Lack of deadline drama is not exactly exciting, but future looks bright
When it comes right down to it, the Spurs’ brain trust isn’t so different from its fan base. It would have loved to pull off a franchisealtering deal at the trade deadline Thursday, and it’s at least a little disappointed it couldn’t.
Just like any fan, general manager Brian Wright would have jumped at the opportunity to send Lamarcus Aldridge and a role player to Orlando for Nikola Vucevic in a heartbeat. He might even have thrown in a first-round draft pick.
Just like any fan, CEO R.C. Buford would have at least considered any offer for Demar Derozan with the potential to put the Spurs in a better position to win
in the years to come.
Just like any fan, coach Gregg Popovich would have accepted a secondround pick for third-stringer Trey Lyles, even if Popovich plans to be living in Italy by the time the Spurs use it.
The problem, of course, is the Spurs’ decisionmakers are burdened with the misfortune of operating in reality, in which no trade partners — not even the Knicks — are quite as cooperative as they’d like them to be.
So Wright, Buford and Popovich weighed their options and then stood mostly pat, just like they usually do. And as a result, this is what the Spurs are left with heading into this summer:
• Six promising firstrounders from the last five drafts, each with a chance to outperform the expected value of their pick, each under contract and each looking like an integral part of the franchise’s future.
• All of their future draft picks, save for a second-rounder in 2022.
• An estimated $52 million in salary cap space, which could give them the third-most money in the league to spend on free agents.
If this is the Spurs’ version of status quo, it’s not half-bad. They will need to be wise about how they spend that money, obviously, and there are no guarantees they will be able to lure a differencemaker from a summer free-agent class that looks to be a tad underwhelming. But if they continue to draft well and use their space mainly to ensure their growing stable of thoroughbreds never has to split up?
They could do a lot worse.
Look, a bit of fan frustration is understandable. For decades now, the trade deadline has served as the festive, frolicking bacchanal to which the Spurs never are invited — or at least choose to skip.
It’s OK to be tempted. Dealing for, say, Evan Fournier on Thursday might not have made much sense, but it at least would have been fun.
The thing is, though, for those most active on the trade markets, the fun has a tendency to wear off in a hurry, and the Spurs have
to look only a bit down Interstate 10 for evidence of that. A couple of months after trading Most Valuable Player candidate James Harden, Houston traded Victor Oladipo — the centerpiece of the Harden deal — to Miami on Thursday.
Next year, the Rockets will have as many players in uniform from their Harden deal as the Spurs will have from the trade they couldn’t swing for Aldridge. The Rockets
have a slew of future picks, but they also gave away a haul in a doomed trade for Russell Westbrook, and they unquestionably are in a much worse place today than they were when they began the wheeling and dealing two years ago.
This isn’t to say the Spurs have done everything perfectly. In hindsight, they could have taken whatever they could for Aldridge a couple of years ago, even if it’s doubtful he would have
fetched then what the Magic got for Vucevic.
And for those arguing that the Spurs should have been buyers Thursday and outbid Chicago for the Orlando center — think about what that would have meant.
To get Vucevic, the Bulls traded not only two firstround picks, but also Wendell Carter Jr., a 21-year-old with a 16.3 player efficiency rating and 2.2 win shares this season. The Spurs’ closest match to that is Keldon Johnson. And if the Spurs had traded Johnson plus two firstrounders for Vucevic, the people of San Antonio would be justified for burning torches in the street.
The truth is, adding a piece like Vucevic always was going to be a long shot for the Spurs at the deadline, just like getting anything for Aldridge was. His contract made a deal all but impossible, so the Spurs wound up getting for him exactly what Cleveland got for Andre Drummond and exactly what Detroit got for Blake Griffin — nothing.
That’s not an indictment of any of those three front offices. It’s just the reality of how the NBA works.
And if fans wish it would have gone a little differently? Well, rest assured that the brain trust does, too.
But once the deadline passed, the Spurs still had a nucleus to build around and plenty of means to do the building.
In other cities, there are fans who would have loved to acquire exactly that.