There's no way to properly draw an analogy between basketball trades and baseball trades. Basketball has salary caps, trade exemptions, reverse counting bonuses, ledger benefactor cap trade allowance costs, and cost-pending trade cap dissolution ipso facto trade-reverse cap trades. Baseball allows teams to trade players when they want to. This is why baseball has such a crazy parity problem; it's why the Yankees have won the last 13 World Series, and it's why teams like the Marlins can never compete. But that's an issue for another day.
It's still tempting to look at what the Warriors did, though, in the broadest possible terms and apply it to the Giants. The Warriors traded a hugely popular player away, and they received an unknown quantity in return. Their reasons for doing so were simple: it gave them financial flexibility for the future, the player coming back could be an exceptional talent in the future at a constant position of need, and the player they traded away was an excellent-but-limited player at a position that's the easiest position in basketball to fill. He wasn't a top-five, and many would argue not top-ten, player at his position.
So I was jealous that the Warriors made such a forward-thinking trade, but I had to come to terms with the fact that the two sports are apples and motorboats. Even a third seed in basketball is almost guaranteed to lose to the better team in the playoffs. In baseball, a less-than-great team like the 2007 Cardinals can get hot at the right time and win 11 games in October. A "make the playoffs first, worry about the rest later"-strategy makes sense in baseball, but it's ridiculous in basketball.
I wanted this post to be where I could write, "See! See! That's how you run a franchise! You think of the future," but it didn't pan out. There's no real comparison, and there are about 7,272 other differences between building championship basketball teams and championship baseball teams. Jason Richardson was comparable to, oh, an odd-year Robb Nen; good and likable, but you can usually find a competent closer/shooting guard without breaking the bank. The comparison ends, though, when you consider why the Giants spent the past decade trying to build a contender with what they had. Building some sort of Voltron-like mega-team isn't the point in baseball, but it kind of is in basketball.
The only demand I have for the rebuilding of the San Francisco Giants is the same today that it was yesterday: If Matt Morris has substantial trade value at the deadline, the Giants should trade him in a forward-thinking deal. That it's even a question is driving me insane. In this article, Padres GM Kevin Towers thinks the Giants should be buyers:
Long, pointless, and rambling post short: I wish the Giants had the future of the Golden State Warriors. Sit on that one for a while.