I had it. The perfect trade. In every way.

	Abdur-Rahim

	Walker

	Baker

Remember the Super Bowl Shuffle? Or the Icky Shuffle? I wanted to call this the Power Forward Shuffle. The Four Shuffle, for short.

A three-way deal that was as enticing, and seemingly as easy, as they come. One that works out for everybody.

Here it is: Seattle's Vin Baker goes to Boston, Boston's Antoine Walker goes to Vancouver and Vancouver's Shareef Abdur-Rahim heads a little south and winds up in Seattle.

	Many fans believe Antoine Walker has suffered a severe diss injury.

What's not to love? All three teams want to rid themselves of their power forwards, and all three power forwards can't wait to rid themselves of their current teams.

Let's start in Boston. One of the reasons Walker said he left Kentucky early was because of the demands of his coach, Rick Pitino, certifiably a better college coach then a pro coach, mostly because he can recruit, but also because he has a personality similar to that of John Calipari.

Lo and behold, in the circle of life, look who Walker wound up with in Boston. Little Ricky.

Only now, things are worse. The team does not have a championship to mask some of the bad feelings, and under Pitino, Walker is not developing into the player his potential suggested when he made the All-Star team in his second season. Hell, it's unlikely he will make the All-Star team this season, and just about anybody can make the All-Star team for the Eastern Conference this season. Rik Smits might even be on it, and he's not even in the league anymore -- at least at the moment.

On to Vancouver: Abdur-Rahim also has stagnated. Not that he is not a talent, which is part of the reason he was named to the Olympic team.

But he too has not developed into the player he should be, and he has even more talent than Walker. He is questionable, at best, in the fourth quarters of games, and that probably has as much to do with a lack of confidence as anything else. Hard to have confidence when your team goes down the drain every season.

There is continual talk in Vancouver that something drastic needs to be done for a team that started its first 15 games playing .500 basketball, and then has gone on to post a 4-20 record since.

First-year coach Sidney Lowe is said to have lost some of his players already, and that includes Abdur-Rahim, whom Lowe benched in the fourth quarter of a recent game.

First, there was speculation that Mike Bibby might be the one to be traded, but now the focus has shifted to Abdur-Rahim. Hey, if you're going to blow something up, you might as well make it nuclear, right?

In the Emerald City, what else is there to say about Baker? His struggles are well documented, from his weight problems, to his run-ins with out-of-work coach Paul Westphal, to his depression and now to his penchant for picking up nagging injuries.

The Sonics tried to unload Baker to the New York Knicks this summer in that first deal for Patrick Ewing, and Baker apparently danced all over New England, and then all over Hawaii, when he heard the news. He nearly threw himself into a volcano when it was later learned that the deal fell through, and he was returning to Seattle.

Things have begun to look somewhat better for Baker, who has begun to play well under Nate McMillan. But he probably never will escape the stigma of his $87 million and his label as a soft player in Seattle, a town that is as down on him as New York is on Johnny Rocker.

Baker is from Old Saybrook, Conn., and he would gladly welcome a ride back near home, where he flirted with signing when he was a free agent two summers ago. He historically plays better in front of his family, and doing so every night could just be the trick to getting his career back on track.

For all three players, it may just be a change of scenery that is needed that could reignite their careers, and that of the organizations for which they are playing. Sometimes relationships become stale, for one reason or another, and divorce is the only healthy alternative.

Conveniently, they all make the same exact salary, $10.13 million this season, and all are in the second years of their seven-year maximum contracts.

Unfortunately, upon consulting a general manager on the hypothetical trade, it was revealed that the NBA's insanely stupid base-year compensation rules make it virtually impossible to do the deal, at least for now.

All three are base-year players, which means that they signed contracts that gave them raises of more than 20 percent of what they were making.

By some incredibly arduous formula, it means that Boston can trade Walker, but can only take back $7.5 million in salary. Same for Vancouver. Same for Seattle.

	Austin

	Barry

The deal still could done, if you include other players to get the aggregate salaries to a level where the base-year compensation does not matter. Say, for instance, Seattle threw in Brent Barry, Vancouver included Isaac Austin and Boston dealt Eric Williams.

Unfortunately, that would defeat the purpose of such a deal. As it was proposed, it is neat and clean, everybody's happy. No need to uproot the lives of other people who are happy in their current situations.

So for now, we can only dream about such things. At least until this summer, when all three players can be swapped straight up.

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