The Oklahoma City Thunder could really use Lu Dort right about now.
The organization, Thunder fans and honestly the entire NBA community are reeling after the double whammy of injury news on Monday. All-NBA forward Jalen Williams suffered a gruesome leg injury that will likely sideline him for the entire season. Shockingly joining him on the shelf will be All-Defense guard Cason Wallace, who is out indefinitely with a torn labrum.
Wallace might be back by the end of the season, but that leaves a massive hole on the wing for the Thunder right now. To add insult to injury, Sixth Man Alex Caruso left Monday night's game early with an injury. What are the Thunder to do?
Could they possibly trade for longtime Thunder wing Lu Dort, a beloved franchise icon and someone who would capably fill the void left by Wallace?
In short: no, they cannot. Probably.
The NBA has rules about trades
The NBA and its 30 franchises are governed by the Collective Bargaining Agreement, or "CBA", that lays out the rules for everyone to follow. One of the things it tries to do is prevent underhanded loopholes where teams get around the basic rules through clever machinations.
One such machination that the CBA tries to prevent is a team trading away a player for some immediate benefit, then going right back and reacquiring a player. For example, a team cannot trade a player to another team, incentivize that team to cut the player, then sign them right back. In such a scenario, a team has to wait until the next league year to sign back a player they traded away.
That rule, while somewhat obscure, is talked about commonly enough around the trade deadline each season. Teams have to trade away players that they like to match salary, but may want those back in the right situation. Rarely, a player is traded away, then traded again, then waived -- one of those loopholes that could mean a player returning to his original team. Mike Conley returned to the Minnesota Timberwolves last season in just that scenario.
Less talked about is what happens when a team trades a player away and would want to trade for them back. Such a move wouldn't make sense in most cases, as if a team wanted to keep a player and had the ability to trade something else the other team wanted, they would do that in the original trade.
Here is the rule, however, in Article VII, Section 8 of the 2023 CBA: A team cannot trade for a player it traded away during the same season.
The Thunder cannot trade for Lu Dort again...probably
It would be lovely if the Thunder could cook up a trade to bring back Dort. He knows the system, he has chemistry with the players, he is loved by the franchise and its fan base. More so, he would fill a very real need. He was already missed in OKC, but all the more after the gut punch of injuries this week.
The CBA seems to state clearly that the Thunder cannot trade for Dort back unless he is traded to another team first, or they wait until next year. That would prevent any such deal in the near future to help with their sudden lack of depth on the wing.
One ambiguity remains in the CBA, however, one that is probably less exciting than it appears. The CBA has two different terms it uses for lengths of time. "League year" is one that begins July 1st and stretches to the next July 1st. Things like contracts, draft picks and so forth advance on July 1st.
The other term is "season" which the CBA defines as the start of training camp through the last game of the NBA Finals. By that technicality, as Dort was traded prior to the start of training camp, could he be eligible to be traded?
The answer is probably not. No one appears to have interpreted that rule in such a way, and players traded during the summer were reported as ineligible during the last CBA, which had the same language. Perhaps a legal challenge could be in order, but it's unlikely it would be effective.
For all intents and purposes, then, Dort cannot be traded back to the Thunder right now. However Sam Presti is going to address this problem, it won't be with a simple reunion.
Probably.
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