If the threshold is championship or the trade wasn’t successful then 99% of the transactions in the nba were failures. The Mike trade was a win… we just needed a bigger win.
My personal threshold isn’t a championship. We didn’t get anywhere close to a championship. But when you’ve got Don and Rudy on your team I think the threshold is a bit more than being a better regular season team. Conley was just one of a long string of moves that made it very difficult to advance further in the playoffs and almost impossible to win a championship. It wouldn’t have been as bad if we didn’t fill the roster with bad perimeter defenders and continue to double down on that roster composition + coach.
We ended up recouping a lot of the assets back. But again, there was a big opportunity cost in using up our Don/Rudy with those guys. We had a team that we knew would get cooked in the playoffs, we continued to get cooked, and we made no significant changes.
But Conley definitely does not the worst move/non-move of that Jazz era. It’s just not a move I would do again. He was always going to be a bad pairing with Mitchell in the playoffs.