There's probably still a long way to go before this series plays out completely, but it looks to me like my initial reaction to the Shaq trade was reasonably accurate: trading Marion made sense for various reasons (he might have walked after his contract expired this off-season, there were chemistry issues, and they probably weren't good enough to win it all as constituted), but trading him for Shaq did not make sense at all, and now they could be staring at a first-round loss followed by two more years of this over-the-hill giant at $20 mil per season.