What I'm hearing as NBA free agency shifts into Superstar Trade Season
How soon will Damian Lillard and James Harden be dealt? Let's look at both situations and talk Sixers, Blazers, Heat, Clippers, Hornets, Mavs, Celtics, Rockets, Hawks, Wolves, Suns, Cavaliers and Jazz
NBA free agency moves faster every year.
We're almost a decade removed from what seems like a completely implausible scenario in 2023: LeBron James waiting until July 11, 2014, to announce that he was leaving the Miami Heat to return to his home-state Cleveland Cavaliers ... and frustrating countless factions all over the NBA map by limiting the rest of the league's free agent movement as if it were Elon Musk pulling the levers.
Nowadays? Entering Sunday's second full day of this summer's open market, per the bookkeeping of Spotrac’s Keith Smith, 62 verbal agreements on new deals for free agents had been struck — with another eight contract extensions agreed to before Jordan Clarkson’s new three-year extension with Utah (who forecasted that?) came to fruition Sunday.
There should be no mystery why modern free agency unfolds this way.
Are you frustrated with the Twitter experience?
Do what many NBA fans did Saturday after the aforementioned Mr. Musk announced that the platform had imposed view limits on tweets.
Relocate to The Stein Line's Substack Chat!
It's a great place to interact with fellow offseason-obsessed readers who want to inhale every latest morsel of transaction mayhem in #thisleague and who banded together during this latest Twitter storm to share the latest news updates that the limits on tweet views might have otherwise caused them to miss.
And at least once a week we get together for paid-subscribers-only sessions with rapid-fire Q&As on an array of league topics. Check out the impromptu session we did Sunday afternoon.