Ranking the 10 Most Lopsided NBA Trades of the Last 5 Years
The NBA trade deadline is a stressful time for every team pondering a move. Highlighting some of the most regrettable deals of the past half-decade risks scaring a crop of executives who already seem hesitant to transact.
Oh well. Let's do it anyway.
Lopsided trades take many different forms. Teams can come out on the wrong end by giving up the best player or pick. But the truly uneven exchanges we'll hit here have more serious and farther-reaching repercussions. We're talking about the ones that alter a franchise's fate for years, compromise draft outlooks for a decade, weigh into championship contention or affect legacies.
The deals in consideration only go back to the 2018 trade deadline, but it's remarkable how many of them have already made direct impacts on NBA history. A few of them have yet to reach that level, but their projected impact on the futures of the teams involved earns them a place on our list all the same.
You could call these the biggest overpays or underpays in recent trade lore, depending on which side you're analyzing. Either way, these deals yielded massive benefits for one team at the painful expense of another.
10. Desmond Bane Slips Away from the Boston Celtics in 2020
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The Trade: Boston Celtics send Desmond Bane to the Memphis Grizzlies for 2023 and 2025 second-round picks
Let's lead off with an appetizer. The deal that sent Desmond Bane to the Memphis Grizzlies for a pair of second-rounders on the night of the 2020 NBA draft doesn't have the sheer volume of high-level assets that several other upcoming trades do, and it's not even technically complete. Neither of the picks Memphis sent Boston has turned into an actual player yet.
Still, though, the implications of this imbalanced exchange are significant. I mean, can you imagine Bane on the Celtics?
Even without Bane, Boston fell only two wins short of a title last season. Suppose the 67 minutes Payton Pritchard logged in the 2022 NBA Finals against the Golden State Warriors had been filled instead by Bane, whose 43.1 percent career hit rate on threes ranks sixth in NBA history among players who've fired off at least 1,000 triples. Or consider how much more Bane could have provided in that series and throughout the season than Aaron Nesmith, whom the Celtics have since dealt to the Indiana Pacers.
Those two players are important points of comparison because they're the 2020 first-rounders whom Boston prioritized keeping over Bane. The trade that sent him to the Grizzlies (which was part of a larger swap that also got Enes Freedom out of town) was seemingly designed to get the Celtics under the luxury tax. Boston determined it could only keep two of its three first-rounders and picked the wrong one to jettison.
It's not like the Celtics have come undone as a result of this trade. Bane is thriving as one of the best two-way wings in the league, but Boston is a no-questions-asked contender and should hold that status for several more years.
With that said, Bane got away for essentially nothing. The fact that he could legitimately be the difference in whether this iteration of the Celtics wins a championship gets this relatively recent trade into the top 10.
9. Mikal Bridges to the Phoenix Suns in 2018
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The Trade: Philadelphia 76ers acquire Zhaire Smith and a 2021 first-round pick (via Miami) from the Phoenix Suns for Mikal Bridges
Mikal Bridges might be the most universal plug-and-play starter in the league, but he'd be particularly valuable on the current Philadelphia 76ers roster that lacks a defensively dominant wing to throw at the Jayson Tatums and Jaylen Browns of the world. Bridges has improved immensely since entering the league in 2018, so it wouldn't have been easy for the Sixers to know he'd reach his current level.
But the fact remains that Philly let a hometown prospect who enjoyed major success at nearby Villanova slip through its grasp.
Bridges became a starter on the Phoenix Suns, helping them reach the 2021 Finals and win 64 games last year. Injuries to stars have pushed Bridges to develop his scoring and playmaking this season—he's averaging a career-high 16.9 points and 3.6 assists per game—but his zero-maintenance reliability and defense make him an elite role player whom every good team should covet. He has never missed a game in his NBA career and finished second in Defensive Player of the Year voting last season.
In Philadelphia's defense, Zhaire Smith may have been the higher-ceiling prospect in the 2018 draft. He was a disruptive and rangy wing defender with less polish than Bridges but more explosive athleticism. In that sense, it's hard to bury the Sixers for their logic, as it's often worthwhile to gamble on upside later in the lottery.
Unfortunately for Philadelphia, Smith never found a niche and battled injuries that ultimately ended his NBA career at only 13 total games. He hasn't played since 2019-20.
