While my last piece focused on the underrated moves from this NBA offseason that might have escaped our attention, now I have the opposite task: Examining a few deals that, upon further reflection, should have received a bit more public scrutiny than they did.
I completed this exercise a year ago and identified five deals that met my criteria.
Two of them are now regarded as overpays: the Toronto Raptors’ five-year, $162.5 million deal for Immanuel Quickley and the Chicago Bulls’ five-year, $90 million pact with Patrick Williams.
Two others have mixed reviews.
Max Christie’s deal with the Los Angeles Lakers seemed like a reach based on his restricted free agency, and he was later included in the trade package for Luka Dončić, but he’s young enough that the contract could still flip to positive value.
Indiana’s extension with Andrew Nembhard still gets me in debates. Still, the downside I wrote about a year ago hit like a hammer: Taking his 2025-26 salary from $2 million to $18 million likely cost the Pacers Myles Turner, just as I theorized, because it pushed Indiana much closer to the luxury-tax line.
Finally, extensions for Cade Cunningham, Franz Wagner and Evan Mobley all “worked,” but they could have worked better without the supermax language, which might not have been necessary.
With all that as background, let’s try this again. Here are five deals that maybe should have had more people asking questions:
Pelicans’ trade for Jordan Poole
Oh, you were expecting a different Pelicans transaction here? Let me remind you: The name of the game is to discuss some questionable transactions that haven’t received enough scrutiny. The decision to trade a likely high lottery pick to the Atlanta Hawks to move up in the 2025 draft has already been panned far and wide. As a result, the Poole trade got lost in the shuffle.
The Pelicans received a 2025 second-round pick (used on Micah Peavy) along with Poole and Saddiq Bey in the deal with the Washington Wizards in return for sending out CJ McCollum and Kelly Olynyk (this eventually turned into a three-team trade that added a side deal between Houston and Washington, but this was the portion involving the Pelicans).
The crux of the deal is the Poole-for-McCollum piece. New Orleans agreed to take on a $34 million obligation to Poole in 2026-27, while McCollum’s contract expires after the coming season.
While McCollum is entering his age-34 season and not the player he once was, he still arguably projects as a more valuable player than Poole. My BORD$ formula rated him as a $14.3 million player for the coming season, compared to an $8.4 million valuation for Poole. New Orleans went from about $20 million underwater on McCollum’s deal to roughly $40 million under with Poole. Yikes.
More jarringly, that valuation for Poole is miles and miles short of the $34 million he’s owed in the extra contract year. That money essentially ties up the Pelicans’ cap; New Orleans has 14 contracts for the 2026-27 season and is just $3.8 million from a projected tax line ownership will never cross.
Even with an expiring deal in 2026-27, Poole might prove challenging to trade for a different reason: His contract contains $3.75 million in unlikely incentives, the sort that teams have bent over backwards to avoid in the apron era because the dollars count against the apron even if the incentives never hit. Nobody wants those on their books anymore. (While we’re here: Bey’s deal also includes incentives, although for just $333,333 this season.)
Knicks’ Mikal Bridges extension
I was surprised by the reaction to this deal, as many people lauded it because Bridges took $6 million less than his maximum allowable amount. I need to remind people that teams aren’t required to max all their players. Bridges will make $33.5 million in 2026-27 and $41.5 million in his age-33 season (2029-30) on this extension, and he’s coming off a season where he was fine but certainly not a star.
This one strikes me as a premature reaction to the Bird rights trap — the Knicks had no viable means of replacing Bridges if he left as a free agent in 2026 because, even minus Bridges’ salary, they would have had no cap space. Of course, this isn’t exactly true — New York always could have generated an outbound sign-and-trade to create a significant exception and then taken inbound salary into it — but it would have come with the collective bargaining agreement’s first-apron handcuffs.
One can also reasonably wonder if the Knicks were reacting to the sunk cost of trading five first-round picks to acquire Bridges in the first place. Coming off an underwhelming first season in New York on the heels of an equally underwhelming 2023-24 season in Brooklyn, it is fair to wonder if Bridges just isn’t the player people thought he was three years ago. Entering his age-29 season, he has a $20.3 million BORD$ valuation — a solid, valuable player, certainly, but more like a fifth starter than a star.
However, New York is paying him to be a star, or at least star-ish, at 20 percent of the projected cap, and it comes right at an inflection point age-wise when most role players start losing their juice. This is particularly true at small forward, which is historically the league’s fastest-aging position. Most tall wings in their 30s either become power forwards or golfers, and Bridges’ body doesn’t lend itself to the former.
