There’s a point every trade deadline where your brain gets saturated. With every successive trade, you begin to blur the details. At that point, they turn into something like junk food. You want more but you’re no longer experience each individually.
Everyone’s threshold is different. I’ve learned that mine is low, but I trick myself every trade deadline into believing I can stomach the whole thing.
At the surface, I know why. The NBA’s trade deadline flies in the face of most everything I enjoy about basketball and covering the game and the people in it. People get reduced to their salaries, they become part of crude math equations intent on over- or underselling their “value”, depending on the needs of a franchise’s front office. People also get reduced to their bodies; the bare mechanics of how their bodies work and whether those bodies are in some kind of deficit (injured) or performing optimally. The Trade Machine-esque language goes extra haywire.
People’s stories — the how and why of how they got where they are — go out the window.
The irony is that what’s most compelling about the trades that happen, or we want to happen, during the deadline are their potential for new stories. The potential to shift the storyline for a struggling team, to catapult it from bottom to top (or more realistically, bottom to functionally better).
It’s one thing to watch a franchise like a chemistry experiment where a new element get dropped in and the rest react, but the hypothesis part of the whole thing is what we want to know. It’s why stories about the behind-the-scenes of trades, why they fell apart or came together in the 11th hour, have so much interest. It’s especially why some fans absolutely geek out over the salary cap implications and crunch numbers like wannabe GMs, and why trades are incessantly graded for their merit.
The cruelest part of the trade deadline, for me, also has to do with stories. Specifically when people’s stories abruptly come to an end. When players are waived immediately after being traded, demoted to “human trade exceptions” and salary dumps or ditched on the buyout market, it’s likely we won’t hear about them again. There are always exceptions, but these are the rules.
I don’t mean to be all doom and gloom. Like finding a radio signal again after driving out of range, the trade deadline definitely retunes interest in the NBA season. Especially a deadline that’s been as landscape-shifting as this one. Many of the stories that emerge in the second half of the NBA season will be of athletes getting new opportunities and second chances because of a trade.
The recovery from the frenzied week leading to the deadline always feels a little like leaving a party you’ve stayed at too long. Blinking back out into the real world and trying to get your bearings. In a roundabout way that collective disorientation is at least encouraging to me. It means the way we talk and act around the trade deadline isn’t a default or resting state. We know what it is for that particular fever to break.
