The NBA draft is tonight, and will be hugely interesting for fans, because this year's class coming out of college is unusually thick with talent.
But what's happening with trades is more interesting to me right now.
The Miami Heat just traded most of its team and some valuable future draft choices to the Milwaukee Bucks for Giannis Antetakuompo and Bobby Portis. Among the traded Miami players are Kel'el Ware and Kasparas Jakučionis, both of whom I got to see play in games here at Indiana University. Ware was on the Hoosiers, our home team. Jakučionis was on the Illinois Fighting Ilini. I saw one game in which Ware did not miss a single shot, including threes, and ruled the floor. And I saw Jakučionis pick apart the Hoosiers defense. They're both very good, with high ceilings.
Giannis is a near-perfect basketball player, with enormous size, muscularity, and court smarts. He is also 32 (almost elderly for a big guy) and has been injured a lot in recent years. That's the biggest risk for Miami.
The putative losers in this trade were the Boston Celtics, which were prepared to trade Jaylen Brown and some other players and/or draft picks to Milwaukee. This was never a good deal for Boston. In fact, I would hope that Brad Stevens, the General Manager, was only responding to outreach by Milwaukee rather than shopping Jaylen Brown, who has done nothing but improve through his ten years with the team. He has also been All-NBA multiple times, won a championship as the MVP, and was sixth this year in league MVP voting. The only thing arguing against him is that he said some unwise (and I think completely misunderstood) shit on a twitch stream. And now some of the talk on the sports podcasts is about how Jaylen is miffed that he was offered in trade at all. But this has happened before, and he knows the only way he'll be traded is if they get more back. I don't see that happening.
Boston also has a great team. The only better ones, as it stands now, are the San Antonio Spurs, the Oklahoma City Thunder, and the New York Knicks. Odds-makers currently place the Celtics third, behind the Thunder and the Spurs, to win the title in 2027. They place the Knicks fourth, which is nuts.
I put the Knicks first, because they are the best team. By far. The way they dominated the championship playoffs this year was a nonstop demonstration of how great teams win games that great players alone cannot.
I hope for the sake of both the Knicks and the Celtics, and their longtime rivalry, that they both keep their rosters intact.
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