WHEN THE ATLANTA HAWKS traded three future first-round picks -- including two unprotected -- and an unprotected pick swap to the San Antonio Spurs for Dejounte Murray, a lot of observers compared the deal to the Milwaukee Bucks forking over three first-round picks for Jrue Holiday in 2020.
Murray, the thinking went, was the missing piece around Trae Young, just as Holiday had been Milwaukee's final building block.
But the better comparison was probably the first big Holiday trade -- a landmark 2013 deal that kickstarted what became known as "The Process" in Philadelphia. Holiday was then a 23-year-old one-time All-Star on a middling Sixers team; Murray is a 25-year-old one-time All-Star coming from a middling team.
Philadelphia traded Holiday in 2013 to a New Orleans Pelicans team desperate to win, and with the goal of tanking to the top of the draft. San Antonio traded Murray to an Atlanta team under enormous pressure from ownership to win -- and with the goal of increasing its chances at Victor Wembanyama or Scoot Henderson.
In 2013, the Sixers received two first-round picks for Holiday: the No. 6 pick in that draft (Nerlens Noel), and a top-five-protected pick in the next draft. Atlanta flung away much more for Murray, with fewer protections.
That first Holiday deal was overshadowed by another watershed trade the same night: the Brooklyn Nets trading three future first-round picks -- including unprotected picks three and five years away -- and one unprotected swap to the Boston Celtics for (among others) Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett. Age and injury undid the Nets. Two of the unprotected picks became Jaylen Brown (No. 3 in 2016) and Markelle Fultz (No. 1 in 2017, a pick the Celtics flipped for the third pick -- Jayson Tatum.)
The damage was so severe, several front-office executives said they never expected to see another trade featuring three or more future unprotected or lightly protected picks going from one team to another. The league in 2017 even considered a rule that would have banned a team from trading swap rights in between seasons in which it owed its first-round picks outright, sources say. It never got far off the ground.
FOR THE NEXT few seasons, teams operated with some caution. When the salary cap stagnated, rookie-scale salaries became more coveted. When new television revenue flooded the league in 2016, those salaries did not rise as quickly as the cap -- making first-round picks even more valuable. Cheap rookie-scale contracts offered some buffer against a harshened luxury tax.
The caution has long since dissipated, leaving executives wondering whether teams are now undervaluing first-round picks or finally valuing them correctly relative to proven talent -- and leaving the Nets potentially facing their second deep rebuild in 10 years.
"Future planning is passe, apparently," one high-level front-office executive quipped.
One day after the Murray trade, the Minnesota Timberwolves traded four first-round picks -- three unprotected, one pick with top-five protection -- and one unprotected swap for Rudy Gobert. The deal sent shockwaves across the NBA, and right or wrong, created a new talking point in the trade talks surrounding Kevin Durant and now Donovan Mitchell -- including discussions between the Utah Jazz and a New York Knicks team armed with boatloads of extra first-round picks from other teams. (Most of those picks from other teams are heavily protected, setting the stage for haggling -- with Utah likely targeting as many of New York's own picks as it can get.)
Including the original Nets-Celtics trade, there have now been seven deals in the past decade involving one team trading three or more future first-round picks: that deal, plus trades centered around Holiday (to the Bucks), Paul George (to the Clippers), Anthony Davis (to the Lakers), Gobert to the Wolves, Murray to the Hawks, and James Harden to the Nets. That appears to be one more such trade than occurred in all post-ABA/NBA merger history through 2012, according to research from ESPN's Kevin Pelton and Basketball-Reference. Two more such deals -- Durant and Mitchell -- may be approaching.
(Both Pelton and Basketball-Reference staff cautioned that nailing down precise details of old mega-trades becomes trickier the further back you go. There can be conflicting information about whether one pick involved was an outright pick, or a swap. One of the pre-2013 deals had the Jazz sending three first-rounders -- including the pick that became Magic Johnson -- to the Lakers as compensation for the free agency signing of Gail Goodrich. Two others involved Chris Webber! Meanwhile, one of the three first-rounders Milwaukee traded for Jrue Holiday originally belonged to another team.)
Such all-in deals used to be the province of glamor market teams and one-player-away contenders. Picks don't mean as much to the glamor crew; they have an advantage luring stars in free agency, or via forced trades. The Atlanta and Minnesota deals fly in the face of that logic.
