Trade & FA 2025-26: Free Agency Starts 5pm CST/6pm EST

[mvossman]

To elaborate more. Several teams try, and fail, to assemble a roster with 3 players of Davis, Irving, and Flagg's caliber. If you're the GM, why would you trade Davis for pennies on the dollar before you ever see it on the floor. Why would you make your team worse when there's no incentive to do so... Having no draft pick next year. It all needs to make sense. Fear of Davis getting severely injured isn't an acceptable reason for a terrible trade imo.

The Clippers constructed an even more talented roster (Kawhi, Harden, George, Westbrook) and couldn't get out of the first round and now are completely screwed.  Most of those guys were roughly same age as Davis and Irving with similar injury concerns.

There is no incentive to be worse next year, but there is incentive to be better in the following years.  Getting worse next season in order to get better the following seasons is a reasonable route to take even with the draft situation.

I don't think anybody is arguing to trade him for pennies on the dollar.  I want them to trade him for his market value, whatever that is.  There is a point where you decide his TDL market value is not worth trading him (I would say those ESPN trades fall in that category) and do what you can to build up his value for the offseason.  But there are a lot of advantages to trading this season, it will likely improve their draft position, it will be easier to shed cap via expiring contracts and with a wide open East there might be a desperate team out there.

I don't have any interest building a team based around AD/Kyrie/Flagg for next season.  I realize they don't have to extend AD, but if they plan on sticking with him I think there is a significant danger they will.  It took them 6 seasons to build a competent team around Luka.  I don't want it to take that long with Flagg (and I don't think building a team around a couple of injury prone aging stars approaching their mid 30s counts).