The NBA trade deadline is 15 days away. I should be bouncing off the walls about this. The league-wide roster overhaul, the heated jockeying for playoffs X factors, the strategic long-term planning, these things get my nerd brain going. The 2014 NBA trade deadline cannot, in any possible way, be worse than last year. Three moves in two days, J.J Redick being the center of attention, journalists turning to the Dexter Pittman trade for column fodder, it can't possibly sink any lower. Yet the NBA trade deadline will be a non-event again, this year.
It's just the way things are now. The latest CBA makes it ungodly hard to organize a blockbuster trade. The salary cap makes superstar contracts binding and is influencing an athlete's worth like never before. So I'm expecting a lot of action this yet, yet it'll probably be as exciting as Saturday afternoon in an accounting convention. The NBA trade deadline will be a non-event this year, or rather, it will find a way to become a non-event, where trades will make sense at the bank and not on the court. Let me borrow Clairvoyant Bill's hat has for a second and predict you what the 2014 NBA trade deadline will be like.
Some disgruntled assets will be moved for 10 cents on the dollar
It's not ideal to trade your talented problem child on an expiring contract on trade deadline. You're not going to get much. For example, the Philadelphia 76ers don't need Evan Turner, but they're going to lose him next summer anyway. He doesn't want to be there anymore. Sam Hinkie is a brilliant GM and he understands that tanking or not, it's important to have assets. But Hinkie waited for too long before flipping Turner and lost negociation leverage. The 76ers will be lucky if they can swap Evan Turner for a late first round pick and an expiring contract and it's not exactly getting even money back.
The NBA trade deadline is your worst enemy if you have a pouter.Sam Hinkie's mentor Daryl Morey gave a great example of this when he deadlined the entire NBA to December 19 to make offers for disgruntled Omer Asik. The man we know as Dork Elvis got lowballed by other clubs over and over again until his self-appointed deadline and wisely pulled the plug before sending his backup center to Boston for peanuts. Maybe not all disgruntled assets will be moved, but teams will attempt to find cheap solutons to their problems instead of enduring them until next season or even worse, until their contract run out.
Some disgruntled assets will stay disgruntled
The NBA trade deadline can be a ridiculous tease sometimes. There will be a lot of noise about crazy moves, it'll all be reported with the utmost serious on Bleacher Report and none of that will actually happen. Take the case of Dion Waiters for example. He lives in the NBA equivalent of hell: he plays for a team that's going nowhere, lead by a loony snake merchant with a bow-tied son, he is fighting with his teammates over ball time, he plays in a Darwinian, system-less rotation that rewards production only and magical thinking and he cannot make himself justice because nobody in his team really likes him and they don't want to pass him the ball.
But Dion Waiters is going to stay in Cleveland unless some nitwit GM with a treasure chest of assets figures he could help his team out (you know that nitwit doesn't exist, right?) Guys like Dion Waiters are not worth the trouble to trade: he's still earning peanuts from his rookie contract, he is not talented enough to be problematic if he underperforms and he needs to play more than the team needs to play him. Pau Gasol is another player who won't get moved, but for other reasons. He is coming off the books next-off season, he is keeping the fans in the spirit of a long lost glory and he kind of keeps the Lakers off the very rock bottom, so why bother? There have been Pau Gasol trade rumours for years now, I'd be extremely surprised if he gets moved.
Some teams will get frisky about their draft picks
Imagine you're the Phoenix Suns. You were supposed to tank this year and draft Andrew Wiggins to save your franchise from itself. But you hired a miracle worker heir to Coach Taylor by mistake and it didn't happen. Jeff Hornacek has built the most uptempo team in the NBA out of scraps and hopes and now what do you do with it? Rent a player and hard earned first round picks for? (the Suns have three, this year). Picks that are in an unusually deep draft? No way.
The only asset Phoenix is ready to part with is the expiring contract of Emeka Okafor, who will probably never play a game for them. I'm going to tell you what they do. They WILL draft 3 times next June, get a talented shooting guard (my guess is on P.J Hairston if he doesn't humiliate himself in the interviews), groom him to become Eric Bledsoe's sidekick and milk the EVERLOVING SHIT out of a Goran Dragic trade and somebody will pay for the über-productive point guard. This scheme is so ridiculously evil, you would've loved to come up with it.
There will be ZERO blockbuster trade
Because they're friggin' hard to pull off, OK? First, the salaries have to add up and it's no small task. You have to stay under the salary cap or under the luxury tax treshold if you can. Not everybody is a crazy Russian billionnaire who can give 80 million dollars to the NBA to prove a point. The player's contract can undermine his value also. Nobody will pay full price for a player who's about to hit free agency. No superstar will move on the NBA trade deadline and you'll have to deal with it.
It's funny how the über-restrictive CBA was meant to jugulate free agency, yet it completely destroyed the transaction market instead. There is administrative red tape around any personnel move you're looking to make. The best way to build a championship team has always been the draft (hence the draft being the most exciting moment of the year for a sports nerd), but free agency became more of a strategic asset, but it became more important. I predict a trade deadline that's more interesting than last year, but still some kind of meh. It's two week away, you'll see.
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