The Kevin Durant sweepstakes were somewhat unusual among star trades in how theoretically accessible he was. Yes, he attempted to steer negotiations towards certain teams, but the price was low enough that almost anyone theoretically could have gotten into the running before he ultimately landed with the Houston Rockets.
And, well, several teams did. The San Antonio Spurs and Miami Heat made offers, though both reserved their best assets. The Minnesota Timberwolves and Toronto Raptors did as well, despite Durant’s misgivings. ESPN’s Shams Charania even reported on a few mystery teams that snuck into the proceedings. The field here was reasonably wide.
Kevin Durant trade grades: Rockets launch into contention, Suns eat crow as Jalen Green becomes swing player
Brad Botkin
We know what this trade means for Houston. It’s an unmitigated victory, a Hall of Famer to fill their only significant hole at a fraction of his fair price. But what about everyone else? What about the teams that pursued Durant and came up short? What does missing mean for their offseasons? Let’s dig into those teams a bit as they work through the aftermath of the Durant blockbuster.
San Antonio Spurs
For more than any other team in the field, Durant was a luxury to the Spurs. They would have been happy to have him. A trio of Durant, Victor Wembanyama and De’Aaron Fox likely would have been good enough to compete for the 2026 championship provided the rest of the roster was up to snuff. But Wembanyama is only 21. Durant will be retired before his prime begins. They can afford to be patient.
Charania said on the Pat McAfee show less than a week ago that he believed the Spurs could be “stocking their assets for potentially a bigger move, a bigger player, someone who might fit their timeline.” While not stated definitively, that certainly sounds as though the Spurs are comfortable waiting to see what happens with Giannis Antetokounmpo. No, he is unlikely to move this offseason, but how is he going to feel if the Bucks are below .500 at the deadline? Even if he is fully committed to the Bucks, the Spurs would likely prefer to know that for sure before they commit assets elsewhere. And if he never moves? Someone else will, and given their trade chips and their newfound recruiting power with Wembanyama, they can just go get someone else who is younger than Durant.
The short term is simpler for the Spurs. They don’t need to jump into the title picture immediately. They just need to take incremental steps forward, ideally to at least make the playoffs next year. They have two lottery picks in Wednesday’s draft. They’ll take Dylan Harper at No. 2. In a perfect world, they’d probably prefer to do with No. 14 what they did with No. 8 last year: trade it for more future assets. They don’t want to play two rookies next season, when they hope to be good. Besides, they’d like to refill the coffers after the Fox trade.
They are still extremely flexible from a cap perspective. They’re more than $27 million below the tax line going into free agency. That makes them an obvious player for the non-taxpayer mid-level exception. Some shooting would be nice after they ranked 20th in 3-point percentage a year ago. They have more than enough room to sign a free agent that way, and then operate on the trade market without fear of paying the tax. They don’t have to get another star right away. The idea for now should be to add role players so that when they do decide to take the star swing, that player is joining a complete team and not just a theoretical assemblage of talent.
Miami Heat
Durant was a luxury to the Spurs. He was a necessity to the Heat, at least if they had any real ambitions of winning next season. They were just a 37-win team without him last year, and that was with Bam Adebayo and Tyler Herro practically never missing time. Maybe they’re better without the Jimmy Butler drama hanging over their heads, but this team is operating at a pretty significant talent deficit compared to even the Eastern Conference’s contenders, much less the big boys out West. Durant was their only way of potentially bridging it. They don’t have the assets, short of potentially dangling prized young center Kel’El Ware, to get a star at fair, market value. They had to get one with a meaningful shortcoming like Durant’s age.
They didn’t, and that leaves the Heat in limbo. They should tear this team down to the studs before committing to a dangerous extension for Herro. The Damian Lillard saga two summers ago showed us Herro’s value probably isn’t especially high, but Adebayo’s certainly is, and with Ware waiting in the wings, there’s a replacement center ready to anchor the defense when it’s time to win again.
But this is the Heat we’re talking about here. They don’t tank. So what’s Plan B? First thing’s first: they’d probably like to re-sign Davion Mitchell. They have around $6 million in room below the tax line, but they have a few ways of saving money. The easiest would be waiving Duncan Robinson, whose contract is only 50% guaranteed, but the preferable method would be trading Kyle Anderson into someone else’s mid-level exception so long as it doesn’t cost too much in the way of draft picks (spoilers, it might!) Mitchell showed a lot of offensive promise with the Heat, and his defense has always been good. He’s exactly the sort of project they love.
But beyond that? Assuming they don’t want to pay the tax, there’s not too much they can do beyond sitting tight and waiting for another star to become available, unless they’re going to force the issue now on someone really underwhelming like DeMar DeRozan. That might sound disappointing, but remember, it’s basically what they did from 2017 through 2019. They were rewarded with Jimmy Butler. The idea of being the face of a new era of Miami Heat basketball will appeal to someone. The real question here is whether or not they’re willing to waste three years being mediocre like they did last decade. If they are, they’re playing the waiting game. If not? We might eventually see our first all-out Heat rebuild ever.
Minnesota Timberwolves
The Timberwolves fell somewhere between the Spurs and the Heat on the need spectrum. They made the Western Conference finals. They’re not facing the sort of existential crisis Miami is. But once they got there, they got slapped around by the Thunder for five games. Minnesota’s goal, of course, is to beat the Thunder, not just face them. Just like the Heat, the Timberwolves are so limited in the sort of assets they can generate for a trade that their only path to another star was a flawed one. They fired their draft bullets on Rudy Gobert already.
