Swapping

 There are trades and there are trades.

Russell Wilson to the Denver Broncos for Drew Lock. And a tight end. And a defensive tackle. And five draft choices over the next two years. And two hundred forty-five million dollars over the next five years. Which may at one time have seemed like a pretty cool deal, but as the 2022 season wears on, and on, that all seems like a pretty steep price to pay for three wins. And a whopping nine touchdown passes over the course of eleven games. 

If you are not a football fan, those numbers and exchanges may not be very meaningful to you, but if you can imagine trading your cow for a handful of magic beans, along with a number of your draft picks and a quarter of a billion dollars, you might be able to rough out this comparison. 

Please understand at this point that I am a Denver Broncos fan and will probably be just that when the dust settles. In a few more years. I am not talking about how degrading it is to spend yet another football season looking for something else to watch on Sunday afternoons. I am setting the stage for a little deeper dive into the sports pages. 

Women's basketball. The WNBA. You may have heard of it. If you haven't, you may have heard of Brittney Griner. Ms. Griner was recently traded for another player. Not a player of basketball. A player of much more nefarious games. We got Brittney Griner and the other guys got international arms dealer Viktor Bout. The "other guys" in this scenario are the Russians. 

They had been holding Brittney since February after vials of cannabis derived oil were found in her luggage at a Russian airport. She was in Russia to play for UMMC Ekaterinburg, a Russian women's basketball team for whom she played on the off-season of the WNBA. It's not uncommon for WNBA players to take their talents to other parts of the world when they aren't playing in America. Because they don't get paid the same kind of astronomical salaries that men get in the NBA. Or the MNBA. 

There are those who insist that the United States got the short end of this stick, as Viktor Bout who is also known by such colorful monikers as Merchant of Death and Sanctions Buster was far more important than some professional athlete. It does make one wonder if it had been LeBron James being held in a Russian labor camp if there would have been a different attitude assigned. A black woman. Married to another woman. For those squawkers, perhaps LGBTQ+ cancels out the WNBA. 

That was the deal that was made, and the squawking about how the U.S. government couldn't swing a deal to get for retired Marine Paul Whelan who has been in Russian captivity for four years.

Slice it how you will, but I still think we did a better job than the Broncos did with Russell Wilson.