Warriors' offseason whiffs led to Jimmy Butler deal

This summer, the Warriors acquired Kyle Anderson, Lindy Waters III, De'Anthony Melton and Buddy Hield. After Melton tore his ACL, the Warriors traded him for Dennis Schroder.

Now, the Warriors sent out all those players, save Hield, in a deal that brought back Jimmy Butler. Here's how they were doing this season.

Anderson: 5.3 points, 3.1 rebounds, 2.3 assists. He's on a three-year deal for $27M.

Waters: 5.5 points, 33.1 percent on three-pointers.

Schroder (as a Warrior): 10.6 points, 32.2 percent on threes, 37.5 percent field goals, 4.4 assists, two turnovers.

Anderson and Schroder were disappointments while Waters had fallen out of head coach Steve Kerr's rotation in recent weeks.

Andrew Wiggins is having a solid season, but the Warriors front office was "aggressively shopping" him this summer and dangling him in trade talks at last year's deadline, primarily to get out of the more than $58M owed to him the next two seasons.

In other words, two of the players the Warriors sent out for Butler had salaries they wanted to get rid of, and the two others were expendable because of their play. They needed those regrettable contracts to match Butler's salary. Although if the deals had worked out, the Warriors probably wouldn't have had to scramble to get Butler and give him a massive contract extension in the first place.

It's a strange feature of the NBA. Sometimes you need bad contracts in order to add great players.