That’s not the best way to say it, but Dennis Schroder has a point.
While the NBA’s trade deadline is always headlined by the eye-popping moves teams are making to try and put themselves in a position to win championships, there’s always a human element of everything that goes overlooked.
These are human beings and their lives are being upended in the blink of an eye. We saw that with P.J. Tucker, who was traded by three different teams in five days.
Now, we see it in Dennis Schröder, who has found himself in a similar situation.
Schröder was shipped to Utah as part of the blockbuster deal that landed Jimmy Butler with the Warriors. The point guard wasn’t long for Utah, though.
Just before the last minute of the NBA trade deadline, Schröder was dealt one more time to the Detroit Pistons, according to the latest from ESPN’s Shams Charania, where he’ll spend the rest of this NBA season.
That’s rough, man. Three teams have technically employed Schröder in 24 hours.
This is also the third time he’s been traded this season. Remember, he started the year with the Brooklyn Nets before being traded to the Warriors.
You know he hates all of this. A day before being traded by the Warriors, he talked about how NBA players are traded on a whim, comparing it to “modern slavery.”
“It’s modern slavery at the end of the day,” Schröder said. “Everybody can decide where you’re going, even if you have a contract. Yeah, of course, we make a lot of money and we can feed our families, but at the end of the day if they say, ‘You’re not coming to work tomorrow, you’re going over there,’ they can decide that. They got to change that a little bit.”
Don’t get it twisted. Anytime someone compares a multi-million dollar profession to slavery of any kind, you have to cringe.
There are plenty of other things out there that we could be comparing to “modern slavery,” as Schröder called it. Forced inmate labor is the most prevalent example of that in this country — something that’s extremely problematic. So, with that in mind, this is a terrible comparison on Schröder’s part.
With that said, the overall point that he’s trying to get at is a salient one.
NBA players — especially the rank-and-file around the league — have very little agency when it comes to how their contracts play out.
Sure, you can sign with a team as a free agent. But that doesn’t mean you’ll be around that team forever. The team can decide to trade you at the drop of a dime, depending on what other opportunities are available out there. They’ll bounce your contract around like flubber if they see fit.
Meanwhile, you could be someone like Andrew Wiggins, who now has to figure out how to move across the country with a newborn baby in his midst. All because the Warriors decided it was time to part ways.
That seems unfair. Very few players in the league can block something like that from happening.
How do we change that? Aside from making no-trade clauses a fixture in every NBA contract, I’m not sure. And we all know that’s not happening.
While there aren’t many apparent solutions now, this is something the players will have plenty of time to mull over until the league’s next collective bargaining agreement comes along in 2030.
(via shantsolmaz/IG) 
