You've Come a Long Way, Trade Deadline

I figure we could use some perspective, or maybe comic relief, on this day of reckoning.

Disclaimer: I'm cheating a little here. This video is from during the Eastern Conference Finals, which means the proposed trade would have gone down in the off-season. And I'm sure it's somehow illegal now to have a trade hinge on an underclassman's willingness to declare for the draft, not to mention stupid to trade away a Hall of Fame center because you might win a coin flip.

Nor is what's notable here isn't that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was nearly, in principle, traded to the Knicks during the 1982 playoffs. Or that Ralph Sampson going to Los Angeles would have altered the course of the eighties. Or the fact that anything involving Michael Ray Richardson is inherently awesome. No, it's the fact that the deal fell apart because it was too complicated, there were too many agents involved, and everyone couldn't sign off on it before Sampson's invented deadline.

Brent Musburger and Kevin Loughery treat this mega-trade as a source of awe not because it's totally ridiculous basketball-wise, but for what an amazing feat of logistics it would have represented. Especially the near-speechless Coach. He acts like he's just seen a UFO, one that offered to serenade his grandmother and do his taxes while playing cards with him all the while. So if you're as busy as I am today, you can blame it all on cell phones.

Video after the jump.

To paraphrase Loughery, I can't believe this is happening to me. To bring it back to the present, I could only see this move happening today if the Knicks were on the receiving end.