The 2021 unprotected first-round pick that the Sixers got with Williams came from Miami. But that selection lived a vagabond's life, traveling to the Los Angeles Clippers in the deal that brought Tobias Harris to Philadelphia before winding up with the Oklahoma City Thunder, yielding Tre Mann at No. 18 overall.
Harris has been a solid starter (and sometimes more) for the Sixers, but you'd be hard-pressed to argue he's a better player or fit than Bridges would have been—and that's before considering the massive cost of the five-year, $180 million deal he inked in 2019.
8. Warriors Acquire Andrew Wiggins in 2020
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The Trade: Golden State Warriors acquire Andrew Wiggins, 2021 first-round pick (top-three protected) and 2021 second-round pick from Minnesota Timberwolves for D'Angelo Russell, Jacob Evans and Omari Spellman
It was clear from the jump that D'Angelo Russell, a ball-dominant point guard best utilized as a conventional pick-and-roll ball-handler, was never going to work in the Golden State Warriors' motion-based offense. Nobody expected D-Lo to fill the gap vacated by Kevin Durant, for whom he was sign-and-traded a mere seven months prior to being rerouted to the Minnesota Timberwolves. But Russell was a poor fit with the Warriors immediately.
That the Dubs managed to move him for Andrew Wiggins, who'd go on to become an All-Star and a critical piece of a championship-winning starting lineup, was a minor miracle.
At the time of the trade, Wiggins was best known for disappointing relative to his No. 1 pick pedigree. This was essentially an exchange of distressed assets that turned into something else entirely once the Warriors slotted Wiggins into his ideal three-and-D role.
The list of things that have to go right for a team to win a championship is always long. Saying Golden State wouldn't have won its 2022 title without Wiggins' timely shot-making, excellent rebounding and suffocating perimeter defense on everyone from Luka Dončić to Jayson Tatum is a bit of a "well, duh" proclamation. But it's still true. Golden State got a "push you over the top" piece in Wiggins, and all it cost was a guy whom it may have never even wanted.
Don't forget: The Warriors also turned that protected 2021 first-round pick into Jonathan Kuminga, whose preposterous athleticism and rapidly developing defensive chops have him firmly in the rotation at age 20.
Russell has continued to do his thing with the Wolves, which is to say he's posting a scoring average in the high teens while grading out as a marginally positive overall contributor, according to box plus/minus. The soon-to-be unrestricted free agent will likely wind up a starter somewhere other than Minnesota, which hasn't been eager to extend him.
7. Nikola Vučević to the Chicago Bulls in 2021
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The Trade: Chicago Bulls acquire Nikola Vučević and Al-Farouq Aminu from the Orlando Magic for Wendell Carter Jr., Otto Porter Jr., 2021 first-round pick (protected 1-4), 2023 first-round pick (protected 1-4)
Arguably the biggest deal at the 2021 trade deadline, this swap looked bad for the Chicago Bulls from the start and has only gotten worse.
The Bulls were in win-now mode and looking for a player who could provide offensive support for Zach LaVine. Not only did they determine Vučević was the right man for the job, but that he was also so right for it that they'd surrender a recent lottery pick at the same position plus two more lightly protected firsts to get him.
Your mileage may vary, but there's a good argument that the aforementioned recent lottery pick, Wendell Carter Jr., has been more valuable than Vooch since the deal.
In 2021-22, the first full season for both players on their new teams, the 22-year-old Carter posted a higher true shooting percentage and PER, more total win shares despite playing 11 fewer games and a superior box plus/minus than the 31-year-old Vučević. This year, Carter has battled injuries but remains the more efficient scorer—one who has also shown he can defend in space against guards and get to the foul line, both of which are major deficiencies in Vučević's game.
The Bulls went 12-17 after acquiring Vučević in 2020-21 and missed the playoffs. Last season, the Milwaukee Bucks issued them a gentleman's sweep in the first round, and they currently sit on the fringes of the play-in tournament race this season. Chicago gave up a ton of future capital in exchange for a chance to win in the present...and hasn't won.
Meanwhile, that 2021 first-rounder turned into Franz Wagner, an All-Rookie selection who's currently averaging a shade under 20 points per game in his age-21 season. Based on the Bulls' current slot in the standings, the Magic might get another pick this year right in the range that yielded Wagner.