The short-term question here is what the Timberwolves do with their own free agents. They potentially have three important ones: Julius Randle, Naz Reid and Nickeil Alexander-Walker. They have full Bird Rights on all three, but it really doesn’t make sense for them to go above the second apron at this point. Doing so last season means that they are allowed to do so only one more time in the next four years before frozen draft picks start dropping to the end of the first round. They’d likely prefer to save their next second apron season for one in which they’re closer or need more flexibility.
So if that’s functioning as a hard ceiling, Minnesota probably has the money for two of those free agents, not three, unless they can dump another contract. Mike Conley is the obvious suspect, but they’d probably need to use the No. 17 pick to dump him. Is that worth it? Four years of cost control on a rookie is pretty substantial for a team this expensive. More likely, Alexander-Walker signs elsewhere, and the Timberwolves hand his minutes to Rob Dillingham and Terrence Shannon.
The longer term is a bit more interesting. The Durant pursuit was yet more proof that Tim Connelly is an aggressive and unconventional roster-builder. He’s not going to stop chasing big names, but without picks, he’s going to have to use players to do so. There’s not an obvious fit out there right now, but things change quickly in this league. If he sees an upside swing on a player with a scary injury history or perhaps a bad contract, he might just take it.
Toronto Raptors
Cards on the table, I have no Earthly idea what the Raptors are about to do. This team makes no sense. They broke up the 2022 team built around one small guard (Fred VanVleet) and a million wings (Pascal Siakam, OG Anunoby, Gary Trent, Scottie Barnes, Thaddeus Young) because they didn’t see the upside in that group. They then proceeded to build a worse version of the same roster: one small guard (Immanuel Quickley) and a million non-star wings (Barnes, RJ Barrett, Brandon Ingram, Gradey Dick). That sub-.500 roster is, amazingly, over the tax line for next season at this moment. Maybe there’s a vision here. It’s not apparent.
All of the reporting this offseason has suggested that the Raptors are eager to take a big swing. That’s why they sniffed around Durant. They didn’t get him, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to stop trying. Frankly, if someone pulls off a stunner of a star trade in the next few days, it’s probably going to be the Raptors.
They obviously have a bunch of big contracts to use as matching tools. They have several promising youngsters, most notably Dick and defensive ace Jamal Shead. They have the No. 9 pick in a draft that seems to have seven or eight highly regarded prospects, and they control all of their future first-rounders as well. Don’t expect something like this, but if someone was going to, say, throw five first-round picks at Boston for Jaylen Brown, or perhaps try to buy low on Zion Williamson, the Raptors seem like the sort of team that would do it. They’ve done it before, after all. The Kawhi Leonard trade looms large over everything Masai Ujiri has done since.
The mystery suitors
The teams above were the suitors we knew about before the deal. Charania reported that three mystery teams also jumped into the bidding: the Clippers, the Nuggets and the Cavaliers. Each of them, however, had meaningful hurdles to overcome. The Cavaliers are well above the second apron, so they would have needed to dump around $10 million just to make a legal trade, and probably more to fill out their roster. Denver had very little asset-value to dangle without including a core player like Aaron Gordon. The Clippers were never going to include Ivica Zubac, so the appeal of a package from them would have been first-round picks in 2030 and 2032. Based on the way Mat Ishbia operates, it’s unlikely that he would have valued those picks appropriately. In all three cases, these pursuits were likely mostly exploratory. All three teams have more attainable goals this summer.
The Clippers remain in a relatively advantageous position. They’re far enough below the tax line to feasibly use the mid-level exception if they want to go get an impact free agent. They also have two deep future first-rounders to trade in 2030 and 2032. The Suns may not have loved those picks but a rebuilding GM would. However, if the wanted to wait and aim for something bigger, they have paths to significant cap space in the next few summers, so they can afford to be patient. They’d love another shot-creator and/or a backup center this offseason, but their on-court needs aren’t pressing. The idea for now is establishing a long-term direction.
Denver had to try. If they could have gotten Durant for, say, Michael Porter Jr., matching salary and a pick, they would have been foolish not to. Realistically, though, this summer was always about rebuilding the fringes. The starting lineup still works. The bench does not. They can create the taxpayer mid-level to chase a free agent, with Bruce Brown as the obvious suspect here. They also still do have first-round pick capital deep into the future if they wanted to make another a bigger trade. Remember how we mentioned the idea of the Spurs replicating the Dillingham trade from last offseason at No. 14 this year? The Nuggets are a clear fit there, as it could give them four years of cheap depth on an interesting prospect. Don’t expect anything too flashy, though. The Nuggets don’t even have a GM yet.
Cleveland was the true stunner. Presumably, the package would have revolved around Jarrett Allen, who could have solved Phoenix’s center woes. However, the Cavaliers probably would have needed to include so much extra salary that a third team would have been needed. At that point, constructing a trade becomes harder. De’Andre Hunter and Isaac Okoro likely would have been involved. The Cavs being involved suggests to us that Cleveland is being more aggressive in shopping for improvements than once thought. If they can get a significant wing for Allen, they can move Evan Mobley to center and likely experience minimal decline in an Eastern Conference they could rip through in 2025-26.
In a perfect world, the Cavaliers at least find a way to retain key backup point guard Ty Jerome. They can go over the second apron to do it, at least for the time being, but the tax bill would be gargantuan. Don’t be surprised if the Cavaliers try for something bigger, but at a bare minimum, steps towards a new Jerome deal as well as some cap dumping (sorry, Okoro, but you’re our likeliest candidate) should be the expectation here.