Within months of passing on Damian Lillard, Sacramento have decided to give away the player they picked instead of him. Seemingly already disenfranchised with their big man out of Kansas, they traded him for another one, and a jump-shooting backup big man, rather than wait it out. This accords with Sacramento’s grand plan, that of dumping valuable young assets to open up negligible amounts of financial flexibility, then spending it on backups. At the very least, they got Patrick Patterson this time.
Patterson broke out this year as a scorer, scoring 11 points in 25 minutes per game, and doing so at just short of 52 percent shooting with a mostly face-up game. He has occasional three-point range and a fantastic mid-range jumper — it’s not hard to project those two things being the inverse of each other some day soon, as that is the way the jump-shooting big man tends to go. Channing Frye was in a similar situation once. Patterson scores, and scores efficiently, without needing much of the playbook to do so. For this reason, he projects as a useful role player for several years. However, Sacramento’s unimpressive recent record on player development isn’t the place for someone with such big holes in his game. Patterson doesn’t box out, doesn’t defend any position, and isn’t tough enough to rectify those problems. He’ll make some jumpers, some fast break dunks, and occasionally carry the team for a quarter, but there’s an awful lot to do.
The rest of the deal has little bearing on Sacramento’s end product. Francisco Garcia will be a mildly useful defender and shooter for a year, but is essentially irrelevant, robbed of his talent by multiple injuries. So are likely to be Tyler Honeycutt (a once tantalizing prospect who hasn’t gotten anywhere, not helped by injuries), Cole Aldrich (same, except with the injuries) and Toney Douglas (whose offensive game still hasn’t recovered from whatever it was that caused him to lose it). Everyone else is a backup, only ever going to be backups, and either expiring or unguaranteed.
