Why have NBA trades been so bad lately?
If anything characterizes free agency so far it’s that the trades are…bad. Big, big stars have switched teams including Jimmy Butler, Chris Paul and Paul George, but the return for all of those guys combined wouldn’t reach, say, what James Harden got when he went to Houston. Butler and the No. 16 pick for Zach LaVine coming of an ACL injury, Kris Dunn coming off a very poor rookie season and the No. 7 pick. Paul for a top-3 protected pick from a really good team, Pat Beverley, Lou Williams and Sam Dekker. George for Victor Oladipo and Domantas Sabonis. We could add to that as well poor Ricky Rubio, traded to Utah for…a lottery protected first-round pick. Or D’Angelo Russell, supposed to be part of the Lakers’ young core, sent to Brooklyn in a double salary dump – to get rid of Timofey Mozgov and pick up Brook Lopez’s expiring.
The enduring mystery of trades of this sort, deeply lopsided all, will always be why other teams couldn’t pull them off. The Pacers, especially, seem like they could have gotten two mediocre players from just about anybody. The Wolves could have gotten two young players with unrealized potential and a late lotto pick elsewhere. Many teams would probably have traded a lottery protected pick for Rubio. But, we can assume people had their reasons – good or bad.
These moves also all more or less accelerated the processes of talent consolidation that have been the league’s most visible aspect the last couple of years. Jimmy Butler went from a team that had nobody else much worth playing with to join emerging stars Karl-Anthony Towns and Andrew Wiggins, a team that just signed Jeff Teague. George will form a two-some with newly minted league MVP Russell Westbrook, a very intriguing combination. Rubio joins the up-and-coming Jazz, who, if they keep Hayward, will be a really ferocious group, further along than the Wolves team he came from. And even Chris Paul, who was already playing with Blake Griffin, seems to have landed in a better spot. I don’t think anyone doubts that James Harden is better than Blake, even without the injury concerns.
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These things are not coincidences, that the price was low and the teams were already good. The one-two punch here amounts to tea leaves, and the tea leaves to an eloquent statement on the state of the NBA today. Last week, I wrote about the barriers talent consolidation presented to any team trying to compete, here we see some of those fruits.
There are really two forces at work here. What you have to understand, as crazy as it seems, is that almost nobody has use for a guy like Ricky Rubio today. It seems crazy because he’s really good. But when you can’t compete with the best teams in the league even with a lot of really good players, what you want to be doing is planning for the future, and not necessarily a near one. In that context, weird as it sounds, adding an expensive point guard who does a lot of things really well but has been in the league six years and hasn’t developed a good shooting stroke, is fundamentally meaningless. It moves the needle forward, but there is so little possibility of moving it forward enough that most teams no doubt prefer to make moves which open a window further down the line. That lowers his value significantly.
Then, there is a strong trend of players deciding exactly where they want to go which, these days, is usually based either on getting to team up with other stars, or getting to play for a prestige franchise like the Lakers (and once upon a time the Knicks, but you know how it is). I’m not saying this is a bad thing and have no qualms with people getting to choose where they want to work. But, what can you get for Chris Paul when he says he’s going to the Rockets whether you get anything for him in return or not? What can you get for Paul George when he lets everyone know he’s leaving for the Lakers in a year? What you decide to trade, even for a great player, is based on expected return. For rentals, you pay rental prices.
Some of this is obvious and some of it less so, but the combination of factors is what’s turning the league into such a different place than it was a few years ago. It didn’t take long, after the George trade broke last night, for people to start comparing it with recent hauls for worse players. But this wasn’t a quirk, and it wasn’t a mistake, instead it will be the new normal. Of course it is. In today’s hyper-stratified NBA there’s no reason to even want a Chris Paul if you don’t already have a James Harden. It’s not useful to have a great, old, expensive player on a team that can’t compete, and nobody much can compete. And Chris Paul knows that too, and behaves accordingly.
It is worth noting that not all sports leagues even try to have the kind of player-for-player trades that have been somewhat common for the NBA. There are other ways to think about team-building. The NFL rarely trades players for players, Julio Jones for Odell Beckham or whatever. Often, you see stars traded for third and fourth-round picks and no players at all. In baseball, many teams decide whether they’re competing on a year-by-year basis and if not habitually dump stars to contenders for young talent.
The paradigm of NBA trades has been about trying to get a return that put an equivalent or better product on the court, in a year or two, as you had before you made it – nothing is stopping it from becoming something else. If most teams feel like there’s no point in trying to compete next year and that the guys who would help them compete either wouldn’t want to come or stay if they did, it will become something else. Maybe it already has.
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Long story short, the trades have been so bad, so far, because that’s the only thing it makes sense for them to be. It’s not a question of what you would trade for Paul George or Chris Paul, it’s what would you trade for Paul George knowing he’s leaving and Chris Paul knowing he’s coming either way? What would you trade for Rubio, knowing that Rubio doesn’t make you a threat, or Jimmy Butler knowing his team’s owners don’t want him and you might not be able to keep him? Today’s NBA has done the weirdest of all possible things, making stars in their prime and late prime at least apparently much less valuable than future stars for the next era. What we are seeing so far this offseason is the result of that achievement.