People overvalue fit over quality. If you want fit you might as well get Luke Babbit to play with Gobert. He can space the floor better than most options being thrown around. Is that a good idea, though? Not really. Babbit is just not particularly good player and even though he can stretch the floor he's so bad in other areas that it would crash down our team.
If we have border-line all-star Favors I see no reason to trade him and I'd make everything possible to retain him. Just several months ago we thought it's all but a done deal that he will be restructured and extended, nobody was thinking that we are freeing capspace to R&E Hill... you know why? Because Favors has been the better player than Hill for the last 2-3 years before this year's injuries. He hasn't suddenly forgotten how to play the game. I'd contend even in his current injured/limited condition he's head and shoulders above anything else we have. He's still an amazing positional and team defender, even if he lacks lift. You just have to watch him on D and see the precision of his rotations and help defense, the small things he does, like taking small steps to the side to impeded opposing players running around screens. None of our other bigs do that. He still makes the right plays on offense(UNLIKE Lyles, who for some reason has forgotten how pass and find the open man in favor of getting contested floaters in the lane). If you look at his shooting splits offensively, you can argue he's showing some good signs of improvement and expanding his game. His shooting from almost all ranges is at career high or close to career high. The only thing that massively brings him down is the thing that requires him to be the healthy athletic beast we know him to be - the finishing around the rim and drawing fouls. He's currently shooting at around 53%, which is about 20% lower than his finishing around the rim in the last 4-5 years!!!! I don't know how to emphasize this enough. This is insane disparity between what he was and what he's doing now! This is the entirety of his struggles right now. If he was shooting at the rim what he shot last year, he'd be having a career year right now(pace or minutes adjusted). This is about 90% of his struggles right now. The other 10 is things he can't do on D, that he used to do, again because of him seemingly lacking lift and explosion.
With all that said, I'm not on principle against trading Favors, I'm just against trading him for pennies on the dollar at his lowest trade value ever. If it were me and the negotiations with Hill went nowhere, I'd try to strike a deal with Favors with declining salary in the future and use his current form/injuries as a negotiation tool to try to make him agree to a R&E at 23-21-15-15 or something of that sort. I think this contract will be a bargain in the last two years. Of course this all is with the caveat that our medical staff doesn't expect some long-term health issues and they truly think he just needs time off in the off-season to get it all fixed.
