The Deadline Silence

Why no moves were made for the Nuggets Thursday

Photo by Daniel Jiménez on Unsplash

Back in December, I wrote this about how Denver’s roster was put together in relation to trades:

Denver locked itself into a corner with this roster. The fully guaranteed deals for second-round players means you can’t swap in and out. Zeke Nnaji’s fall from being a “maybe” to a “definitely not” playable player means that the fifth-highest paid player on the roster is immovable.

If you’re going to be top-heavy in the modern NBA, you have to have highly interchangeable parts. The Nuggets have rusted parts stuck together with corrosion and the gears are grinding against one another.

You can’t replace a part and try something different because the mechanism is both tightly constructed and stuck together.

So when I reached out to a source on Thursday at 1:03 p.m. MT and asked, “confirming, no movement?” and the reply came “nothing,” I wasn’t surprised.

Denver, on Wednesday, had tried a number of things. They had been close on Jonas Valanciunas. They had talked about Terance Mann. They had picked back up with Toronto to try one more time to make a deal that made sense for both teams.

Nothing doing.

Ultimately, too many asset gambles went wrong in a season where, ultimately, thankfully, not much has gone wrong for Denver on the court. (Knock on wood!)

Denver sits in third place in the Western Conference as of Thursday night after another win in a row against the Magic. They are on pace to finish outside of OKC’s side of the bracket and against a favorable, inexperienced playoff opponent in the higher seed bracket.

They’re good. They’re not great, but no team outside of the Thunder is this season in the West.

But when you have a good team, it’s a great opportunity to make a great one. Denver wanted to, but the options just weren’t there.

Denver basically had to stay on 17 in blackjack.

NO OPTIONS TO FIND OPTIONS

The word you heard both around the league and internally was that the Nuggets wanted “assets.” That means fewer players and more replenishing their pick supply, which was exhausted by the additions of Aaron Gordon, Jerami Grant, and KCP, moving up in the draft to get various players, and clearing Reggie Jackson’s salary.

But even though Denver dangled some pretty valuable swaps when Jokic might be exiting his prime, no takers were found for the right assets.

Much of this has to do with the money on the books and incorrect projections.

I’m invested in consistency. I try not to flame moves that I thought were good at the time, even if they turned out wrong.

The Zeke Nnaji contract was perfectly reasonable. A first-round pick, versatile, athletic player who can switch and shoot should increase his trade value over time, not decrease it. That contract should be gold right now.

The argument will be that Zeke never developed due to the short slack Malone provided him and the work done with him. The counterargument will be about his approach and inconsistency.

But Nnaji, along with Hunter Tyson, Dario Saric, and Jalen Pickett, were the hangups at the deadline. No one wanted to send assets for those players, only take assets in order to take the money.

Cap space in the new CBA has become land with oil future on it.

If the Tyson and Pickett contracts weren’t guaranteed, they’d be more movable. If the Nnaji contract were shorter, it would be movable. If Saric didn’t have a player option, it would be movable. Maybe not for much in any of those instances, but these deals would have been movable. Someone would have wanted the cap space or the rights to the players.

YEAH, NO MIKE DEALS

Jamal Murray is untradeable under current rules due to signing his extension. Ditto for Aaron Gordon. Nikola Jokic isn’t available unless Nico Harrison takes over basketball operations.

So that left Porter. We’ve given all sorts of suggestions on possible Porter trades, and if the right deal had come to Denver, they would have considered it. But early on this season, internal conversations yielded a firm decision to not shop Porter.