It’s the second most exciting time of the NBA season, the trade deadline. While I hate how much time podcasts spend discussing hypothetical trades – just analyze basketball – I always enjoy seeing how the league is reconfigured into the back 30% of the season. I enjoy even more yelling at GMs and wondering what it would take to get hired in their place. I have never, however, put my thoughts into words, which means the vindication I often feel may be confirmation bias and not reflect any greater skill I have at analyzing basketball. So, with the trade deadline ending today, February 5, 2026, I present you to my hot takes. These opinions are only for big trades that I feel are particularly revelatory.

1. Harden (Clippers) for Garland (Cavs): C. On one hand, this deal makes sense: the Cavs want to win now, and Harden has was once an MVP who has made several deep playoff runs. Darius Garland is a small guard who has shown flashes of elite playmaking the last two seasons but is injury prone and, well, small. There are two problems with this trade. First, someone wanted Harden, a prima donna. Here is a player who hasn’t been happy on a team since he was 6th man of the year on the Thunder, and even then he probably wasn’t happy because he left to become the leading man for the Rockets. He and Daryl Morey saw Steph revolutionizing the game of basketball with three point shots, free flowing ball movement, and beautiful drives and said, “What if we do that, but make it horrible to watch?” Harden perfected the art of foul hunting and ball hogging. If you watched basketball in 2017 and felt the yungins were ruining the game, then Harden was happy to show you the 1990s but replacing bad long distance twos with not-particularly-accurate 3s. Seriously, go check out page 178 of Kirk Goldsberry’s Hoop Atlas for one of my favorite charts of all time: if you graph the percent of unassisted 3 point shots made against their number for every player, you have a pretty up and to the right line, until your eyes scan and scan and scan to the right, landing upon Harden off on his own taking a ton of unassisted 3s but not making them at a remarkable rate. This same player is also only half a player: Luka Doncic is only the second laziest defender in the league because Harden is also an NBA player. Finally, on superficial grounds, there are two final problems with Harden. One, I never trust an NBA player with a belly; your job is to run, run, and run, and if you cannot get in shape that tells me a lot about how seriously you take the game. Two, that. f—–g. beard. shut. up. and. trim. it. Obviously some maintenance is performed, but for Christ’s sake act like you care. I know – well, I assume – a lack of money isn’t keeping him from getting it trimmed. It is so unkempt you can’t see his lips – every bite of food comes with a side of face hair! Seriously, what GM would take a player that does not take care of himself?

Oh that’s right, the type of GM that runs the Cavs, which brings me to my second problem with this trade: it shows how inept, or at least overly trigger happy, the Cavs organization is. Donovan Mitchell is an elite guard who could lead a championship team, but I still think Lauri Markkanen, collin Sexton, Ochai Agbaji, 3 first-round picks, and two pick swaps was too high a price. The price is too high because the Cavs should have built around Lauri Markkanen, Evan Mobley, and Jarrett Allen. The 21-22 season was a breakout one for the team led by those three fast, tall, and athletic players who could guard almost any position on the court. Instead of building a team around that core, the leadership got an itchy finger and dismantled it for Mitchell. In that spurt they traded for De’Andre Hunter, someone I had never heard of but that the podcasters did a really good job convincing themselves he was a valuable player; he now on the Sacramento Kings, which is as ignominious as being on the Wizards (see below). Mitchell plays the same position as Garland, so it was inevitable Garland would leave. So to solve the duplicative problem, the Cavs went and got * checks notes * a duplicate player. Here is how I imagine the decision sounded in the Cavs’ front office: “Hey, we have a 26 year old small guard who tries hard. Let’s ditch him for a 36 year old guard who is literally the worst defender in the league. Finals, here we come!”

The obvious move was, and still is, to bring LeBron back for a retirement year next year and have him come off the bench. After all, LeBron knows how to get the Cavs to the Finals.

2. Davis + others (Mavs) for People (Wizards): ???. I don’t know what to make of this trade. On one hand, I feel bad for Anthony Davis. On the other, the second worst facial hair feature in the league, the unibrow, belongs to him. To guess how I feel about that, reread how I feel about The Beard’s beard. What I really learned from this trade is that the Wizards exist to make teams like the Cavs feel like they know what they are doing. Seriously, this is the team that just took Trae Young, a very small point guard who people don’t like as a teammate, and decided to pair him with a guy who gets injured just looking at a basketball. It’s like when John Wall’s knees left his body they took the Wizards’ soul too. Ted Leonsis, the Wizards’ owner, is almost certainly receiving side payments from the other 28 league owners to take their dregs. I say 28 because Vivek Ranadive, the owner of the Kings, is almost certainly begging them to to bribe him instead.

3. Kuminga + Hield (Warriors) for Porzingis (Hawks): B. After one of the Warriors’ first three championships, GM Bob Myers received some mockery for gloating something along the lines of, “We are so great because when others teams zig, we zag.” (I thought this moment was famous, but 5′ of googling and finding nothing suggests it was not.) Well, since their 2022 title, the Warriors have done a lot of zagging when they should have been zigging. As great as the team was to draft Curry (before Myers), Klay Thompson, and Draymond Greene, they have failed miserably at developing players after that. They have not had a good big man since Bogut. Poole was great; now, he’s gone. Kevan Looney had flashes of good play; now, he’s gone. Someone else I am forgetting; now, he’s gone. Maybe there is something about interpersonal dynamics us laypeople never get to see, but what I see is impatience. Basketball players are usually young and seasons are long. It seems like instead of working through issues and developing a player and a relationship, teams just discard players as soon as there is half a season of frustration. It’s swipe-right basketball.

In the last two years, the Warriors acquired Butler, who I love and wanted to work out but is now out with a torn ACL. I actually really like Porzingis, but with his injury history you can’t trust he will be available. They also picked up Al Horford in October, a wonderful player and person whose fault now is that he is old. I guess the two timelines collapsed into the old timeline. LeBron to the Warriors? KD back to the Warriors?!