New York’s best move was to ride this one out into Bridges’ walk year, even if it took on some flight risk. If everything went well, the Knicks would still be in a position to negotiate an extension in June ahead of free agency. Instead, they’re locked into the four years beyond this one, paying increasing dollars for what are likely to be declining years.
Kings’ swap with Nuggets
In February, the Sacramento Kings traded two second-round picks and a minimum-contract player, Sidy Cissoko, to the Wizards in exchange for Jonas Valančiūnas.
Jonas Valančiūnas reacts after being called for a foul during the second quarter of a game against the Clippers. (Darren Yamashita / Imagn Images)
In July, with no notable change in Valančiūnas’ ability, the Kings traded him to the Denver Nuggets for the remains of Dario Šarić. Thus, in the course of two transaction cycles, the Kings turned two future second-round draft picks into the unwanted $5.4 million contract of a washed-up player. Congratulations, Kangz. You’ve outdone yourselves.
The motivation for the second Valančiūnas trade was to get the Kings below the luxury tax threshold to facilitate other moves, but it was not a necessary precondition either. The Kings would have been just $600,000 over the tax line if they had held onto Valančiūnas and made all the other same moves this offseason. That number will perhaps increase if their rumored Russell Westbrook acquisition ever comes to fruition, but if they kept Valančiūnas, the Kings presumably wouldn’t have needed to sign Drew Eubanks either.
Avoiding the tax by that small an amount isn’t some insurmountable hurdle. The Kings could have traded cash and a fungible end-of-roster player at the Jan. 5 guarantee date, as long as that player’s deal wasn’t fully guaranteed (basically, this would have worked with Isaac Jones or whatever they had done with Eubanks’ roster spot).
The other part of this that I’m not even dunking on is the “sign Dennis Schröder for the full midlevel exception” aspect, which was the other half of Sacramento’s cap logic. The Kings did need a point guard, but they didn’t need to go to the full non-taxpayer MLE for Schröder, which is the thing that put them in the position of trading Valančiūnas for Šarić. They could have signed Tyus Jones or D’Angelo Russell for half the money; both are three years younger and arguably better players.
However, more than anything, the process from February to July highlights how the Kings muddle along, moving in fits and starts from one plan to another and from one front office to another, burning assets along the way. The relative normalcy of the Mike Brown era was all too brief.
Heat’s salary dump
I didn’t understand why Miami did this deal, or why the Heat felt the urgency to do it in late summer rather than during the season. The Heat gave up a future second-round pick to drop Haywood Highsmith’s $5.5 million contract on the Brooklyn Nets, which gets Miami out of the luxury tax. However, here’s the thing: Highsmith wasn’t dead money. He’s a valuable player, and an offseason meniscus injury still had him on track to return to the court this fall.
Even with Highsmith on the books, the Heat were only going to be $3 million into the tax with all 15 roster spots filled — a completely manageable number if they wanted to get under in-season. The Heat could have that number below $1 million if they had declined Keshad Johnson’s option and brought him back on a two-way deal.
The biggest reason I disagree with the price Miami paid can likely be found when Brooklyn moves Highsmith for draft equity at the trade deadline. He had positive value on that contract and likely could have brought back a second-round pick. Instead, Miami gave one up to get rid of him.
Raptors’ Jakob Poeltl extension
The perfect aimless move to pile on to the Raptors’ half-decade of what-are-we-doing-here since they won the 2019 championship, Toronto extended Poeltl by three years and $84 million on top of a $19.5 million player option season that he locked in. That ensures that Poeltl won’t opt out of his contract after the season and try to sign for more than the $19.5 million, which would leave Toronto in a tight spot regarding the luxury tax due to the other bad extensions (Brandon Ingram and Immanuel Quickley) that now clutter their cap sheet.
Staying below the projected 2026-27 luxury tax threshold appears to be the primary motivation here; however, Toronto had other options for achieving the same goal. Those included “signing somebody else if Poeltl got too expensive,” of course, but the Raptors also had a year to make other moves (such as trading RJ Barrett) to slim down their cap sheet around the, I guess, “core” of Scottie Barnes and Ingram.
Additionally, being inexpensive in 2026-27 only makes the Raptors more expensive later, based on this extension. A 33-year-old Poeltl will make $29.5 million in 2028-29, while the partially guaranteed final season has a low threshold for minutes played that is likely to make it unpalatable to cut in the summer of 2029 (a $15 million cap hit, basically).
Poeltl is a solid starter now, with a BORD$ value of $24.7 million, but the Raptors are counting on him holding that value for half a decade. History says that’s extremely unlikely, and that locking in what is perhaps a slight discount for 2026-27 doesn’t come close to offsetting the commitment that follows.
(Top photo of Mikal Bridges and Jordan Poole: Evan Bernstein / Getty Images)
