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NBA trade deadline 2025: The 5 most fascinating teams to watch

dan devine
Senior writer
·20-min read

The 2025 NBA trade deadline is just over a week away, and just about every team in the league is looking to play some kind of angle.

For a handful of upper-crust squads, it’s about trying to find the last piece of the championship puzzle. For plenty more, it’s about attempting to separate yourself from the pack and make a postseason push in a congested conference where a handful of wins separates home-court advantage from a lottery spot. For the rest, it’s about continuing a rebuilding project by trying to snag a second-round pick or two on the fringes of bigger deals … or, if nothing else, looking to duck the luxury tax and save your owner a few million bucks.

Whatever game they’re playing, front offices across the NBA are working overtime trying to find the help they want at the price they need. Let’s take a look at the five most interesting teams — to me! — in the NBA as we approach the deadline, starting with the broiling beef on the shores of Biscayne Bay:

I mean, duh.

Jimmy Butler is the best actually-gettable player on the market right now. Jimmy Butler has also spent most of the last two months gleefully lighting Roman candles inside Kaseya Center — I’m speaking strictly in metaphor, unless there’s been a new development since I started writing this sentence — in hopes of forcing his way out of town and landing in a new home where he can rediscover his joy for playing basketball … and, hey, also, just while we’re at it, maybe discover a new max contract to carry him through his late 30s. They bury treasure in the desert, don’t they?

“I think I’m still in my prime, if I’m being brutally honest,” Butler told Ben Golliver of The Washington Post last month.

Everything’s come to a head in recent weeks: reports of longstanding issues surrounding Butler’s star treatment — skipping shootarounds, traveling privately rather than with the team charter, staying on his own in separate hotels — boiling over; suggestions that Butler’s felt burned by the front office parting ways with multiple partners (Max Strus, Gabe Vincent, Caleb Martin, Kyle Lowry) from those deep Miami playoff runs without surrounding him with commensurate competitors; Butler playing at something considerably below his customary level of intensity when he did take the court for Erik Spoelstra’s club; a game of chicken between two of the most obstinate people in the NBA, in Butler and Heat president Pat Riley.

The result: an “ugly, bitter, untenable” situation that has seen the Heat suspend Butler three separate times this month, costing the six-time All-Star more than $3 million in missed game checks — though, for what it’s worth, Butler can likely recoup at least some portion of his fines and docked wages via union intervention and negotiation, as Ben Simmons did a couple of years back — and signaling an unceremonious end to what had been a pretty fruitful partnership for the last half-decade.

Actually arriving at that endpoint, though, has proven tricky, thanks to the remarkably complicated reality of Fitting Jimmy Butler Into What You Do.

There’s the financial/structural issue: A $48.8 million salary isn’t exactly easy to slide onto your balance sheet, especially in a post-2023 collective bargaining agreement environment in which teams must deal with the penalties and restrictions that come with going over the aprons. There are the asset-management concerns; the fact that Butler holds a $52.4 million player option for 2025-26 means that, if he decides he doesn’t want to stay with your team long-term, you could wind up shipping out players and draft picks for a three-month rental, only to watch him turn around, enter unrestricted free agency and leave you with nothing.

There’s the small matter of Jimmy being 35 years old, not having played more than 65 games in a season since he was a Bull — which is eight seasons and about to be five teams ago — and toting a medical file as thick as his list of grievances with past employers. And then there’s … y’know, the part about him eventually lighting those Roman candles everywhere he goes.

Maybe none of that’s an issue for Phoenix, where the operative approach seems to be bigger, faster, louder, more; it is an issue, though, if the Heat don’t want what the Suns have to sell (namely, Bradley Beal, if a player holding the golden ticket of a no-trade clause even allows himself to go on the block). That means you’re going to need more teams involved in the process — potentially a handful, maybe even more — to both make the math work and get the Heat what they’re looking for, according to ESPN: “players who can help now, young talent, draft capital and salary that expires by the summer of 2026.”

That asking price has reportedly come down in the shadow of a third suspension, though. Brian Windhorst reported Tuesday that the Heat “are willing to do more than they were when this all started last month,” including opening the door for some teams that thought they were out of the bidding — like, say, Golden State — to get back in, and potentially snag a five-time All-NBA selection for a bargain price.

