Utah trades Devin Harris to Atlanta for Marvin Williams

Check out ESPN’s rundown here:

Sources:  Marvin Williams off to Utah

This is apparently what it feels like to wonder aloud why your team’s General Manager did nothing through the NBA Draft only to look up a week later and see that 2/5s of the starting lineup has changed.

There is a lot to say about this, but for now, let’s take care of one misconception that has floated around a little bit:  Devin Harris is on the books for one more year at over 8 million dollars, and so is Marvin Williams.  The difference is that Williams has one more year on his contract as a player option at 7.5 million dollars.  It is hard to say whether he will exercise his option or not as it likely depends on how the next season goes.  However, either way, this doesn’t hurt Utah’s cap situation very significantly.  The cap situation after next season was getting so amazingly good that it was almost a bad thing- remember, the new Collective Bargaining Agreement instated a salary floor, meaning that if Utah couldn’t get enough solid free agents next summer (or agree on extensions with current players), they’d have to hand out some bad contracts just to reach the minimum threshold.  So the dream for James Harden lives on!

We’ll have more thoughts soon to come about the trade as well as our untimely farewell to Devin Harris. Until then, we can watch Williams’ highlights in Utah’s quadruple-overtime loss to Atlanta earlier this year with terribly mixed emotions:

Video highlights, as usual, credited to @ProdigyJF