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With the NBA trade deadline just a few weeks away, several teams looking for roster improvements might be getting a little desperate.
It’s a tense, uncertain market, as all but a handful of clubs have legitimate playoff shots. There will be more buyers than sellers, which could drive up prices—even for damaged goods. The instinct among particularly aggressive buyers might be to overpay, to swing big, to somehow distinguish themselves from the rest of the market and get their guy in a brash, landscape-altering move.
That’s fine. Fortune favors the bold.
But some of the players who might draw interest from those buyers ought to be avoided entirely. Exorbitant salary, physical decline, future uncertainty and fit issues make each of these potential trade acquisitions too dangerous to pursue.
The trick here is that all of the players we’ll list have market value. They’re good. That’s why teams might want them.
But unless the cost is laughably low, these are your stay-aways ahead of the Feb. 7 deadline.
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Robin Lopez isn’t here for the usual reasons.
He’s not overly expensive, with an expiring deal for $14.4 million this season. He’s not a potential source of locker room unrest. He’s not going to demand touches.
No, the reason buyers should stay away from RoLo is so the Chicago Bulls have no choice but to do right by the veteran center and buy him out.
Chicago has no interest in turning Lopez loose and instead prefers to move him in a trade, according to Yahoo Sports’ Chris Haynes. In a vacuum, that’s a fine approach. Get assets when you can.
But for a Bulls team already distinguished by an overbearing head coach, excessively punishing practices and an offensive style that holds zero appeal to free agents, the play now is to further turn off potential future signees by denying respected vets the chance to play meaningful basketball for a couple of months before free agency?
It’s a bad look for an organization that must already appear awful to players around the league.
The Bulls are setting themselves up for a future in which no free agent should have anything to do with them. If only for the sake of suppressing Chicago’s draconian and unrealistic instincts, the rest of the league should wait this out and vie for Lopez’s services on the buyout market.
It’s the right thing to do.
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So, who likes to gamble?
Marc Gasol, playing his age-34 season, is still easily one of the 10 or 15 best centers in the league. He also plays for a Memphis Grizzlies team rapidly losing ground on a playoff spot after once leading the West at 12-5. For Memphis, Gasol’s player option for next season poses a risk.
It could lose him for nothing.
So could anyone who trades for him, and that’s the issue.
The New York Times‘ Marc Stein reports there’s a “growing belief” Gasol will choose to hit free agency this summer, and that should make any acquiring team wary. Sure, you could get some wink-wink assurances of an opt-in through back channels before executing a deal, but what if circumstances change and Gasol doesn’t like wherever he winds up via a hypothetical trade?
Plus, it’s not as if Gasol would be the easiest piece to integrate into a title contender, which you’d have to think would be the only type of team interested in adding him. He’s a conventional center in terms of his mobility, and he’s best utilized in a prominent role. A gifted passer (career-high 4.7 assists per game this year) who spaces the floor and still has one of the better basketball minds in the league, Gasol has never been an auxiliary piece.
For roughly a decade, he’s been a fulcrum on both ends. That kind of player may not come cheap and may not be easy to integrate on the fly. That’s a bit of a headache for someone who might just leave in a couple of months anyway.
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As a general rule, you probably shouldn’t trade for one of the worst contracts in the league.
Kevin Love is 30 years old and played four games this year before undergoing foot surgery that, according to Tom Withers of the Associated Press, still has him “weeks away” from a return. That means he may be valueless for the remainder of this season.
Oh, and his four-year, $120 million extension starts next year.
If a team were confident Love could hold up as a floor-stretching center for the balance of that hefty extension, maybe there’d be some logic to adding him. But nothing in Love’s history suggests he’d survive on defense at the 5, and there should be serious questions as to how he’ll guard anyone—at any position—given his age, track record and foot surgery.
Last year, the Cavs were one of the worst defensive teams in the league, and they surrendered more points per possession with Love at center than they did overall.
Bigs with a history of substandard defense don’t tend to improve after being operated on in their 30s.
Love could help any team in a limited role. He might even be able to help a good team as a starter. But the investment (in years and dollars) is just too great. Love is going to regress whether he’s healthy or not over the life of his extension. The downside risk makes adding him a nonstarter.
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Nikola Vucevic has never been better than he is right now.
Sporting career-best numbers in points, rebounds, assists and blocks per game, Vooch isn’t just piling up stats on a bad team. He’s also posting best numbers in true shooting percentage and usage rate. He’s a no-brainer All-Star at age 28, and he might be the only reason the Orlando Magic are remotely relevant in the playoff discussion.
So if you trade for him now, you’re buying high. Super-high.
Not only that, but Vucevic is also headed for unrestricted free agency this summer. The chance of losing him without compensation is real. Although, the only thing worse than losing Vucevic might be keeping him on his next contract.
Offense-first centers who can’t switch on D, even ones with expanding skills like Vucevic, still aren’t worth much in today’s NBA. But if a team were to give up the assets necessary to add him, it might feel compelled to overspend to keep him.
In terms of fit, there are also issues. Vucevic has improved as a defender, but it’s hard to imagine opposing playoff teams (again, you have to assume the only teams interested in what might be a rental are postseason contenders) not targeting him on D. Plus, like Gasol, Vucevic is used to having a significant role on offense.
The Ringer’s D.J. Foster explained: “Big men, particularly ones who require plenty of post touches, may require a team to rethink major parts of their approach. Tempo and spacing may have to be altered on the new acquisition’s account. Pick-and-roll coverages might have to be shifted completely.”
Vucevic is a star-caliber player on a reasonable $12.8 million expiring deal. And yet, because he’s playing at a level he probably can’t sustain at a position that has as little value as ever, he’s not someone teams should be clamoring to add in a trade.
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Let’s frame it this way: If you think you can sign, say, Bojan Bogdanovic for less than an average annual salary of $27 million this summer, you probably shouldn’t trade for Otto Porter Jr.
That might feel like a harsh evaluation of Porter, a 25-year-old wing with good length and a career 40.3 percent conversion rate from deep. But when you break down Porter’s contributions this year—12.8 points, 5.7 rebounds, 57.8 true shooting—it’s hard to make the case they’re worth max money.
Rudy Gay exceeds those figures, for example. He, like Bogdanovic (16.0 points, 4.1 rebounds, 61.4 percent true shooting, for reference), will be a free agent this summer. You could likely get both for the $27.3 million Porter will collect next year.
If you were willing to accept something like 80 percent of Porter’s production, you could find someone at the mid-level exception or even on a minimum salary if you get lucky. The Milwaukee Bucks’ $1.4 million man, Sterling Brown, has per-36 numbers right in line with Porter’s this season.
The point should be obvious: Porter is not a wise use of a team’s finite cap space, and anyone adding him for the stretch run has to consider the nearly $56 million he’s owed through 2020-21 (assuming he exercises his $28.5 million player option in 2020).
There’ll be buyout candidates capable of coming close to Porter’s production for the rest of the year…and they won’t require a long-term investment.
Stats courtesy of NBA.com, Cleaning the Glass and Basketball Reference unless otherwise noted. Accurate through games played Monday, Jan. 21. Salary info via Basketball Insiders.
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