It was a night of trades and tears and a seemingly insatiable social media thirst for the sort of drama that the NBA generates like no other league once its gyms go dark and the balls stop bouncing.
It was also only the beginning.
Thursday’s NBA draft, for all the transactional mayhem it spawned even before Zion Williamson’s emotional reaction to going No. 1 overall, was just a prelude to the looming free-agent frenzy.
A tasty prelude, no doubt, but merely l’aperitif.
Days of chaos — plural — are coming June 30 at 6 p.m. Eastern time, when free agency officially starts. If that didn’t become clear when the Los Angeles Lakers reached an agreement to acquire Anthony Davis from the New Orleans Pelicans less than 48 hours after the Toronto Raptors dethroned the Golden State Warriors as league champions, it must be obvious after a thoroughly bonkers draft.
None of this, mind you, should be a surprise to anyone studying the way several franchises have behaved in the Warriors’ considerable shadow.
Throughout the past two years of Golden State’s five-year run of title contention, teams from the next tier made numerous moves to try to close the gap rather than wait the Warriors out. You’ll recall that in the summer of 2017, Houston and Oklahoma City quickly responded to the Warriors’ first title with Kevin Durant with ambitious trades: the Houston Rockets by adding Chris Paul and the Oklahoma City Thunder by gambling on Paul George. Boston also brought in Kyrie Irving.
Then this past season, after Toronto made its big summertime dice roll for Kawhi Leonard, three of the East’s top four contenders — Milwaukee, Philadelphia and those same Raptors — commenced a slew of major in-season acquisitions to try to capitalize on LeBron James’ defection to the Los Angeles Lakers in the West.
So you can imagine how emboldened some executives feel to swing big now, with the Warriors in tatters after the devastating injuries to Durant and Klay Thompson in the NBA Finals. That was evident the day before the draft when the Utah Jazz did what they were hesitant to do in February by meeting the Memphis Grizzlies’ asking price in a trade for Mike Conley.
The path to title contention, in truth, will not be nearly as wide open as it seems if Leonard, the free-agent-to-be, stays with the Raptors on a two-year contract approaching $70 million with a player option in Year 2. Should Kawhi go that route, and if veteran center Marc Gasol delays his free agency one more year, Toronto’s core would essentially stay intact for another season and give us a clear favorite for the 2019-20 campaign.
The Raptors, though, have feared that the Los Angeles Clippers would sign Leonard away at the first opportunity from the minute they got him in July 2018. We’re roughly two weeks from finally finding out how rational those fears are, but Canada’s collective confidence appeared fragile Thursday when photos of Leonard apparently buying cardboard moving boxes at a Home Depot emerged. Many Raptors fans inevitably interpreted the pictures as an omen of doomsday — even though Leonard showed up at a Toronto Blue Jays game hours later.
To borrow a word Stephen Curry used during the recent NBA Finals to describe the abnormal: It’s that sort of janky time in this league.
The new champions could lose Leonard, a two-time finals most valuable player, and plummet back to the ranks of flawed challengers as quickly as they rose to the summit. The Warriors don’t know if they can keep Durant away from the New York Knicks or the Brooklyn Nets in free agency, but they do know they’ll have to cope without Durant and Thompson, another soon-to-be free agent, for the bulk of next season while they heal, even if they re-sign both.
The outlook is no brighter for the Rockets and the Celtics, who are soaked in their own dramas so soon after they were widely classified as elite when last season began. Houston’s contract talks with coach Mike D’Antoni have broken down yet again, while Rockets management strains to debunk near-daily reports that the team’s two headstrong stars, James Harden and Chris Paul, can no longer coexist. Boston’s predicament, furthermore, may be even worse, with Irving and Al Horford regarded as virtual locks to bolt in free agency and Davis — the team’s longtime dream target — no longer an option.
The leaguewide upheaval and uncertainty are such that the ever-conservative Jazz saw fit to surrender two first-round picks to get Conley and make a run in the perennially deep (and brutal) West. Unpredictability is so rampant that the upstart Nets are convinced that they are not only firmly in the lead to sign Irving, but also a legitimate threat to persuade Durant to ignore the Madison Square Garden lure of the Knicks and join his good friend Kyrie in Brooklyn.
My personal read there is that Durant is more likely to choose the destination he prefers and then tell Irving he can join him if he wishes. The best hint on this front came from Durant before his Achilles’ rupture, when he told my Yahoo Sports colleague Chris Haynes: “I can’t be recruited. Write that.”
Yet no one can be sure of anything in today’s NBA. Even first-round picks, which teams were so reluctant to part with in recent years, have been routinely thrown into trades since February as executives concede that drafting franchise building blocks is harder than ever.
This is the antsy NBA climate that greets Williamson after months of anticipation. On draft night a year ago, no players on league rosters were traded, something that hadn’t happened since 2003. On draft night this year, 39 of the 60 picks were swapped, and the Phoenix Suns curiously traded for two veterans of questionable fit (Dario Saric and Aron Baynes) after shipping out another (T.J. Warren).
Not that I imagine much of a protest to this free-for-all. Not when the basketball public tends to enjoy what the hot stove serves up as much as, if not more than, what happens inside those fancy gyms from October through mid-June.