If that selection pans out, Orlando could wind up getting three young starters with legitimate All-Star upside for a player in Vučević who hasn't delivered the results Chicago wanted and might leave for nothing in free agency this summer.
6. Thunder Acquire Chris Paul for Russell Westbrook in 2019
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The Trade: Oklahoma City Thunder acquire Chris Paul, 2024 first-round pick (protected 1-4), 2026 first-round pick (protected 1-4), 2021 first-round pick swap (protected 1-4), 2025 first-round pick swap (protected 1-20) from the Houston Rockets for Russell Westbrook
Start with the fact that the Oklahoma City Thunder got the best player in this transaction—not just in the season immediately following the deal, but in each subsequent campaign. Chris Paul has outperformed Russell Westbrook across the board since the two future Hall of Famers swapped teams.
In the three-plus years after the deal, CP3 has played more games, posted laughably superior box plus/minus figures, crushed Westbrook in true shooting percentage and has been a hugely positive influence on his team's on-off performance. Paul has appeared in 40 playoff games since then, while Westbrook has played in only 13. The two point guards are neck and neck in assists since the trade, but Westbrook has nearly twice as many turnovers.
Westbrook's Rockets eliminated Paul's Thunder in the first round of the 2020 playoffs, but Russ had little to do with it. He missed the first four games of the series and averaged only 14.7 points on 41.7 percent shooting in the three games that he did play. He also posted a negative plus-minus in two of them.
Westbrook played only 57 total regular-season games for the Rockets and has changed teams twice more since leaving OKC. He's now a bench player for the Los Angeles Lakers and carries a contract too onerous to trade without giving up draft assets as sweeteners. Paul has since moved on to the Phoenix Suns, where he's been an integral piece of a team that reached the Finals in 2021 and won 64 games last season.
Throw in all the picks Houston surrendered to exchange Westbrook for Paul, and it's clear the Thunder won this trade handily. It doesn't even matter that Paul spent only season in OKC, as the team got another first-rounder when it sent CP3 to the Suns—which it, of course, then turned into a 2027 Denver Nuggets first-rounder with minimal (top-five) protection.
5. Rudy Gobert to the Minnesota Timberwolves in 2022
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The Trade: Rudy Gobert to the Minnesota Timberwolves for Malik Beasley, Patrick Beverley, Leandro Bolmaro, Jarred Vanderbilt, 2022 first-round pick Walker Kessler, 2023 first-round pick, 2025 first-round pick, 2027 first-round pick, 2029 first-round pick, 2026 first-round swap
It's too early to officially call this the worst trade of the last five years, but it's already trending in that direction.
The Minnesota Timberwolves gave up a mammoth haul for Rudy Gobert, hoping the three-time Defensive Player of the Year would elevate their defense to an elite level. That wasn't unreasonable, as he did exactly that for the Utah Jazz.
With Gobert as the interior anchor, Utah had a top-10 defense in six of the past seven seasons, including four top-three finishes. Without exception, Gobert's presence on the floor in Utah meant absolute defensive dominance.
Though the Wolves are enjoying similar on-off benefits from Gobert defensively, he's killing the offense and is now on the wrong side of 30. With three years and $131.5 million left on his contract (including a $46.7 million player option for 2025-26), Gobert projects to be among the league's most overpaid players.
Meanwhile, there's a strong case to be made that No. 22 pick Walker Kessler is already nearly as valuable as Gobert on defense. Nine years Gobert's junior, Kessler comes with a considerably more optimistic trajectory over the next several seasons.
Utah doesn't need to hit on all the picks it got from Minnesota to win this deal, but the upside with many of those is far higher than expected because the Wolves don't seem likely to be a perennial 55-win team like some foresaw. If the Jazz turn one or two of those selections into a cornerstone player, it'll just be icing on the cake. They already made out like bandits by getting off Gobert's deal at the right time, clearing their books, bringing aboard several valuable (and affordable) young pieces and filling their center void with Kessler.
Maybe the analysis will change if Minnesota makes a conference finals at some point during Gobert's tenure with the team. For now, it looks like Utah got away with grand larceny.
4. Luka Dončić for Trae Young in 2018
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The Trade: Dallas Mavericks acquire No. 3 pick in 2018 draft from the Atlanta Hawks for No. 5 pick and a 2019 first-round pick (protected 1-5)
At the time, it may have seemed like a lightly protected first-round pick was a huge price to pay to move up only two spots in the 2018 NBA draft. In hindsight, it wasn't nearly large enough.
