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... right, but I'm not suggesting that the Suns would have a championship (or two) like those Detroit teams, so the gauge is different. Alex Len and Markieff Morris, for instance, are not bad players, and if the West was not quite so deep, a squad with those two guys and the three guards could have reached the playoffs.
By the same token, at the start of this season, I did not think that Phoenix would make the playoffs, and once Dallas proved to have been better than some might have anticipated, I especially did not think that the Suns would make the playoffs. The only reason why Phoenix was hanging in there was Oklahoma City's injuries.
Given Dragic's looming free agency, I don't think that the Suns could have received something much better than Brandon Knight. Indeed, I wanted to emphasize that when I called guys like Faried and Hill "role players," I did not mean that they were "role players" in the mold of, say, A.C. Green with the Lakers and his first two seasons with the Suns, or Horace Grant with the Bulls and Magic, or Charles Oakley with the Knicks, or Otis Thorpe with the Rockets: really solid, tough, adept complementary players who started on championship clubs or contenders and reached the margins of All-Star play (each made one All-Star team apiece). Rather, Faried and Hill might not even be starting if they were playing for better teams. Thus an available big man likely would not have accelerated the Suns' timetable in the manner that you are suggesting, and in that case, Phoenix should have only traded Bledsoe (or Dragic) in a value-for-value deal rather than simply trying to fill a position. And Brandon Knight probably represented as much of a value-for-value deal as Phoenix could have found.
As for the Dodgers, for all the carping about their crowded outfield, they probably made the correct decision by keeping all those guys last year. Carl Crawford and Matt Kemp have developed perennial injury problems, and all that outfield depth helped Los Angeles survive and thrive over a 162-game schedule, winning another National League West crown. And let's face it: the Dodgers lost to the Cardinals in the NLDS not because of chemistry problems, but because St. Louis has had Clayton Kershaw's number (and maybe because manager Don Mattingly had too long of a leash for Kershaw in the seventh inning of those starts).
Consider the Phoenix Suns in 1994 for a case where the team traded from a surplus that might have come in handy given a subsequent injury. After free agent All-Star forward Danny Manning agreed to sign with the Suns in the summer of 1994, Phoenix looked to ship out small forward Cedric Ceballos, who had just averaged 19.1 points per game in only 30.1 minutes. Head coach Paul Westphal feared that Ceballos would not accept reduced playing time, so he pushed for a trade, which in September 1994 ended up sending Ceballos to the Lakers in exchange for Los Angeles' first-round draft pick in 1995. But when Manning tore his left ACL just before the All-Star break in February 1995 (after having torn his right ACL as a rookie in January 1989), the Suns could have used Ceballos, who had earned a selection to the Western Conference All-Star team. Phoenix later rebounded when it used the pick received from the Lakers to select Michael Finley in June 1995; Finley proved to be one of the best rookies in the league in '95-'96, and the Suns used him as an important chip in trading for Jason Kidd in late December 1996. Yet one might still wonder if Phoenix would have won the West in 1995 had Ceballos been available to step in once Manning went down.
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