Foreseeing the NBA Trade Deadline

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. 

The Tankapalooza Chronicles

This year is a special year in the NBA. It's an exceptional draft year. The best of the last ten years, maybe of the last twenty. Canadian freak Andrew Wiggins is rumored to be the best player to enter the draft since LeBron James and he's just the icing on the cake. There is supposedly about a dozen budding all-star available and several strong role players, including some of the best players eligible last year, but who decided to remain in school, including Marcus Smart, Dario Saric, Willie Cauley-Stein and Doug McDermott. Next June will reshape the landscape of the NBA's future quite a bit.

So this year, plenty of teams are tanking. They are deliberately trying to suck, to try and get a high draft pick. You might find it shitty (and it is shitty, considering these teams are selling tickets to their games), but if there is a year to throw everything out the window and live off hope and fresh water, this year is the year to do it. So once a month this season, I'll take a look at the 5 worst offenders and see how they're doing. This year, sucking matters. So to speak.