Recent Trades Haunting NBA Teams This Offseason
The NBA offseason is stressful even under ideal circumstances. A team with clean books and premium assets still has to navigate a ridiculously competitive landscape of trades, signings and draft picks, all while the other 29 organizations root against it.
The degree of difficulty rises even higher when a bad trade from the past limits options in the present. The very worst can even ruin the future.
The deals we'll discuss here have sapped resources, inflated costs and generally made difficult work even harder for the teams affected. Whether tying up cap space, limiting trade options or, in severe cases, putting the very identity of the organization at risk, these recent deals will have huge effects on this summer's outlook.
In fact, if the executives from the these teams soon find their jobs in jeopardy, it may not be because of what they do this offseason. Instead, they'll have the transactions of the past to blame.
Kyrie Irving to the Dallas Mavericks
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Other than the broader market being afraid of committing to Kyrie Irving, the Dallas Mavericks are short on leverage. Irving knows Dallas can't replace him in free agency, knowledge that will allow him to drive a harder bargain than you'd think someone with his history of unreliability could. The Mavs, on the other hand, can't play hardball in contract negotiations.
What's more, acquiring Irving this past season cost the Mavs assets they could have used to give Luka Dončić what their 2022 conference finals run showed he really needs: a supporting cast composed of versatile defenders and shooters. Sure, Irving can spell Dončić by attracting defensive attention and running the show in spurts. But his skill set is ultimately duplicative. Dorian Finney-Smith went to Brooklyn for Irving, and he was the team's best defender. Dallas would have been better off using the first-round pick and Spencer Dinwiddie to trade for more players like DFS.
Zooming all the way out, the Mavericks should regret trading for Irving because of the worst-case fallout if this whole experiment fails. Bereft of picks and appealing trade pieces, Dallas could bring back Irving and still fall short of contending. Maybe the Mavs will make the playoffs next season, and maybe Irving will be a part of that. But the likelier outcome is that 2023-24 will resemble 2022-23, in which case Dončić would be justified in demanding a trade.
The Irving deal doesn't have the potential to make Dallas a contender, even if everything breaks right. And all the downsides—losing Irving in free agency, paying handsomely for Irving to miss loads of games, ultimately losing Dončić altogether—are very real.
Jae Crowder to the Milwaukee Bucks
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Five second-round picks may not sound like much, but the Milwaukee Bucks can't trade any future firsts until draft night in 2028 and possess just three second-rounders between now and 2027. Those restrictions spike the importance of those selections.
The Bucks gave up that quintet of picks in a multi-team swap for Jae Crowder, now an unrestricted free agent after providing nothing of value upon coming over from the Phoenix Suns. If you blinked, you missed Crowder in Milwaukee's upset loss to the Miami Heat in the first round. He logged a grand total of 41 minutes in four appearances and shot 3-of-13 for the series.
Even if you scoff at the value of second-round picks and don't care that the outlay to get Crowder represented such an enormous share of Milwaukee's few available assets, you have to admit the deal was a bust. This was a legitimate something-for-nothing exchange, and it leaves the Bucks severely short on resources ahead of a pivotal offseason.
Remember, Milwaukee has Khris Middleton's $40.4 million player option and Brook Lopez's unrestricted free agency to handle, not to mention a coaching search. If the Bucks can retain Middleton on a new deal at a lower annual salary and hand Lopez somewhere between $15-20 million per year, they'll still be well beyond the second tax apron with only nine players under contract for 2023-24. Filling out the rest of the roster was always going to be hard, but now the Bucks don't have second-rounders to draft minimum-salaried long shots or trade for more immediate help.
Nikola Vucević to the Chicago Bulls
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An oldie but a goodie, the Chicago Bulls' 2021 acquisition of Nikola Vucević is the bad trade that keeps on, well...being bad.
Start with the certainty that no reasonable team today would give up Wendell Carter Jr. for Vucević in a straight-up swap. WCJ is nine years younger than Vooch, outperformed him in Estimated Plus/Minus in each of the last two full seasons and is now locked into a declining four-year deal that'll pay him just $10.8 million in 2025-26. Now add the fact that one of the first-round picks Chicago sent to the Orlando Magic for Vucević became Franz Wagner who, in his age-21 season, averaged 18.6 pointes, 4.1 rebounds and 3.5 assists—a solid sophomore follow-up to an All-Rookie 2021-22 effort.