By surrendering those two picks to the Atlanta Hawks, the Dallas Mavericks got their man in Luka Dončić at No. 3.
Never mind that the Phoenix Suns had the first pick and passed on the Slovenian teenager, or that the Sacramento Kings botched things even more severely by grabbing Marvin Bagley III at No. 2. The point is Dallas saw the player it liked, paid what it cost to get him and stole this generation's greatest talent right out from under the Hawks.
Trae Young, whom Atlanta selected at No. 5, is one of the most productive offensive forces in the game. He led the league in both total points and assists in 2021-22, has made two All-Star teams and totes a career scoring average of 25.5 points per game. That helps mitigate the damage of this trade from the Hawks' perspective.
Unfortunately, Dončić is transcendent. He was the easy Rookie of the Year pick in 2018-19 and has been a fixture on the All-NBA first team since 2019-20. He'll almost certainly make it four straight seasons with that distinction this year, and Dončić has also finished among the top six in MVP voting during each of the last three seasons.
He will win the award at least once at some point in the next few years. You can book that.
In the end, it's pretty simple. No rational discussion about the NBA's best player excludes Dončić, just as no rational discussion of that same topic has ever included Young. Dončić is the once-in-a-generation franchise-altering megastar whom teams covet above anything else. If Atlanta could offer Young and a half-dozen unprotected first-round picks for Dončić today, the Mavs probably wouldn't even consider it.
Housekeeping: Cam Reddish was the player whom Atlanta snagged with that 2019 first-rounder. He's no longer with the Hawks and has yet to prove he's worthy of a rotation spot anywhere.
Even if Atlanta had gotten two players of Young's caliber in exchange for Dončić, it still probably would have lost the trade. It should go without saying that Reddish doesn't move the needle in Atlanta's favor.
It's possible to get an excellent asset in a trade and still lose the deal handily. That's what happened here, much to the Hawks' chagrin.
3. James Harden to the Brooklyn Nets in 2021
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The (Very Big) Trade
Brooklyn Nets acquire: James Harden, 2024 second-round pick (via Cleveland)
Houston Rockets acquire: Victor Oladipo; Rodions Kurucs; Dante Exum; Brooklyn's 2022, 2024 and 2026 first-round picks; pick swaps with Brooklyn in 2021, 2023, 2025 and 2027; Milwaukee's 2022 first-round pick
Indiana Pacers acquire: Caris LeVert; 2023 second-round pick (via Houston)
Cleveland Cavaliers acquire: Jarrett Allen and Taurean Prince
Before we dig into the complicating factors and subsequent value-recouping follow-up trades, understand the basics: The Brooklyn Nets gave up more than a half-decade's worth of draft picks for 16 games of James Harden playing alongside Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving.
Harden spent parts of two years in Brooklyn, logging a total of 80 contests. But he was only on the floor with his top two teammates for what amounted to less than 20 percent of one full season.
Yes, the Nets got Ben Simmons, Seth Curry, Andre Drummond, an unprotected 2022 first-rounder (deferred to 2023) and a top-eight-protected 2027 first-rounder in the deal that moved Harden to the Philadelphia 76ers. But that's a wash for the Nets at best. It might even go down as another loss on the ledger if Simmons continues his rate of decline and those Sixers picks both wind up in the 20s.
The sheer volume of picks Brooklyn surrendered for Harden still stuns. Houston replaced the draft capital it lost in the 2019 Westbrook-to-OKC deal and then some.
What's more, Jarrett Allen was far from a throw-in. Brooklyn gave up a young center who'd go on to make the All-Star team and anchor a stellar defense with the Cleveland Cavaliers. Caris LeVert, who also wound up in Cleveland following a deadline deal last year, is a useful playmaking sixth man who can start in a pinch.
When healthy, Durant and Kyrie Irving have had the Nets playing like one of the best teams in the East. If that keeps up for the foreseeable future, the picks that Houston got for Harden won't be so valuable. But KD is 34 years old, injured again and only a few months removed from a trade demand. Irving is an unrestricted free agent this summer.
It isn't hard to see the upside in owning control of Brooklyn's draft picks through 2027.
Hindsight is 20/20, but imagine if Brooklyn had just kept all those picks along with Allen and LeVert. We'd likely be talking about the Nets as an elite team with the potential to be major buyers at the trade deadline.
