According to various reports, Ricky Rubio has agreed to terms with the Minnesota Timberwolves, which means he will be coming over from Spain to play in the NBA during the 2011-12 season. When Rubio was drafted with the fifth overall pick in the 2009 NBA Draft, nobody was sure he would ever make it to Minnesota. But that fifth pick didn't always belong to the Timberwolves, it came from the Wizards. Soon, we will be able to evaluate what that trade meant.
In June of 2009 the Wizards traded the fifth overall pick (along with Etan Thomas, Darius Songaila and Oleksiy Pecherov) to the Minnesota Timberwolves for Mike Miller and Randy Foye. Both of the players the Wizards got back in the trade were only for the Wizards for one season, and signed with other teams this past Summer.
Now we all know that the 2009 season did not go as planned, so it's hard to really blame Mike Miller and Randy Foye at all, but neither of them brought the impact that an organization would hope it could get from the fifth overall pick. And the fact that just a year later shows just how near sided it was.
So if Ricky Rubio shows anything, and I mean anything, than we'll know it's a bad trade. Especially considering that the Wizards probably would have been very happy to take Rubio at No. 5, because no one expected him to still be on the board.
But it isn't all bad. because the Wizards had such a miserable 2009 season, they got John Wall, who I think will be much better then Rubio when it is all said and done. So maybe it wasn't so bad after all.