There’s also the on-court component to this for Miami, which we should probably consider at some point. Amid all the drama, the Heat are still in sixth in the East, two games out of fifth, with a near-top-10 defense, Tyler Herro playing All-Star-caliber ball, Bam Adebayo locked up as a long-term two-way cornerstone, and some intriguing pieces to build around, including emerging rookie big man Kel’el Ware. On top of that: They’re incentivized to continue to try to be at least that good for the rest of the season, because if they miss the playoffs, the lottery-protected 2025 first-round pick that they owe the Thunder — a pick first sent out, you guessed it, in the 2019 deal that brought Butler to South Beach — rolls into an unprotected 2026 first-rounder … which, as Jake Fischer recently noted, would create the compounding problem of pushing the protected 2027 first that they owe Charlotte from last year’s Terry Rozier trade into an unprotected 2028 first, to avoid running afoul of the Stepien rule.

So: The Heat are trying to deal a perennial All-NBA candidate, the kind of player who could meaningfully swing a playoff series … while also trying to stay in playoff position themselves, lest they put themselves in awful position to retool for the franchise’s next phase … while potentially needing, like, a fifth of the league to get looped into the process to arrive at a deal that satisfies everybody and can pass muster with the league office. Yep — that’s the most interesting set of circumstances entering the deadline. No duh.

… with the possible exception of:

Phoenix is where Butler’s reportedly angling to go, because he believes Mat Ishbia is the governor most likely — and maybe the only one — who’ll actually pay him as much as he can for as long as he can come this summer. Whether Jimmy’s right, or whether he’d be worth it, are immaterial. What matters is that it’s reasonable to believe it, because under Ishbia’s stewardship, the Suns have become arguably the most on-tilt franchise in the NBA — not only all in literally since the day Ishbia took over the team in 2023, but perpetually doubling down on the degree to which they are all in.

That all-in-ness has manifested in creative maneuvers like trading future first-round pick swaps for multiple second-round picks or, more recently, turning one tradable first-round pick into three. It has also produced the NBA’s most expensive roster — Phoenix’s projected tax bill ($164.3 million) is higher than the total salary spend of six teams — for a team that is three games over .500, eighth in the West, with a negative net rating. That, clearly, is not what Ishbia, head coach Mike Budenholzer, and superstars Kevin Durant and Devin Booker have in mind; the goal is to be really good and really relevant really immediately.

They reportedly believe that Butler is their path to that instant improvement and relevance. Their path to Butler, though, all but certainly has to include moving Beal, whose gargantuan contract — $103.9 million guaranteed over the next two seasons, plus a $57.1 million player option for 2026-27 — is extremely difficult to park on anyone’s books. And that’s before you get to the no-trade clause that Beal holds, thanks to the Washington Wizards, and that he’d have to agree to waive in order to be included in any deal.

“If [Phoenix wants to do a deal], I need to be addressed, because I hold the cards,” Beal told reporters earlier this month. “Until I'm addressed and somebody says something different, then I'll be a Sun.”

That’s not a hard-and-fast no; Beal would consider waiving the clause “for the right destination, according to a source familiar with his thinking,” as Fred Katz of The Athletic reported last week. But Beal’s agent, Mark Bartelstein, told Duane Rankin of The Arizona Republic that any reports his client would be willing to do so to land in Milwaukee, Denver, Miami or Los Angeles were “created out of thin air,” and that, as of last Wednesday, “there has not been one conversation about a trade.”

A lot’s happened since then, of course (hell, Jimmy got suspended again!) including some will-they/won’t-they over deal frameworks that would reportedly land Beal in Chicago, with Butler — or potentially Zach LaVine? — heading to the Valley. Thus far, though, the state of the Western front remains all quiet: Phoenix wants Jimmy; Jimmy wants Phoenix; Bradley wants Phoenix; sadly, nobody wants Jusuf Nurkić; and, oh, by the way, the Suns have won nine of 12 since moving Beal and Nurkić to the bench and rookie defensive monster Ryan Dunn into the starting lineup, ranking 10th on offense and 16th on defense in that span. Maybe the Suns, mostly healthy and shuffled up, actually are pretty good?

Even if they are, though, “pretty good” is not good enough for Ishbia. He wants velvet ropes parting and champagne falling from the sky, and he’ll pay through the nose in pursuit of it, prudence and propriety be damned; once you’ve doubled down and gone bust, the only thing left to do is triple down and call Riley again.

There’s only one team in the NBA that hasn’t made any deal, of any type, at any of the last three trade deadlines. I’ll give you three guesses of which team oh wait their name is listed in a large font right above this paragraph isn’t it.

Ever since importing Nikola Vučević from Orlando in 2021 at the cost of Wendell Carter Jr. and draft picks that became Franz Wagner (oof) and Jett Howard, Bulls executive vice president Artūras Karnišovas has largely stayed pat and stood still. Stand still long enough, though, and everybody just runs past you … which is how you wind up on pace for a third straight sub-.500 season, a third straight trip to the play-in tournament at best, and a third straight year of everyone wondering what, if anything, is the plan in Chicago.

