As soon as the trade went down that swapped Josh Giddey for Alex Caruso last offseason, consensus opinion appeared to be that the OKC Thunder were the winners in the exchange with the Chicago Bulls.
As the months went by, with Oklahoma City boasting the league's top defense and ultimately winning a championship while Chicago went playoff-less for the seventh time in eight years, such a belief only seemed to gain more traction.
Now, following the latest news that the Bulls officially shelled out a lucrative new four-year, $100 million contract extension to Giddey, there are no more cases to be made in support of Chicago having potentially come away with the upper hand in the transaction.
Instead, it's now clearer than ever that the Thunder are the obvious victors.
Josh Giddey extension with Bulls solidifies Thunder trade win
Now, this is not to say that the deal that Giddey received deserves to be classified as bad.
Considering the 6-foot-8 floor general just posted a career-best season, one where he dropped averages of 14.6 points, 8.1 rebounds, 7.2 assists, and 1.2 steals per game on 46.5 percent shooting from the field and 37.8 percent shooting from deep, he proved he's a solid starting point guard in the league, and the going rate for such a talent is roughly $25 million per year.
However, though one could easily make the case that he's worth the price tag, this doesn't negate the fact that the Thunder were right to have moved on from him.
Had he stayed in the Sooner State, reports are that OKC was planning on utilizing him as a reserve piece rather than as a primary starter, something that inevitably would have driven Giddey out of town anyway.
Instead of A) paying him a lucrative new extension or B) letting him walk in free agency for nothing in return, they C) decided to avoid both options a year early by offloading him in the exchange with Chicago.
In the end, not only did it bring them back arguably the perfect role player for their system in Caruso, who cemented himself as the best perimeter defender in the league last season while averaging 1.6 steals per game and a 102.5 defensive rating, the 10 and top mark, respectively, among players who played at least 50 games, but it saved them roughly $20 million in the process.
With the recent Giddey extension, there are now officially no more arguments to be made that the Thunder didn't emerge as the ultimate winners from last summer's trade.