Presti: Thunder didn't want to trade George
When Thunder general manager Sam Presti addressed the media Thursday for the first time since the franchise-rocking trades of Paul George, Russell Westbrook and Jerami Grant, he wanted to provide clarification without running over his former All-Star.
What started with "thanks" ended with pancakes. The trade wasn't "mutual," as George described at his Clippers introductory press conference Wednesday in Los Angeles, the same way it wasn't mutual for the Pelicans to trade Anthony Davis to the Lakers.
"I wouldn't necessarily agree with that," Presti said of George's wording. "… because that would infer that we were wanting to trade Paul George, which I think most people would agree that that probably wasn't on the top of our off-season priority list."
Without disparaging George, Presti made it clear that the Thunder didn't want to trade him. But in the NBA's peak of player power, do teams have a choice?
George told ESPN Wednesday that the Thunder trading him to the Clippers was a "mutual thing between both of us that the time was up and we both had ideas of doing things differently."
What followed George's trade request was the mutual part, not the desire to trade George initially.
With two years left on George's contract, Presti acted in collaboration with George's agent, Aaron Mintz, to get him to Los Angeles while also getting the Thunder the capital it wanted — five first- round picks, two first- round pick swaps and Clippers players Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Danilo Gallinari.
"He would have had one year left on his contract at that point in time, and although we may have had more time to plan, I don't think we were going to be in a position to be able to
recoup the value that we were able to in that particular situation," Presti said Thursday about if the Thunder would have kept George.
"It was not adversarial at all, and I also fully respect the way that it was handled. The fact that we were able to make it work in a way that benefited the franchise made it something that we could do."
Something the Thunder could do isn't the same as something it wanted to do.
OKC went into the offseason prepared to run it back with improvements on the margins around its two All-Stars. It had spent into the luxury tax and traded draft picks to fashion a team around George and Westbrook.
Then came George's trade request. Not long after, reports emerged from The Athletic of George and Westbrook expressing their "discontent" to the Thunder and "expressing interest in the franchise possibly making significant changes."
Presti, never the speculator, didn't address any particular report.
Instead, he alluded to the leaguewide issue of discontent players and the disappointment which naturally follows a season which falls short.
"I could just tell you this: I don't know how many people in the NBA are content at the end of a season," Presti said.
Of the league's 27 AllStars from 2019, eight were either traded or left their teams in free agency. That doesn't count Jimmy Butler, who began the 2018 season with a trade demand out of Minnesota.
On July 9, NBA commissioner Adam Silver said trade requests are "disheartening to the team" and are "disheartening to the community and don't serve the player well."
"That's an issue that needs to be addressed," Silver said. "There's not a simple solution there. This is a talent- driven business. Players have leverage."
Because of that leverage, and possibly a pair of disgruntled All-Stars, Presti is now overseeing a rebuild. That much is clear even if the language used
to describe the Thunder's deconstruction has been murky.
"I don't know what the discontent is referring to," Presti said Thursday. "I don't know if it was pancakes not fluffy enough or we're not winning enough
games. All I can tell you is those guys are great guys. We're going to have conversations with those guys at the end of the year.
"When you don't reach the potential that you think you have as a team, there's going to be
frustration. But I think all systems were `go' going into the season, and we were excited about it, but that's just not the path that it took. I feel really good about the way that we were able to handle that from that point."