of it as possible to utilize on other players than can actually make the team somewhat decent?

However, Tyler Johnson is not only a guard (which the team needed desperately no matter how average  the player was), plus, he is actually still fairly productive.

Ryan Anderson, on the other hand, had fallen off of the map.

The 3-point sniper who had averaged 38.2% from beyond the arc in his career prior to his acquisition by the Suns, suddenly could not hit the rim to save his life.

Johnson helped Phoenix last season and will help them again this year as a decent backup, and then in the summer of 2020 his contract will be gone and that money can be used elsewhere.

For the Heat, they probably knew they were going to waive-and-stretch Johnson after last season, so with Anderson’s contract being slightly less, when they eventually waived-and-stretched his deal out, it saved them a little extra money on the cap.

That said: he is still being paid $5,214,583 in each of the next three seasons to not be there.

I’d say, James Jones dodged a tremendous bullet and this deal was an absolute win for him.