With the NBA trade deadline less than three weeks away, teams will use this time off to figure what direction they should go and what kind of deals they’d like to do.
This upcoming trade deadline will be the first to precede the newly implemented playoff play-in. By virtue of automatically having two more teams from each conference have an opportunity to make the potseason, in theory, more teams should be disincentivized to trade their good players.
Despite early indications that there won’t be as many sellers as buyers, that doesn’t mean that we won’t see a busy trade market. It mostly suggests that the price to acquire good players is going to higher than usual.
By now, each team should have a good idea of who they want to keep, what moves they should consider next, and what they could accomplish. Here is a breakdown of each team’s situation ahead of the trade deadline and whether we can expect them to be active or not.