2. Kawhi Leonard to the Toronto Raptors in 2018
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The Trade: Toronto Raptors acquire Kawhi Leonard and Danny Green from the San Antonio Spurs for DeMar DeRozan, Jakob Poeltl and a 2019 first-round pick (protected 1-20)
Good players went both directions in this deal, but the outcomes for the teams involved wound up being so different that applying the lopsided label was unavoidable.
San Antonio was over a barrel with Leonard, who had played only nine games in 2017-18 and had grown so frustrated with the team's medical staff that he began angling for a route out of town in the 2018 offseason. The question marks surrounding Leonard's health may have driven down the price to acquire him, but it's still jarring to note that the Raptors had to put only a single first-round pick (with significant protections) on the table to get him.
Danny Green was no throw-in, either. He was just 31 when the deal went down and was still on the short list of the league's best three-and-D wings. He'd go on to start 80 games for Toronto while hitting a career-best 45.5 percent of his triples.
Leonard helped lead the Raptors to the 2019 championship, securing his second Finals MVP award in the process. Already a superstar, Leonard's play in Toronto put him firmly in the "best player alive" conversation.
The Spurs, unready to tank, got DeRozan and Poeltl as the headliners. Both were (and in Poeltl's case, are) quality starters throughout their tenures with the team. DeRozan actually leveled up, posting true shooting percentages of 60.3 and 59.1 in 2019-20 and 2020-21, respectively, that were his best ever to that point in his career.
Don't forget that protected pick, either. It became Keldon Johnson, who is arguably San Antonio's best young prospect today.
Nonetheless, the Spurs still lost this exchange to an extreme degree. Part of that is because Toronto won it as decisively as possible.
Any trade that immediately yields a championship is an automatic, unqualified victory of the highest order. In contrast, San Antonio consigned itself to the mediocrity treadmill. The Spurs lost in the first round of the 2019 playoffs and won 32, 33 and 34 games over the next three years.
Only now, nearly five seasons after trading Leonard, is San Antonio starting its rebuild with a full-on tank job. Even if the Spurs wind up with projected top pick Victor Wembanyama, they will still be another two or three years away from making any real noise, and perhaps five years from serious contention.
A championship on one side and as much as a decade in NBA no-man's land on the other. This one is proof that not every lopsided trade has to involve squandering multiple first-round picks.
1. Russell Westbrook to the Los Angeles Lakers in 2021
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The Trade: Los Angeles Lakers acquire Russell Westbrook, 2024 second-round pick and 2028 second-round pick from the Washington Wizards for Kyle Kuzma, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, Montrezl Harrell and No. 22 pick in the 2021 draft
From the moment it happened, this deal was a catastrophe for the Los Angeles Lakers.
Start with Russell Westbrook's theoretical fit on a Lakers roster suddenly bereft of wing defense and shooting. In a best-case scenario, Russ could have functioned as an innings-eater, sopping up playmaking duties for LeBron James and Anthony Davis during the regular season in an effort to preserve them for a playoff run.
That notion turned out to be misguided in the end, but it was flawed from the start. It never accounted for the eventuality that if the Lakers even made the 2022 playoffs (they didn't), Westbrook's inability to provide value off the ball, on defense or as a perimeter threat would render him useless in the games that mattered.
What's more, the players Los Angeles gave up—principally Kyle Kuzma and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope—were exactly what last year's team needed most. Both played vital roles on the team that won it all in 2020, and they essentially reprised their roles in the 2020-21 season. Despite that information and years of proof that two-way wings that threaten defenses from deep are the best player types to put around LeBron James, the Lakers pivoted as hard as humanly possible to Westbrook, a non-shooting, ball-dominant former star in clear athletic decline.
Oh, and there's also the contract component. Westbrook came to the Lakers with two years and $91.3 million left on his deal. Forget giving it away; Los Angeles' only theoretical path to getting rid of that money involved paying another team multiple first-round picks to take it.
The Lakers squandered two years of James' late prime, sacrificing flexibility and legitimate shots to contend in exchange for a player who cost them dearly and never projected as a good fit.
It doesn't even matter that the Washington Wizards haven't done anything of consequence with the assets they acquired. The sheer level of destruction the Russ trade wrought on the Lakers makes it wildly inequitable on its own.
