NEW YORK — A full 22 days after the NBA trade deadline reshuffled rosters, broke up locker rooms, and generated 14,000 thinkpieces about who ‘won the offseason in February,’ league sources confirmed Saturday that the playoff standings are now functionally identical to the ones printed on a placemat at a Buffalo Wild Wings in late October.
The Celtics are first. The Thunder are first. The Nuggets are a problem nobody wants to play. Twelve teams in the West are within four games of each other and all of them are ‘surging,’ according to a graphic ESPN has aired 41 times since Tuesday.
‘We’ve run the numbers and the deadline moved the league’s competitive balance by approximately one-half of one playoff seed,’ said Reggie Donlan, a quantitative analyst at the basketball desk of a midwestern actuarial firm. ‘The Pistons got marginally worse on purpose. The Wizards got marginally worse by accident. Everyone else is exactly where they were when Joel Embiid first said his knee felt weird.’
The lone confirmed casualty of deadline week was a 6’9″ forward who was traded three times in 48 hours and reportedly spent Tuesday morning in a Marriott lobby in Charlotte trying to figure out which team’s group chat to rejoin. He has since been waived, signed, waived again, and is currently averaging 11 and 6 in Lithuania.
Contenders who ‘made bold moves’ to ‘go all in’ include the Lakers, who acquired a 34-year-old combo guard with a bone spur, and the Knicks, who traded four second-round picks for the right to keep paying a player they already had. Both teams remain the fourth and fifth seeds, respectively, exactly as they were in November, December, and the week before LeBron’s last cryptic tweet.
The Sacramento Kings, briefly mentioned in 38 trade rumors, did nothing, said nothing, and now sit one game out of the play-in, which a team spokesperson described as ‘our ceiling, our floor, and our brand.’
Down at the bottom, the league’s six designated tank teams are locked in a fascinating race to lose more compellingly than the others. The Wizards lead by half a game. The Hornets are ‘finding their identity,’ per coach Charles Lee, who declined to specify what that identity is or when fans might see it. Brooklyn has now lost 11 in a row, which the Nets front office is counting as a successful execution of strategy.
‘People keep asking what the deadline accomplished,’ said one Eastern Conference assistant GM, speaking on the condition that nobody quote him by name because his roster contains no players anyone would recognize. ‘It accomplished forty-seven podcasts. It accomplished a Shams tweet at 2:47 a.m. that genuinely woke up my wife. The standings, no. The standings are vibes.’
The league’s marquee post-deadline matchup — a Saturday night Celtics-Nuggets game ESPN is billing as ‘The First True Test of the New-Look Contenders’ — features zero players who were traded in February and is expected to end, per Vegas, with Boston winning by 7.