The Portland Trail Blazers' acquisition of Marcus Camby from the Los Angeles Clippers on Tuesday is an important one for fantasy owners, and not only because Camby is a top-40 player on the Player Rater (and even better in leagues which count turnovers). Many other fantasy-worthy players will be impacted on both squads in various ways.
Considering Camby's moving from a team somewhere in the middle of the pack in terms of pace to the slowest team in the league, it stands to reason that there will be slightly fewer blocks, steals and rebounds to go around. Still, it's not a huge difference; he's not moving from the Golden State Warriors to the Blazers, for instance, and considering the fact that his expiring contract pretty much makes him a rental for the rest of the season, I'd expect Camby to play plenty of minutes, maybe even more than the 31.3 per game he's been playing in L.A. Basically, I don't see his value changing much at all.
For the Trail Blazers, this trade makes up for the fact that they've lost two extremely good rebounding centers, Greg Oden and Joel Przybilla, already this season. Juwan Howard, an afterthought heading into the season, has played more minutes to this point than any Trail Blazers big man not named LaMarcus Aldridge. Howard has averaged 7.1 rebounds per game, along with better than 50 percent shooting from the floor since the start of January, but won't get nearly enough minutes to maintain the little value he had now that Camby's in the fold.
Howard shared minutes during the past couple of months with two young Blazers bigs, Dante Cunningham and Jeff Pendergraph. Each has shown some flashes, but neither has seen enough minutes to be fantasy-worthy and that certainly won't change now. The Blazer most affected by this move has to be Aldridge. Aldridge has spent the entire season slowly improving his rebounding average, and the reason his recent rankings have been much better than his overall season ranking is because he's been playing an insane amount of minutes. His 37.3 minutes per game on the season is good for 20th in the league, but the 40-plus minutes he's been playing during the past two months would be third in the league if he kept it up for an entire season. Obviously, that's not the Blazers' plan. Aldridge's minutes will go back down to the 35-37 per-game range. Add to that the fact that he's now playing alongside one of the league's best rebounders, and you can probably assume his rebounds will dip back to around 7.5 per game as long as Camby stays healthy. Factoring in small cuts in his stats across the board due to fewer minutes, and Aldridge no longer looks anything like a top-50 fantasy player the rest of the way....................
