We can say it with some certainty now: Whoever thought that the NBA trade deadline would work best when fit into Superb Owl Week is a genius. Assuming politics in the league office work as they do in every other corporate structure, with credit flowing upward toward the Monopoly Guy reclining in the fattest chair, that would make Adam Silver a super-genius.
And credit where it’s due: It worked. Nothing else could have kept us from our preordained position—facedown in the gutter, licking up the two main themes of this championship week, the referees taking a knee for the Chiefs, and Patrick Mahomes Legacy Talk. Nothing else would have elevated our attention beyond the please-just-play-the-stinking-game-now mantra that hits like clockwork on Big Game Thursday. Nothing else would have spared us from the ceaseless bleating of the Owl Nobody Wanted.
So let's cover all our potential conspiratorial bases and thank everyone involved in giving us one of the great weekends in NBA Babbler History:
- The players who got traded and the ones who haven't but are now the subject of fever dreams around future deals—Luka Doncic, Anthony Davis, Zach LaVine, De'Aaron Fox, Jimmy Butler, maybe even LeBron James.
- The general managers who are either geniuses or morons, and the owners who either approved or demanded action from them—Nico Harrison, Rob Pelinka, Monte McNair, Brian Wright, and Marc Eversley; and Miriam Adelson, Jeanie Buss, Vivek Ranadive, Peter Holt, and Jerry Reinsdorf.
- The insiders who are having their moment through our pal Shams Charania, who went from had-to-be-hacked to news-bringer to the world on Saturday night in announcing a trade so big and so unexpected that he couldn’t even find a way to write about it weird.
This was, in summation, what Dan Le Batard and his band of unhinged reprobates have coined "the 'holy shit in church' deal," and for two full days and maybe even a third it has given us blessed relief from the hackneyed and repetitive stupidities of Owl Week. It is leading us all on to the next step in this process of sanity through insanity: the arrival of a National Trade Deadline.
We have timidly floated this notion before, in which all pro sports share the same deadline/transfer week for maximal chaos, but nobody ever considered that it was imaginable, let alone feasible, let alone “remotely a good idea.” But now, after the million-ton craphammer of Doncic-Davis and all that continues to emanate from it and the only slightly lesser throw-weight of the deal that sent De’Aaron Fox to San Antonio and Zach LaVine to Sacramento, we can now conceive of the logical extension of this singular moment.
We are not just promoting a shared trade deadline for all our sports, including the semipro-with-university-names tier of college football, but going a step further. We are demanding mandatory deals. Every team, the 30 NBA, MLB, and MLS teams, the 32 NHL teams, the 13 WNBA teams and 14 NWSL teams, and everyone else in every sport and university—will all have to make one significant deal (trade or transfer) during Trade Week. Each league thought that having its own deadline separate from the others was good marketing and good sense, and the only thing that's happened is that the NFL is more like Thanos than ever, to the point at which we have been given an Owl wrapped in a gigantic middle finger and been told to eat it. Which, given the cultural appetite for game day feasts, we will. It’s a stringy bird, but it’s what’s for dinner.
But a weekend in which Doncic/Davis and a side of Fox/LaVine shook up the NBA has shown us what is truly possible. We can see what this glorious all-dealing future can be. Hell on a lolly stick, the NFL is already reacting by providing us with an alleged trade demand from Cleveland's edge monster Myles Garrett. The NFL has historically had rules against making big news during Owl Week, but rules can always be changed with the right amount of ancillary bullshit, and the NFL does ancillary bullshit like no other. The window for Everyone Else, Inc., is now.
The main drawback of the Universal Deadline strategy is obvious. The thing that separated the Doncic deal and even its ugliest side pieces—the “Luka as fat and lazy” narrative coming out of Dallas, most notably—from every other deal in every other sport since the Wayne Gretzky-to-Los Angeles trade in 1988 was its audacious surprise, and you can't have a surprise when everyone is blocking out a week for it. But doing nothing is its own punishment, and punishment this week is coming soon enough. In fact, the clock is already ticking on Taylor Swift-going-naught-for-the-Grammies-as-portent-for-a-Chiefs-loss memes. Who wouldn't want a deliciously spiteful Jimmy Butler-to-the-Wizards story instead?
