So the Golden State Warriors traded Stephen Jackson to Charlotte on Monday for Raja Bell and Vladimir Radmanovich.

The Warriors could have traded Jackson for a used toothbrush and a toilet seat they found at the dump and they’d still be better off.

This, fans, is the textbook case of “addition by subtraction.”

Or, addition by less distraction.

I take you back to Warriors media day at the end of October, and literally everybody in the Bay Area media — radio, TV, online, print — was jockeying for position at one of the interview tables.

That’s because Jackson was about to grace them with his presence, just so that he could extrapolate on the ridiculous trade demands he made over the summer.

Everybody, that is, except me.

I opted for a different table to interview one of my hoops heroes, ex-Michigan State star and current NBA broadcaster Steve Smith, to get his take on what Warriors rookie Stephen Curry needed to do to make an impact this season.

A large part of it was, I just didn’t care what Jackson had to say, because that was 20 minutes of my life I was never going to be able to get back.

Millionaire athletes griping about, well, anything frankly bores the you-know-what out of me.

Especially Jackson.

I’ve always had a theory that any player in the NBA that gets any significant minutes whatsoever is going to put up statistics.

That’s why crappy expansion teams have leading scorers, right? The same guys that were 12th men for their previous team the year before?

Jackson is the epitome of the meaningless stat line, and I can tell you personally from watching dozens of Warriors games the last couple of years that he shot them out of more games than he kept them in or won for them.

His defense was good when he wanted it to be, but that “passion” — i.e., sometimes acting like a jerk — that he played with often took his head out of games, and made him spend more time barking at officials than actually playing the game.

That’s not to say what he has already ruined this year, just nine games into the season.

His negative influence on the previously jovial and likable Monta Ellis is obvious, and Jackson even surrendered his captaincy before the season started — all the while swearing he was still going to do his job and compete every night.

Yeah, right.

Bad teams usually have bad players with bad attitudes at the top, and that’s what the Warriors had in Jackson.

I thought it was hilarious that he wanted to go to Cleveland and “help them win a title.”

Oh yeah, I’m sure LeBron James and Shaquille O’Neal were just beating down owner Dan Gilbert’s door and demanding that they bring in “The Final Piece.”

Let’s see … aging, overrated, huge salary, terrible attitude, likes guns, and beats up the fans … where do we sign up?

Yeah, so going to a contender didn’t exactly work out, because now Jackson is in Charlotte.

If you look up “not an NBA contender” in the dictionary, you get Charlotte.

Geez, Bobcats fans, is it too late to sign up for season tickets?

Even if Bell and Radmanovich don’t play a minute for the Warriors, I promise you they are better off.

As for the contributions he made to the ‘We Believe’ Warriors of a couple of seasons ago, sure, he helped, but he was not “the main reason, or one of the main reasons” — as he said recently — that they made the playoffs that year.

It wasn’t even Baron Davis.

It was Jason Richardson, and how well he played those last two weeks of the regular season that helped them clinch the No. 8 spot in the West.

Look it up, Warriors fans. It’s true.

Even then, they won 48 games and exactly one playoff series, so let’s keep Jackson’s time here in perspective.

Don’t let the door hit you in the a— on the way out, Cap’n Jack.

Anyone who has read my stuff over the years knows that I’m a native of Michigan, and that I went to college at USC.

So, obviously, I am always interested when the Trojans play Jim Harbaugh’s Stanford Cardinal.

Remember, Jim Harbaugh was a University of Michigan man before he ever played in the NFL or coached a college football team.

They say it takes years to build a reputation, and only a moment to ruin it.

Well, sad to say, I lost a lot of respect for Harbaugh over the weekend.

Stanford, in case you missed it, absolutely destroyed USC 55-21 on Saturday.

And Harbaugh destroyed his credibility, in my mind, by going for a two-point conversion after scoring a touchdown to make it 48-21 with about seven minutes left in the game.

USC pretty much made its only good defensive play of the day on the stop, but just by going for it, the damage has been done.

It’s called karma, Jim, and you especially don’t kick a powerful and proud program like USC when it’s down, because it’s a fact that it’s going to catch up to you later.

And as for this notion that, ‘Oh, Pete Carroll’s been doing that to other teams for years’ — I’m telling you it’s absolute garbage.

If there’s one team I’ve watched more than the Warriors, it’s the Trojans, and Carroll is notorious — to a fault, in some USC fans’ eyes — for playing his backups liberally and not running up the score on other teams.

It has affected USC’s margin-of-victory stats in the BCS standings at times, and Carroll has always stated that’s not how football is played and his team would not be doing that, regardless of what the computers said.

Sure, USC would score touchdowns late in games against overmatched teams, but again, look it up — it was probably a sixth-string running back taking a handoff up the middle and breaking a long run.

You don’t see many teams’ third-string quarterbacks ever unless there’s an injury, but I guarantee you Mitch Mustain got more playing time behind Mark Sanchez and Aaron Corp than any other third-stringer in America last year.

It could have and should have been a glorious day for the Cardinal, but there’s no honor in what Harbaugh pulled.

And Cardinal fans, Toby Gerhart and Andrew Luck are not going to be there forever.

Jim Harbaugh better hope Pete Carroll doesn’t stay at USC much longer, either.

Randy Johnson can be reached at rjohnson@napanews.com or 256-2222.