The 2024-25 NBA All-No-Trade Team
As we soon enter the throes of NBA Trade Season, this Newsletter Tuesday delivers a list for you to keep handy that features all the players who cannot be dealt this season without their consent
Maybe you saw the stat freshly circulated by ESPN's Bobby Marks.
Come Sunday, when the calendar flips to Dec. 15th, 87% of the NBA will be trade-eligible through the Feb. 6 trade deadline.
In other words: That time of year is really here.
You can expect more Trade Season coverage than ever before from The Stein Line after the recent addition of Jake Fischer as a contributing writer. This will be the fourth trade deadline I've covered on this platform and, well, all I'll say now is that I think you'll more than notice the infusion of reporting prowess with what we publish just between now and Sunday.
For starters, though, let's turn to a staple that we like to run this time every year: Our annual All-No-Trade Team.
This is a story designed to make it as clear as possible exactly who cannot be traded this season without securing their consent ... or who, in the case of Utah's Lauri Markkanen and some other recent contract extension recipients, can't be traded until after the season even if they wanted to be dealt.
It's a list, as always, that starts with players who possess a full no-trade clause. There are only two leaguewide — Phoenix's Bradley Beal and the Los Angeles Lakers' LeBron James — but that's twice as many as last season when Beal possessed the only full NTC on the NBA map.
Remember: A full NTC is not automatic based on service time as seen in baseball and is very difficult to obtain in the NBA, because NTCs can only be negotiated into completely new contracts in addition to requiring players to have eight years of service time and four with the team providing it.
NBA rules prohibit working a no-trade clause into a contract extension. Given how rarely top players make it to free agency these days, with seemingly everyone in #thisleague determined to sign extensions rather than test the open market, NTCs have become a real relic.
It's Beal. It's LeBron. And that's it.
Back to Markkanen: Players who sign contract extensions can't be traded for six months. You'll recall that, after he attracted considerable trade interest from Golden State and other suitors during the summer, Markkanen intentionally waited until Aug. 7 to sign a lucrative extension with the Jazz to ensure that he would not be trade eligible until after the Feb. 6 trade deadline.
There are seven more recent extension recipients since Markkanen landed his new deal in Utah who cannot be traded until after the season because six months will not have elapsed since they signed the new deals. They are:
🏀 Wendell Carter Jr. (Orlando)
🏀 Joel Embiid (Philadelphia)
🏀 Aaron Gordon (Denver)
🏀 T.J. McConnell (Indiana)
🏀 Jamal Murray (Denver)
🏀 Jayson Tatum (Boston)*
🏀 Ivica Zubac (LA Clippers)
*In Tatum's case, because he signed a supermax extension last July, he is ineligible to be dealt for a full year rather than six months after signing.
As always there is also a small handful of players this season who, because they signed a one-year contract in the offseason with the same team they played for last season, hold veto power over an in-season trade. We have long referred to such players as One-Year Birds and, as is customary around here, we turned to our pal
to confirm that our list of players in this category is complete.These 12 players can indeed be traded before the Feb. 6 trade deadline ... but only if they sign off on the trade. The reason: Any of these players would forfeit their Bird Rights for the 2025 offseason as soon as they switch teams.
The NBA's One-Year Birds for 2024-25:
🏀 Bol Bol (Phoenix)
🏀 Vlatko Čančar (Denver)
🏀 Seth Curry (Charlotte)
🏀 Luka Garza (Minnesota)
🏀 James Harden (LA Clippers)*
🏀 James Johnson (Indiana)
🏀 DeAndre Jordan (Denver)
🏀 Luke Kennard (Memphis)
🏀 Luke Kornet (Boston)
🏀 Damion Lee (Phoenix)
🏀 Kyle Lowry (Philadelphia)
🏀 Trendon Watford (Brooklyn)
*Harden signed a two-year, $70 million deal with the Clippers during the offseason but is considered a One-Year Bird because Year 2 in the contract is a player option.
Keith being Keith means he also furnished me with a list of 12 more players who could have been One-Year Birds this season but elected, as permitted by the NBA's latest labor agreement, to waive that right when they signed their current contract. Those 12 who have relinquished their veto power:
🏀 Precious Achiuwa (New York)
🏀 Charles Bassey (San Antonio)
🏀 Thomas Bryant (Miami)
🏀 Gary Harris (Orlando)
🏀 Aaron Holiday (Houston)
🏀 Keon Johnson (Brooklyn)
🏀 Alex Len (Sacramento)
🏀 Sandro Mamukelashvili (San Antonio)
🏀 Markieff Morris (Dallas)
🏀 Kelly Oubre Jr. (Philadelphia)
🏀 Garrett Temple (Toronto)
🏀 Moritz Wagner (Orlando)
Two more players who are ineligible to be traded because they are recent free agent signees and will not have been with their new teams long enough by the time Feb. 6 hits: Oklahoma City's Branden Carlson and Sacramento's Jae Crowder.