The Hawks were not quite one player away despite their 2021 conference finals run. Young is their only All-Star. What if Murray -- a free agent in 2024 barring an extension -- chafes at being a distant No. 2 option?
It seems counterintuitive given they haven't won a playoff series since 2004, but the Wolves might have been closer than Atlanta to "one-player-away" status. They had two bona fide stars in Anthony Edwards and Karl-Anthony Towns; Gobert gives them a big three -- even if he's a decade older than Edwards, who is barely starting his career.
The decision to move from two stars to three can be one of the thorniest team-building moments. The choice hinges on the talent of the two in-house stars; the supporting cast; the franchise's timeline; injury risks; and other variables. The Clippers and Celtics have been content to stick with two and maintain flexibility. The Nets grabbed a third. The uniqueness of New York's pursuit of Mitchell is he would be star No. 1 -- meaning the Knicks would have fewer avenues to acquire star No. 2.
Minnesota has zero history of nabbing major free agents, so it could frame the Gobert acquisition as its version of using cap space. Still: You rarely see teams in places like Minnesota go out on this kind of limb. The Wolves are probably still outside the inner circle of contenders until Edwards makes a big leap -- by which time Gobert may be aging.
It's hard to draw a through line between all these megadeals, even if you isolate those that failed and those that hit. Garnett and Pierce were over the hill when Brooklyn mortgaged everything; the risk was obvious.
Harden was 31 -- still in his prime -- when the Nets gambled their future to team him with Durant and Kyrie Irving. Harden stormed back into the MVP conversation in Brooklyn. The Nets' superteam looks like a historic failure now -- and objectively it was -- but it's also possible two ill-timed injuries (one to Harden, one to Irving) in the 2021 playoffs and one black swan event (the pandemic, combined with a local vaccination mandate that prohibited Irving from playing home games) undid a well-constructed juggernaut. The Nets understood the stormy personalities involved -- and thus the risks -- but I'm not sure the results are some ironclad indictment of their thinking in putting the team together.
Murray is 25. Davis was 26 when the Lakers acquired him, maybe the most important veteran to be available via trade since Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in 1975. George and Kawhi Leonard were 29 and 28, respectively, when the Clippers traded the motherlode to pair them -- a reasonable decision that has so far yielded the only conference finals appearance in franchise history, and has them set up to contend next season and beyond.
But there is always risk, no matter how great the players involved. Several front-office executives around the league used a word beyond "risk" to describe the recent Atlanta and Minnesota deals: reckless. Even Durant is 34, and any team that acquires him will slice away a big part of its roster doing so. If it ends up being the Phoenix Suns -- less likely after they matched the Indiana Pacers' offer sheet for Deandre Ayton on Thursday -- any unprotected Phoenix picks will have value given Durant is 34 and Chris Paul 37.
On the flip side, teams that receive bundles of picks in multiple players-for-picks deals often find themselves unable to use them all. They end up stashing players overseas, trading out of drafts, or (as the Thunder have done in the past two drafts) trading multiple picks to move up a few spots.
WHAT'S DRIVING ALL this risk? What are the implications?
Some causes are easy to diagnose:
• There has been a sense that the league is (by NBA standards) open at the top since the Toronto Raptors rode a one-year Leonard rental to the 2019 title, and Durant left the Golden State Warriors. Very few people saw Phoenix coming as a legit contender.
When more teams think they can at least build a team one break from the conference finals, more teams will sacrifice future for present.
(As an aside on competitive balance, the growing payroll disparity between the Warriors and Clippers and the rest of the league was a hot topic at the NBA's recent board of governors meeting in Las Vegas, sources say. Next year's Warriors and Clippers are set to join last season's Warriors as the three most expensive teams in NBA history. There is no question those teams can outspend everyone else other than perhaps the Nets -- and either sustain losses, or in Golden State's case compensate with arena revenue.
There is probably no magic solution -- if you even conceive of this as a problem. You might argue these governors are billionaires or close, and that swallowing heavy tax payments is the price of contending. Maybe that's true, but it's not going to persuade the governors. Stakeholders will likely kick around several bandages, including an even harsher luxury tax, more robust revenue-sharing, and a harder cap. That last one is a very tough sell for the players' union, which would also have qualms about stricter tax penalties; they like idea of a few teams who will spend almost regardless.)