Well, for the first time in a while, the plan might actually be to, y’know, do stuff. ESPN’s Brian Windhorst and Tim Bontemps recently reported that “several executives who have spoken to the Bulls this month have described their motivation as ‘seeking change.’” And that change could be dramatic: Joe Cowley of the Chicago Sun-Times reports that every player on the Bulls roster besides rookie wing Matas Buzelis could be available — and even he’s not necessarily untouchable.

Realistically, of course, most players on most rosters are at least up for discussion; the sticking point, as ever, is price. We’ve known for a while that multiple teams have checked in on Vučević and Zach LaVine, both having fantastic bounce-back seasons; multiple reports have suggested, though, that Chicago is holding out for at least one first-round pick for both of them, despite the 34-year-old Vučević still having another year and $21.5 million left on his contract, while LaVine’s owed $46 million next season with a $49 million player option for 2026-27. (LaVine now “would prefer” to stay in Chicago, according to Fischer, which goes to show how much can change in a year — especially when there’s family to consider.)

Letting their two leading scorers go for less than that would be painful for Chicago, but keeping them might be even more so. Remember, the Bulls still owe a top-10-protected 2025 first-round pick to the Spurs, as part of the deal that brought DeMar DeRozan to Chicago all the way back in the summer of 2021. (Starting to kind of understand why Karnišovas might be a little hesitant to make a big move.) They enter Tuesday with the ninth-worst record in the NBA … which feels a little too close for comfort if, as Cowley and others have reported, Chicago is in fact committed to keeping this year’s pick.

Then again, even ostentatiously throwing in the towel might not necessarily get the Bulls where they want to go, considering how far they’d need to sink to muck it up with the likes of Washington, Utah, New Orleans, Charlotte, Toronto and Brooklyn. There’s also the disaster unfolding in Philadelphia, with Joel Embiid’s haunted leg and the grim funhouse mirror reality of the hoped-for Paul George era leading to loss after loss for a team that also owes a protected pick this season — to OKC, natch — that it would like to keep.

I’m not sure the Bulls can make themselves as bad as they should probably want to be; I’m also not sure they’re capable of making themselves meaningfully better than they’ve been. I am sure, though, that they’ve got a ton of dudes who could be very interesting on different rosters — see with me the vision of Coby White in Orlando, or Lonzo Ball pretty much anywhere — and, evidently, an interest in actually changing at least some aspects of what has been an organization largely trapped in stasis. Maybe it’s finally time for the Bulls to shake things up; as a famous Chicagoan once said, slow motion’s better than no motion.

Most discussion of the 2023 collective bargaining agreement between the NBA and its players has focused on the introduction of the second apron as a de facto hard cap, and the widespread misery it’s wrought on front offices and trade-machine hobbyists alike. (And justifiably so!) Something else enshrined in the CBA, though, is that teams now have to spend up to 90% of the salary cap on players by the first day of the regular season, meaning that fewer teams enter the campaign with significant financial flexibility.

In fact, there’s only one NBA team with meaningful actual cap space out there right now — and it’s the one that’s been arguably the most pleasant surprise of this NBA season.

The Pistons have $14 million in cap space burning a hole in their pocket, per Spotrac, and no reason not to use it before the deadline; the question now, though, is how. Three months ago, the answer seemed obvious: rent that cap space out to teams desperate to either get contracts off of their books or complete complicated multi-team trades, in exchange for future draft picks that could help in the perpetual rebuilding effort to construct the next competitive Pistons team. A funny thing happened on the way to the obvious; this became the next competitive Pistons team.

Led by All-Star hopeful Cade Cunningham, the Pistons enter Tuesday at 23-23, just a half-game out of sixth in the East; multiple projection models give them an excellent chance of making the postseason for the first time in six years. (A great and pretty mind-boggling note from Spotrac’s Keith Smith: They haven’t won a playoff game since 2008. Not a playoff series; a playoff game.) Given their ahead-of-schedule reentry into the fray under first-year team president Trajan Langdon and first-year head coach J.B. Bickerstaff, might the Pistons — who also have Tim Hardaway Jr.’s $16.2 million expiring contract to use in deals — go the other way and try to add a piece to their still-developing mix?

While they’ve “left rival teams with the impression they aren't weighing any truly massive moves,” Fischer reports that Langdon and Co. are at least “considering the concept of becoming trade deadline buyers.” If they do go in that direction, you’d imagine it’d be with an eye toward adding a secondary shot creator in place of the injured Jaden Ivey to ease the workload of Cunningham, who ranks fourth in the NBA in usage rate and touches per game, and second in average time of possession. I kind of love Sam Vecenie’s pitch of sending THJ and some seconds to Chicago for Lonzo Ball, who could run the show off the bench, knock down spot-up 3s playing off of Cade and fit neatly into an improved Pistons defense that’s up to 14th in points allowed per possession outside of garbage time, according to Cleaning the Glass.