Don't worry, though, there's more. Chicago will have to watch as Orlando uses another of its first-rounders in the 2023 draft. You might think the No. 11 pick is less likely to yield a player with Wagner's star potential, but the last decade of 11th selections includes Devin Vassell, Cameron Johnson, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Domantas Sabonis and Myles Turner.
The Bulls aren't getting Carter or those two first-rounders back, and there's a good chance they'll throw more good money after bad. Vucević is an unrestricted free agent Chicago lacks the resources to replace, so the odds of panicked overpay to retain a 32-year-old center who can't switch or defend the rim are high.
Ironically, the best path forward for Chicago involves letting Vucević walk and trading Zach LaVine and DeMar DeRozan to trigger a teardown—a process that would have been much more palatable with Carter, Wagner (or someone else from the 2021 lottery) and this year's pick.
Rudy Gobert to the Minnesota Timberwolves
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If there's a statute of limitations on deriding the catastrophic trade that sent Rudy Gobert to the Minnesota Timberwolves for (deep breath) Malik Beasley, Patrick Beverley, Leandro Bolmaro, Walker Kessler, Jarred Vanderbilt, four first-round picks and swap rights on a fifth, we haven't reached it yet.
Besides, the criticism here isn't even about how the Wolves posted a worse record and left the playoffs in fewer games with Gobert than they did without him in 2021-22. Or that no rational team would trade Kessler for Gobert straight up. Or that the franchise's most important player, Anthony Edwards, is limited by Gobert's space-sucking presence in the lane. That's all in the past.
Unfortunately for Minnesota, there's plenty of present and future pain still stemming from the deal.
Edwards is due a max extension this summer, and Jaden McDaniels may be in line for a nine-figure deal himself. With Karl-Anthony Towns already locked into a four-year, $224 million supermax extension that'll pay him an estimated $62 million in 2027-28, Gobert's remaining three years and $131.5 million will push the Wolves' payroll to unsustainably expensive levels going forward. A little back-of-the-napkin math shows Minnesota could be paying around $152 million to just four players—Towns, Gobert, Edwards and McDaniels—in 2024-25. That would make it virtually impossible to avoid the second tax apron and all the crippling penalties that come with it.
So as the Wolves make decisions this summer, they'll do so knowing that taking on salary or using the MLE will exact a massive toll down the road. With such a top-heavy, expensive and underperforming roster, this shouldn't be the time to pinch pennies and operate conservatively. But the Gobert trade gives Minnesota no other choice.
The Walker Kessler Trade Everyone Forgot
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You have to venture down a rabbit hole to get there, but having just discussed Walker Kessler as part of the Rudy Gobert trade, we should acknowledge another team had a shot at the best defensive rookie the league has seen in years.
Thanks to the 2019 swap that sent Mike Conley from the Memphis Grizzlies to the Utah Jazz, Memphis secured the No. 22 pick in the 2022 draft. On draft night in 2022, the Grizzlies then negotiated a trade with the Timberwolves that sent the No. 22 and No. 29 picks to Minnesota in exchange for the No. 19 selection (Jake LaRavia).
Had the Grizzlies simply kept that No. 22 pick and selected Kessler, they could have paired him with Jaren Jackson Jr., who happened to win Defensive Player of the Year this past season.
With Steven Adams, Xavier Tillman and Brandon Clarke joining JJJ in the frontcourt rotation, one could understand why Memphis didn't want to add another center to the mix. And to be fair, nobody expected Kessler to so quickly become one of the NBA's best defensive players.
Still, if the Grizzlies had paired Kessler with Jackson Jr., they could have spent this offseason looking for somewhere to offload Adams and wouldn't have been so badly hurt by Clarke's season-ending Achilles injury. Better still, Memphis wouldn't have to be nearly as concerned with replacing Dillon Brooks' defense in free agency or via trade because it could put three parking cones on D next to Kessler and Jackson and still expect a top-three defensive rating in 2023-24.
