Ringer has thoughts on five teams that did nothing:
Why Did These Five Teams Do Nothing at the NBA Trade Deadline?
Only five teams sat out the busiest NBA trade deadline in history. Will they regret standing still? We examine the ripple effects for the Nuggets, Wolves, and more.
Getty Images/Ringer illustration
After a transformative week during which a league-record
63 players were dealt before the NBA trade deadline, only five teams did not, in any form, make a move: the Portland Trail Blazers, Orlando Magic, Brooklyn Nets, Denver Nuggets, and Minnesota Timberwolves.
A few more teams barely did anything—the Boston Celtics, Oklahoma City Thunder, and Indiana Pacers, for example, nickeled-and-dimed their way through relatively insignificant transactions—but no others sat completely still, both on the day of the trade deadline and during the entire month leading up to it. There are similarities among these five organizations, but no unifying theme to connect their passivity. No overarching statement to be gleaned and then spun into a meaningful trend. A couple of them are all-in contenders, one is ascending through unfortunate growing pains, and the other two are near the start of a rebuild. Their inertia is important, though.
Here’s a critical look at each stagnant situation and whether everything these teams
didn’t do should be recognized as prudent or unimaginative. (At the end of each section, a one-word verdict will be applied.)
Portland Trail Blazers
The Trail Blazers have somehow won 10 of their past 12 games and deserve a standing ovation for the restraint they showed on Thursday, not taking all their assets and pushing them front and center for a chance to win the 2025 NBA title. (That was a joke. Sort of.)
Portland is 23-31, a spunky 13-seed that’s only 4.5 games back of the play-in. It’s also spinning its wheels, trudging through an increasingly paradoxical rebuild that can now, fairly, be categorized as bizarre. In the short term, Portland’s roster is tantalizing, explosive, and somewhat nonsensical. Its core players, several of whom are extension eligible this summer, may not be compatible with one another, and none are clear foundational centerpieces.
The Trail Blazers clearly aren’t going full bore on a youth movement, Jerami Grant, Deandre Ayton, and Robert Williams III are all (when healthy) in Chauncey Billups’s rotation. While veteran leadership can certainly bring value to a green team, there’s also something to be said about developing young players by, like, putting them on the court at the same time. Lineups that feature Shaedon Sharpe, Scoot Henderson, and Donovan Clingan—the team’s three most recent lottery picks—
have played only 145 minutes this season, and they haven’t started a game together since
November 20.
The Blazers have made it unnecessarily hard to figure out who should be part of the organization’s next growth cycle, a perplexing dilemma when you realize that all but four players on this roster are under contract next season, too. Yes, Portland will likely have another lottery pick in what’s expected to be a deep draft. But the strategy, right now, all feels a bit too circumspect.
Winning is intoxicating. But would it have made sense to be a little more aggressive about moving off Williams and Grant or potentially even selling high on Anfernee Simons? (Assuming that the market for any of those three could yield positive draft capital in a league full of teams so desperate to win.) There are a lot of questions, and I don’t have all the answers. But I really hope that the Blazers weren’t hoodwinked by their own recent success. That would be criminally shortsighted, regardless of how formidable they’ve looked over the past six weeks.
Since January 1, the Thunder and Clippers are the only teams that rank higher in defensive rating, which might be the most unbelievable stat I’ve read all season.
Adding to the frustration:
Reports have trickled out that Portland wasn’t particularly close to completing any deals. “We know a lot of fans, and probably a lot of people in here, prefer a little bit of action,” Blazers general manager Joe Cronin said. “Often, we do too. We’re always looking for ways to participate in these windows and find guys who can help us be better. But this time around, we just didn’t find the value. So, we decided to pass.”
The trade deadline can be an inflection point for any franchise mired in the wilderness of a prolonged rebuild. By sitting this one out, Portland tacked another level of uncertainty on top of a plan that’s yet to take shape.
One-word verdict: Bizarre
https://www.theringer.com/2025/02/11/nba/nba-trade-deadline-2025-nuggets-wolves-magic