One more category Professor Smith encouraged us to start including last season: First-round picks from the Class of 2021 who recently signed extensions. There were 11 such extensions before the Oct. 21 deadline … three shy of last season's record 14 extensions for first-round picks from the Class of 2020.
The following players are not completely ineligible to be traded this season but are indeed very difficult to trade before the offseason because their new contacts have activated what is known as the Poison Pill Provision, which applies to players on Year 4 of their rookie deals before an extension begins.
The provision, as ESPN's Marks puts it, stipulates that such players' "fourth-year salary [counts] as outgoing money [in a trade] and the average of the extension amount and last year of their rookie contract [counts] as incoming money." The example Marks cited in his piece illustrates how Golden State's Moses Moody only counts as $5.8 million in outgoing salary for the Warriors but $10.2 million for the team that would acquire him in a theoretical trade.
Team PPP in 2024-25:
2021's No. 1 pick Cade Cunningham (Detroit)
No. 2 Jalen Green (Houston)
No. 3 Evan Mobley (Cleveland)
No. 4 Scottie Barnes (Toronto)
No. 5 Jalen Suggs (Orlando)
No. 8 Franz Wagner (Orlando)
No. 14 Moses Moody (Golden State)
No. 15 Corey Kispert (Washington)
No. 16 Alperen Şengün (Houston)
No. 17 Trey Murphy III (New Orleans)
No. 20 Jalen Johnson (Atlanta)
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Numbers Game
🏀 7
Smart reminder via Spotrac from the aforementioned Professor Smith: There have been seven trades between Dec. 15 and Jan. 15 over the past six years ... and nearly eight. Toronto dealt Pascal Siakam to Indiana last Jan. 17.
🏀 6
Nikola Jokić's 56 points Saturday night in a stunning loss at Washington marked this season's sixth 50-point game.
🏀 8
Including a win in Atlanta after the Washington debacle, Jokić totaled 104 points, 30 rebounds and 16 assists over a two-game span. According to my fellow Substacker
, Elgin Baylor is the only other NBA player to pull off that feat.🏀 60
Sacramento's De'Aaron Fox scored a season-high 60 points in an overtime loss to Minnesota. The other 50-point games have been recorded by Milwaukee's Giannis Antetokounmpo (59), Orlando's Paolo Banchero (50), Charlotte's LaMelo Ball (50) and San Antonio's Victor Wembanyama (50).
🏀 6
Trivia Question: Can you name all of the NBA's past MVPs who have played for at least six teams?
🏀 7
Special: Karl-Anthony Towns had lost all seven of his previous career visits to Toronto before making the dagger 3 that clinched the Knicks' Monday night road win over the Raptors.🏀 10
Remember when I wrote recently (below) about the deepening ties between the Knicks and the Mavericks since the Kristaps Porziņģis trade in January 2019? My DLLS Sports colleague Bobby Karalla did some research after the piece dropped and found Dallas, per Basketball Reference, has made 10 trades with New York ... more than with any other franchise.
🏀 11
I'm a week late to this one because there was no Numbers Game section in last week's Tuesday Newsletter Extravaganza that exclusively featured more than 4,000 words' worth of NBA Power Rankings, but I enjoyed Kubatko's recent roundup of statistical superlatives from the 11th month of the year … also known as November:
🏀 5
Included in Kubatko's piece: Jokić and LeBron shared the league lead with five triple-doubles each in November.
🏀 6
We are down to six teams in the NBA averaging at least 40 3-point attempts per game … led by Boston's 51.4 3s per game. The next five: Chicago (43.5), Charlotte (43.1), Golden State (41.2), Minnesota (40.6) and San Antonio (40.0). However …
🏀 4
There are four teams not far off in the 39s. They are: Brooklyn (39.6), Oklahoma City (39.6), Phoenix (39.4) and Miami (39.2).
🏀 20
The 19-5 Celtics have sustained those five losses by a mere 20 combined points. The 18-5 Thunder took their five defeats by a combined 24 points. The 16-8 Mavericks have lost those eight games by 38 points combined.
🏀 5
Trivia Answer: There are five former MVPs who have played for at least six different teams. Moses Malone and Buffalo Braves legend Bob McAdoo each played for seven teams; Shaquille O'Neal, Derrick Rose and Denver's Russell Westbrook have played for six each.
If we were to distill the list down to an actual All-No Trade List, looking at actual 2024-25 performance, not career, would it be: Harden, Lebron, Barnes, Tatum, Mobley? I think you can make an argument Lebron isn't on there because his defense has been so bad, but with Franz out, hard to see anyone else supplanting Lebron. Also hard to leave Embiid off, but you'd have to right?
I had a feeling McAdoo would be on that list; I just wasn't sure of the number of teams, as his early career, for me, was purely viewed via those old, yearly handbooks ('The Complete Handbook of Pro Basketball') that I would leaf through voraciously as a kid.
I got Shaq, Moses, and Westbrook, too. Had sort of forgotten all the teams Rose had been on, though.