The end of the first round of the postseason often marks the unofficial beginning of NBA trade season. The deals don’t come in earnest until later, but the seeds are planted now. Major NBA trades start with unhappy stars. Stars are unhappy when they lose early in the playoffs. We’re in the all-in era, but only one team actually gets to win the championship. Every few years, a couple of the stars playing for the teams that don’t start to get frustrated with their early exits, and rumor season begins.
That’s where we are now. More than half of the league has been eliminated now, and more teams will soon join them. Some of those teams are asking how they can make it further next season. Others are panicking as they try to convince their stars that they can actually do it. The deck is about to get shuffled, so before the chaos begins, let’s take a look at five stars who could be on the move this offseason.
Antetokounmpo tends to get antsy every few years. The Bucks have responded by making a blockbuster deal every time. Jrue Holiday won them a championship in 2020. The Damian Lillard follow-up deal hasn’t been nearly as successful. Now, the Bucks are out of bullets, and Lillard has a torn Achilles. They don’t have another star veteran to trade. They don’t control their own first-round pick again until 2031. They’ve cultivated no youth whatsoever. This era of Bucks basketball, from a competitive standpoint, is over.
The ball is in Antetokounmpo’s court now. If he wants to retire as a Buck, regardless of what that means for him on the court, Milwaukee will gladly allow it. If he decides he wants to go compete for more championships, though, it isn’t happening there. His quotes in the past have hinted that he’d lean towards the latter. Antetokounmpo is only 30, still more than capable of competing for years to come. Every team in the league will ask about him if he does indeed pull the trigger on a trade request.
There’s less mystery here. The Suns made their bed when they shopped Durant to the Warriors at the deadline. He squashed that trade because he didn’t want to return to Golden State. With a wider field available this offseason, the Suns are widely expected to move him over the summer. They’ll try to pivot into a Devin Booker-centric retool. Durant, meanwhile, likely lands on a team eager to compete now.
His field of suitors won’t be quite as vast as Antetokounmpo’s. He’ll turn 37 before opening night, after all, and he has an extensive injury history. You don’t trade for Durant thinking he opens a five-year window. You do it to win with him here and now. Only a handful of teams are capable of both paying the Suns something close to fair market value and still doing so. They’re mostly clustered in the Western Conference, skewing older outside of Houston and perhaps Oklahoma City. Many of the teams that will seek Durant probably want Antetokounmpo too, so clarity on his front will be important. But when the dust settles, there’s no guarantee Giannis moves. Durant almost certainly will.
Young wields quite a bit of control in what happens here. He is now one year away from free agency, and as an unlikely All-NBA pick, he probably won’t be supermax eligible. That removes some of his financial incentive to stay with the Hawks, and the basketball incentive, after consecutive play-in exits, may not be especially strong either. In the coming weeks and months, the Hawks will decide what sort of extension, if any, they want to offer Young. If he declines what they offer, or if they simply decide they don’t want to pay him, that means a trade is probably coming.
The catch here is that the Hawks reportedly already sniffed around Young trades last offseason. They didn’t find takers, so they dealt Dejounte Murray instead. Young is a tricky player to trade for. He’s not much of an off-ball offensive player and he doesn’t play much defense. His value flows entirely out of what he does with the ball in his hands, so he’s a tricky fit with other superstars and probably can’t play with any other weak defenders. That whittles the field down significantly. Only a handful of teams make sense for Young, so even if he becomes available, he probably wouldn’t attract the same level of interest as Durant or Antetokounmpo.
Regime changes tend to lead to significant roster changes. The Pelicans fired general manager David Griffin, whose primary crime was building a team around a star in Williamson who could never stay healthy. Replacing him is Joe Dumars, and the reporting surrounding his plans for Williamson has been conflicting. There are rumblings that ownership would prefer a trade, or that Dumars wants to try to reach Williamson first.
He’s the ultimate boom-or-bust trade candidate. He’s a clear All-NBA talent when he’s on the court. It’s just so rare that he’s actually available consistently. He closed the year playing some of the best basketball of his career, and he comes with the added bonus of a contract filled with protections against injuries. If he can’t stay healthy, his next team can get out of that deal if it needs to. He’s the likely target of a team that might not have access to a sure thing like Antetokounmpo. Some bold general manager is going to bet his job on the chance that Williamson finally gets his body in order. If he does? His new team could contend quickly.
Yes, yes, I know we did this last summer. Circumstances were different then. Markkanen was incentivized to remain in Utah at the time because only the Jazz could renegotiate and extend his contract with cap space. Utah, meanwhile, was still stuck between lanes. Now the Jazz are in a clear tank, and with several top prospects available next year, they will likely try to remain at the bottom of the standings again next season. Markkanen has his money, so if the right trade presents itself, there shouldn’t be anything holding back either side from a move.
Of course, defining “the right trade” when Danny Ainge is involved is never easy. He doesn’t make trades unless he thinks he’s won them handily. That means getting Markkanen would mean paying Ainge a haul, especially since he’s proven now that this team is capable of losing enough games for a top draft pick even with Markkanen on it. Demand for stars always outpaces supply, though, so there will inevitably be significant interest.