• The revamped lottery odds and play-in tournament appear to have tilted the equation a bit toward winning now. Middling teams have incentive to chase the No. 9 and 10 seeds. Good teams no longer regard their future first-round picks -- even if they consciously bottom out -- as automatic golden tickets to a top-three pick.
Teams also recognize the crap-shoot nature of the draft. The average value of a mid-first-round pick is maybe a solid reserve. The bounty Boston snared from the 2013 Nets deal was an outlier. Teams have noticed how well the Raptors, Miami Heat, and others have done late in the draft or outside it entirely.
It's possible teams are overreacting a little. Over long periods of time, the new lottery odds still favor the worst teams winning the top picks -- as just happened for the Houston Rockets in back-to-back seasons, and for the Oklahoma City Thunder in this past draft.
But it's not a cinch aymore. The Process Sixers could be fairly certain that several seasons of abject losing would earn consistent top-three-ish picks. Philly did not nail those picks at the expected level, yet still ended up with one franchise player (Joel Embiid) and turned one wobbling No. 1 pick (Ben Simmons) into Harden. The Sixers haven't made the conference finals yet, but they have a chance every season.
• The most interesting possible driver might be the unintended trickle-down effects of shorter player contracts and the rise of player empowerment.
Outside some beacons of tranquility, there is a sense around the league that windows open and close faster than ever -- that your foundational star might be one sideways season away from demanding change, or even worse, asking out. Toss in some new governors with zeal to shake things up, and you get more aggressive future-for-present reaches. (Tony Ressler, the Hawks' governor, said publicly that Atlanta made "a mistake" standing pat after the 2021 playoffs. Marc Lore and Alex Rodriguez, incoming governors in Minnesota, did not hide their desire to make a splash.)
Owners pass pressure onto GMs. The photo negative may apply in Minnesota: Tim Connelly, their new president of basketball operations, got the kind of guaranteed long-term security that might embolden decision-makers -- or convince them to shrug and do what their bosses want.
Windows seem so short-lived that teams that splurge on the "superstar" side of these pick-heavy trades might reasonably believe that if the trade fails, they could position themselves right away on the other side of the same kind of deal: that there will always be a team desperate to overpay in draft picks for one of their established players. (The Nets achieved a version of this flip-flop in recouping two first-round picks by trading a disgruntled Harden to Philadelphia for Simmons.)
• The NBA is a copycat league. When one team gambles, another team might feel more comfortable doing the same.
When more teams take one path, it sometimes stands to reason there are efficiencies to be gained going down another -- that there might be power in stability and continuity when rivals swing between wild trades.
But what does this countervailing stability even look like? Boston and the Denver Nuggets seem to be following calmer paths: center everything around two stars, and selectively upgrade the edges -- one pick apiece for Derrick White and Malcolm Brogdon over separate calendar seasons, one for Aaron Gordon at a pivotal deadline.
(Jaylen Brown makes sense in theory as the centerpiece of a Durant megadeal, and the Celtics have to be wary of Brown's unrestricted free agency in two years. But there have been no substantive talks about such a deal, sources say.)
The Memphis Grizzlies -- with Ja Morant and Jaren Jackson Jr. as their foundational 1-2 -- might be the next test case; they have enough trade chips to do just about anything they want. Lower in the hierarchy, the Cleveland Cavaliers will face tough and tempting choices as Darius Garland, Evan Mobley, and Jarrett Allen grow together.
Those teams have stars they drafted. So too did the Hawks and Wolves. Few strategies -- continuity, boldness, wild dart-throwing -- work regularly without one star in-house, and even in the new lottery odds era, the draft remains the most common way of getting that first star. That is most true for small-market teams with no track record in free agency.
This is why most of those teams feared the lottery changes, though only one (Oklahoma City) had enough conviction to vote against them. It's why the Thunder, Pacers, Spurs, Magic, and maybe now the Jazz have bottomed out or are doing so. (Harden thrust the big-market Rockets onto that path, and their relative appeal as a free agency landing spot should give them a leg up in rising fast.) The Pacers dealt Domantas Sabonis for Tyrese Haliburton in part because they concluded Haliburton -- four years younger than Sabonis, an easier fit -- had greater star potential.
Even one-star teams can find themselves in purgatory -- outgunned in trade wars for a second star, but too good to reach the top of the lottery. The Washington Wizards and Portland Trail Blazers may be there now.
There is no failsafe method of team-building. If title contention is the goal, every path is a low-odds proposition. But every team will be studying how these mega-trades end up in five years.