Is chemistry the reason no NBA title winner has added a centerpiece player via midseason trade since the defending champion Houston Rockets dealt for Clyde Drexler in 1995?
Sure, teams have made trades for role players en route to other championships, including the Detroit Pistons adding Rasheed Wallace at the 2004 trade deadline, and more recently, the Toronto Raptors picking up Marc Gasol in 2019 and the Milwaukee Bucks dealing for P.J. Tucker in 2021.
None of those trades, however, were similar to the kind of blockbuster deals we saw this week sending Kevin Durant to the Phoenix Suns and Kyrie Irving to the Dallas Mavericks. With Phoenix now having the second-best odds to win the title at Caesars Sportsbook, the question of whether a midseason trade for a star is disruptive to playoff success has never been more relevant. So let's dig in.
Throughout the NBA season, I answer your questions about the latest, most interesting topics in basketball. You can tweet me directly at @kpelton, tweet your questions using the hashtag #peltonmailbag or email them to peltonmailbag@gmail.com.
In addition to the main question, this week's mailbag also tackles questions on the historic number of teams in the NBA's middle class and the winningest players in recent years.
"What does history say about big midseason trades? Not like adding P.J. Tucker, but trading for Kyrie. Or any trade where you get a starter that's top three on your team in usage. Seems difficult to win four playoff series with all that change? Maybe I'm wrong."
-- @stratigious
It's hard for any team to win four playoff series, and I don't think the lack of past precedent is definitive because championship favorites don't usually feel compelled to make big trades in-season.
Instead, I think it's worth considering how teams that made these kinds of dramatic changes performed in the playoffs relative to what we would have expected from them at the time of the trade.
Since the Drexler trade, I found 16 examples that met my slightly altered criteria:
Player acquired midseason
Player averaged at least 18 points per game after the trade
Team made the playoffs
Let's go through them by category:
The playoff push additions (7): Stephon Marbury, 2004 Knicks; Vince Carter, 2005 Nets; John Salmons, 2009 Bulls; John Salmons, 2010 Bucks; Stephen Jackson, 2010 Bobcats; Isaiah Thomas, 2015 Celtics; CJ McCollum, 2022 Pelicans
All seven of these teams were outside the playoff spots at the time of the trade. Merely making it to the postseason was an accomplishment. It's no surprise that none of them advanced beyond the first round.
Hoping to win a series (5): Gary Payton, 2003 Bucks; Peja Stojakovic, 2006 Pacers; Allen Iverson, 2007 Nuggets; Pau Gasol, 2008 Lakers; Carmelo Anthony, 2011 Knicks
Here's the group where you can say midseason deals for key players haven't worked as intended. All of these teams were in the playoffs at the time of the trade, some of them with legitimate aspirations of playing deep into the postseason. Milwaukee had reached the conference finals the year before, while Indiana was just two years removed from reaching the Eastern Conference finals prior to the Malice in the Palace that marred the 2004-05 campaign.
Yet of these five teams, only the 2008 Lakers actually ended up winning a series. After adding Gasol in February, the Lakers emerged as a championship contender before losing to the Celtics in the Finals. Their run is the closest we've come to having a top-two player on a title team acquired midseason since Drexler.
The legit championship contenders (4 players, 3 teams): Jimmy Butler/Tobias Harris, 2019 76ers; James Harden, 2021 Nets; James Harden, 2022 76ers
As I noted at the outset, the issue with saying no champion has made a trade for a major player midseason is that few contenders actually make those kinds of deals. There's limited precedent for a player of Durant's caliber getting traded midseason, nearly all of it recent (and two of the three deals involving Durant's team).
I'm being a little generous to count the 2019 and 2022 Sixers as title contenders. They were fifth in the East at the time of the Harris trade, their second massive midseason shakeup, although just a game out of third (where they eventually finished). Philadelphia was in the same spot this time last year, but 1.5 games out of second and likely to benefit more because the main return for Harden was Ben Simmons, who hadn't played a game.
Both of those 76ers teams were knocked out in the conference semifinals, the 2019 group in heartbreaking fashion on Kawhi Leonard's game-winning jumper at the buzzer in Game 7. Sure, this year's Philly team is better built around Harden than last year's group was on the fly, but I don't think either of those defeats were attributable to integrating a star midseason.
Meanwhile, the closest comp for the Suns adding Durant is surely the 2021 Brooklyn team that teamed Harden with him and Irving. That Nets team looked like the clear title favorites after taking a 2-0 lead against the Bucks in the conference semifinals, only for Irving to suffer an ankle sprain in a narrow Game 3 loss.
With Harden hobbled by a severe hamstring injury, Brooklyn suffered its own heartbreak in Game 7 of the conference semifinals. A healthy Nets team might well have gone on to win a championship. So I don't think the mere fact that Phoenix added Durant midseason should factor too heavily against the team's odds of winning it all.
"Parity is super high this year. How does the congestion of teams around .500 compare to past seasons?"
In terms of overall tightness of the NBA standings, it's the greatest at this point of the season in nearly 40 years. Looking at team records through their first 53 games -- and thus throwing out the lockout-shortened 1998-99 regular season, which ended after 50 -- the standard deviation of them is the lowest since 1983-84.
The six seasons with the least spread at this point all came within two periods: 1945-55 through 1956-57, when the league was down to eight teams, and the period just before and just after the ABA-NBA merger from 1975-76 through 1978-79.
Standard deviation considers the entire spread from top to bottom, and we have the usual teams at those extremes. What stands out this year is the bottleneck you mentioned around .500, and that is historic at this point of the season.
An incredible 16 teams were within five games of .500 through 53 games, the most ever in that span. Since the NBA expanded beyond eight teams, it's also the highest percentage. Only 1977-78, when 11 of 22 teams were so close to break even at this point, have more than 41% of teams been so close to .500 in the past six decades.
"Which NBA players have the best record over the past several years?"
-- Nate Duncan
I'm borrowing this question from a January episode of the "Dunc'd On Basketball" NBA podcast, where Nate was musing about the aforementioned Tucker being on competitive teams throughout the past six years.
In part because of the 32 games Tucker played for the Rockets in 2019-20 before being dealt to the Bucks, he's not quite at the top of the list. But he is in the top 10 in wins above .500 starting with the 2017-18 season, having played with each of the five players ahead of him on the list.
Naturally, the presence of so many role players near the top of the list who have happened to team with stars shows why team record shouldn't be used as a measure of player value.
Paul's placement in particular, however, is eye-opening. He's been part of two different teams in Houston and Phoenix that had the NBA's best record in the regular season, while this season's Suns are (thus far) the worst team he's played on in terms of winning percentage in 13 years. And the main reason the New Orleans Pelicans slipped below .500 that season (2009-10) was Paul missing 37 games, during which they went 14-23.
He may no longer be the same point god he once was, but Paul has driven team success for an incredible, sustained period of time.