Even that might seem a bit too aggressive for Langdon’s taste; the last thing you want to do when you’re ahead of schedule is start rushing and inadvertently put yourself back behind it. It’s possible that Detroit instead keeps its powder dry, stays the expected course and uses its space to add more draft capital, with NBA insider Marc Stein listing the Pistons as one of several teams “known to have interest in helping to facilitate a Butler deal” should the Heat need help getting across the finish line.

Whether they’re working their way into the mega-deals of others or hunting opportunities to find a helper of their own, the Pistons enter deadline week as a team of legitimate consequence, with possibilities branching off in all directions — including, perhaps, toward the playoffs. Not a bad position to be in … and a pretty cool change of pace for a franchise and a fanbase that hasn’t had much to get psyched about for a while.

On one hand, after knocking off the Hornets in Charlotte on Monday, JJ Redick’s crew has now won four straight, six of seven and 14 of its last 21. The Lakers enter Tuesday at 26-18, on pace for 48 wins, a game out of fourth place in the West; they’ve had a top-seven defense and a near-top-10 offense for nearly two months now. For all the sky-is-falling drama surrounding a glamour franchise led by the most famous player on the planet, the Lakers, viewed through that lens, seem to be At Least Pretty Good.

But then, there’s that nettlesome other hand.

A 14-7 mark still trails behind the records of Oklahoma City, Houston and Denver over the same time span; even while playing their best ball since early in the season, the Lakers have only the sixth-best net rating in the West during this stretch. For the full season, they’ve been down by 20-plus points nearly twice as often as they’ve been up by 20-plus. They’ve had more double-digit losses than double-digit wins. They’re 10-16 against teams with .500-or-better records, and 4-9 with a -8.2 net rating against opponents with a top-10 point differential.

Viewed through that lens, the Lakers seem to be Not That Good — a clear step below not only the conference-leading Thunder, but also the Rockets, Grizzlies and Nuggets, and a team that, as LeBron James told reporters after a recent loss to the Clippers, doesn’t “have room for error.”

So: Will Lakers vice president of basketball operations Rob Pelinka move aggressively in the direction of increasing that margin?

Superstars James and Anthony Davis sure would like him to — ideally, in accordance with AD’s longstanding and frequently stated preference, in the form of “another big” who could shift Davis back to the 4. Hence, reports that the Lakers are “exploring all of their options for a five man.”

Except, um, that Stein reports L.A. is not “expected to join the hunt” for the Bulls’ Nikola Vučević or the Raptors’ Jakob Poeltl. And that Utah’s Walker Kessler is “believed to [be] as close to unavailable as it gets.” And that, when it comes to consummating a deal for reported LeBron favorite Jonas Valančiūnas, “substantial momentum … has yet to manifest.”

And that, according to Lakers beat reporter Jovan Buha of The Athletic, the operating theory around the NBA is that “standing pat or making a half-measure trade — likely [one involving] one or two second-round picks — is more likely than the Lakers going all-in.” And that, according to ESPN’s Windhorst and Bontemps, the Lakers’ “recent discussions with teams show little sign of aggression.”

Is that lack of aggression because Pelinka is reserving L.A.’s 2029 and 2031 first-round choices for a bigger swing down the line — one that could better bridge the gap between now and whenever the Lakers’ LeBron era might actually end? Is it because he has taken a glass-half-empty view of what his team’s put on film through the first half, and determined there’s no one-fell-swoop answer to propel the Lakers from the middle to the top?

Or is it because he’s veering the other way — looking on the bright side of a team that has won two-thirds of its games since sliding 3-and-D wing Max Christie into the starting lineup, that has outscored opponents by a healthy 64 points in 259 minutes with still-very-new addition Dorian Finney-Smith on the floor, and that just got frontcourt havoc-wreaker Jarred Vanderbilt (who already has five steals and three offensive rebounds in his first 26 minutes of the season) healthy and back into the fold?

Deadlines tend to serve as truth serum for NBA decision-makers. If Pelinka agrees with LeBron and AD that this iteration of the Lakers is “right there” and “potentially a piece or two away,” maybe we see that level of aggression in negotiations crank up a notch or two over the next week. (It’d be very interesting if the Pacers are actually putting Myles Turner out there, after years of similar rumors, because they’re not sure they want to pony up to re-sign him this summer.) And if the buzzer sounds without the Lakers doing much more than adding a third guard or fourth big … well, then they’re back where they started: hoping that LeBron and AD are enough to get them where they want to go.

On one hand, that’s worked before. But then …