Don’t Worry, Thunder Fans – They’re Not Trading Kevin Durant

Chicago didn’t trade Michael Jordan. San Antonio didn’t trade Tim Duncan. And despite everything that happened in Miami, the Heat didn’t actually trade LeBron James.

It all goes back to one simple tenet: You don’t trade a once-in-a-generation player at the peak of his basketball prowess.

Perhaps it’s just that teams are risk averse. Your best case scenario when trading a superstar is the Kevin Love/Minnesota Timberwolves trade that happened at the end of last summer. In it, Minnesota was able to deal away their best player for future superstar Andrew Wiggins along with Anthony Bennett and a handful of pick considerations. Essentially, the team has to hope to be as lucky in future drafts as they were with their initial superstar.

This particular aspect of team construction makes recent articles on Kevin Durant particularly confusing. Last week, former NBA executive Tom Penn made the following statement on the Colin Cowherd show:

"“I think this burst from Westbrook makes it much more likely that Durant ultimately gets traded next year. … Sam Presti has proven that he does not ever want to lose anybody for nothing. So he traded James Harden a year early to avoid a potential luxury tax problem a year later.”"

While it is true that Westbrook has reached a new level that allows Durant to shoulder less of the load, the rest of the statement is essentially misguided conjecture. To compare Durant at this juncture in his career to Harden when he was traded is, as Sam Presit said, “ludicrous.”

Durant is a former MVP, a perennial 50/40/90 threat and, when healthy, one of the two best players in the known universe and multiverses therein. The only two forwards that come to mind with those sort of credentials would be the immortal Larry Bird and greatest-European-player-of-all-time Dirk Nowitzki. That combination of efficiency and volume is truly a generational-type talent.

And Oklahoma City, perhaps more than anyone, is acutely aware of this.

Contrast that to Harden in 2012. He was coming off of a Sixth Man of the Year Award and had been the single biggest wrecking ball in the Thunder’s then-deconstruction of the Spurs. There was no doubt that the guy was brimming with talent. However, anyone claiming they that KNEW, without a doubt, that he was an MVP caliber-type talent is lying to themselves.

Even NBA scouts didn’t have Harden pegged at that level. Both the Washington Wizards and Golden State Warriors turned down trades involving Harden at the time. Nobody was really sure what Harden would be once he was handed the reigns. The dirty secret is that for every success story like Harden’s, there’s a guy like post-sixth-man-of-the-year Lamar Odom (to Harden’s credit, at least he wasn’t involved with a Kardashian at the time he was traded. Here’s looking at you, Lamar). Simply put, there are always doubts when you’ve never seen a guy truly make “the leap” on a full-time basis, even for someone as seemingly-talented as Harden.

Harden supporters love to point to the Spurs series as the biggest indicator of his potential and that he definitively made his leap in the Thunder’s come-from-behind-win in the series. However, those same people tend to ignore Harden’s immediate regression in the finals against Miami, where he seemingly shrunk away from the big moment. The potential was there. So were the doubts.

There are zero of these doubts concerning Durant. So to even compare the situation surrounding a relative-unknown in Harden coming in to his fourth year as a reserve player to Durant established as some sort of mutant-George Gervin/Scottie Pippen–hybrid is off-base from the outset.

However, it goes deeper than that. I stated above that superstars don’t get traded at their peak. That doesn’t mean, however, that desperate GMs haven’t tried. The Lakers tried to give up Kobe Bryant for Richard Hamilton, Tayshaun Prince, and picks. The Rockets tried to deal Hakeem Olajuwon for Steve Smith, Glen Rice, and Rony Seikaly exactly one season before The Dream stomped a figurative mud hole through the NBA en route to two consecutive NBA titles.

Fortunately for both of those franchises, neither trade panned out despite the GM’s unprecedented willingness to part with a franchise cornerstone. And do you know why? It’s ridiculously hard to move a player of that value at the sort of salary a player of that caliber demands.

Durant is the perfect microcosm of this notion. There’s only a handful of teams that would even have the assets to keep Presti from immediately hanging up when the phrase, “What do you want for Durant?” gets brought up. For instance, the Philadelphia 76ers or Los Angeles Lakers could offer literally their entirely roster for Durant and the Thunder would decline.

But having the assets isn’t nearly enough. Being able to work someone like Durant under the cap is nearly impossible unless you have spent significant time preparing to take on a max contract.

One of the few teams that could feasibly pull the trade off is, perhaps not so ironically, also one of the most vocal free-agent destinations for the Slim Reaper in 2016. The Washington Wizards are assumed to already be clearing cap room for a bid at KD and have a nice collection of young assets that may intrigue the Thunder.

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So could a deal get done? A lot of things would have to break right for Washington. First, Durant would have to make it clear to Oklahoma City that there is absolutely no way he will be returning in a Thunder uniform. If there’s even a sliver of hope that Durant will be back, Presti isn’t going to deal him.

But let’s assume for the sake of this exercise that despite the Thunder’s best efforts, Durant simply can’t be persuaded to return. Presti might then pick up the phone to try and get a return on his franchise’s biggest investment. More than likely, that return would be centered on Bradley Beal.

Remember the trade for Harden that Washington declined that I mentioned above? I’ll give you three guesses as to who that trade was centered around. If you guessed something that rhymes with Schmadley Schmeal, you are probably correct. The Thunder haven’t been coy that they’re looking for a wing to spread the floor. Given that the Dion Waiters experiment hasn’t gone swimmingly, Beal would admittedly be a nice addition for OKC.

But even then, with as close to mutual interest as one could get in a trade for Durant, it’s still nearly impossible to make the salaries work. The Wizards are already over the tax with their roster as is. Durant is due $20,158,622 in 2015-2016. Bradley Beal? $5,694,674. The Wizards have to somehow clear $15 million in cap to make the trade work and Nene Hilario and Marcin Gortat are really the only guys who can make up the difference (notwithstanding any free agent additions by Washington this summer).

Given the Thunder’s current bevy of young bigs on cheap salaries, it’s hard to see that combination being particularly “exciting” to the Thunder’s front office. Even if the Wizards were to throw in 1st-round draft picks every other year for the next three or four years, the Thunder wouldn’t really be persuaded given that a Durant-led Wizards team is likely fetching picks in the mid-to-late 20’s for the next five years at the least.

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