We’ve hit the quietest part of the NBA calendar. Free agents have signed. Blockbuster trades have been made. A new Hall of Fame class has been enshrined in southern Massachusetts.
There are questions to be answered. When will the Kawhi Leonard/Clippers investigation wrap up? Will the Pistons finally re-sign Jalen Duren? But here in late August, we’re going to take a look back at the summer that was. Here now are our NBA Summer Superlatives for some of the most memorable parts of the last few months.
Craziest contract: Trae Young, Wizards
Sure, the new lottery odds dictate that a team like the Wizards can no longer aspire to be the bottom of the league’s barrel, and there might not be a player more equipped to lead you straight into the “not good but not terrible” zone than Young. But did Washington have to give him a four-year, $212 million contract to do it?
We all heard about this supposed mystery team that was threatening a max offer for Young, but come on. This dude was straight-up salary dumped by the Hawks, who didn’t even want to be in the business of Young at this kind of annual money for one more player-option year. They pretty openly tried to trade him for more than a year and nobody wanted him at anywhere near max money. And here the Wizards handed it to him like it’s nothing.
Ranking NBA’s 15 worst contracts: Trae Young, De’Aaron Fox in top five, but Joel Embiid is No. 1
Sam Quinn
Do you have any idea how sure you have to be of a player’s superstar value to commit a max contract to him in the NBA’s current financial landscape? The bar is way higher than Young. The Celtics didn’t even want to be in a max relationship with Jaylen Brown, who won Finals MVP in 2024 and finished top-five in MVP voting last year.
You could argue James Harden is still, even at 37 years old, the better version of Young and it feels like the Cavaliers overpaid for him at $97 million across three years. There is no world in which Young is worth $212 million. I’m sorry. He’s an offense unto himself, I get it. But no way. This is a huge overpay that will weigh down Washington’s books for nearly the next half-decade.
Sleeper signing: Dean Wade, 76ers
Lost in the hoopla of the Jaylen Brown/LeBron James coup was Philly’s acquisition of Wade, who signed for $29 million over three years and has a chance to be the piece that ties the Sixers’ puzzle together. On a team full of ball-dominant scorers, Wade operates in total star support as a 3&D wing with a usage rate beneath 10 percent.
Wade will space the floor as a 40% spot-up 3-point shooter last season, per Synergy, and 41% from the corners while defending at 6-foot-9 across the positional spectrum. In last year’s playoffs, he matched up on point guard Jalen Brunson and center Jalen Duren in consecutive series.
The bottom line is Wade’s lineups win, and have for some time. Over the last three years, every Wade lineup that logged at least 100 possessions together outscored its opponents per 100 possessions, per Cleaning the Glass, and most of those net ratings were extreme. Last year, for example, three Cleveland lineups that included Wade and played at least 100 possessions together had an average point differential of +22.3 per 100. Which is to say, do not be surprised if, for all their star power, the Sixers end up leaning pretty heavily on Wade, perhaps even in closing lineups.
Worst actor: Giannis Antetokounmpo, Heat
Antetokounmpo gets the Razzie in a landslide for his borderline embarrassing performance as the “good guy” in an NBA drama. Giannis was clearly genuine in his stated desire to play his entire career in Milwaukee. He signed an extension in 2023 when he could’ve waited until 2024 and guaranteed himself a lot more money, but around that time, he started to plant the first real seeds of a potential defection down the road.
“I don’t want to be 20 years on the same team and not win another championship,” Antetokounmpo told the New York Times just prior to the Sept. 27, 2023, Damian Lillard trade. And from there on out, the message started to slowly bleed into one focused more on winning and less on loyalty.
The writing was on the wall by the summer of 2025. But because Giannis didn’t want to be the bad guy, he would not come out and demand a trade, thus infusing the Bucks with enough false hope to make the desperate move of waiving and stretching Lillard (to the tune of paying him $113 million over five years to go play for the Blazers) while signing Myles Turner to a $107 million deal.
Less than a month later, Antetokounmpo was talking with the Bucks about an “alternative path forward.”
Translation: Going to play for another team.
Only Giannis refused to say it, even after reports emerged that the Knicks were given an exclusive negotiating window to try to secure Antetokounmpo’s services in August 2025. A month later, Giannis was saying he “expected” a trade to happen despite his “hope it never happens.”
This is where the semantics went totally sideways for Giannis, who actually thought nobody could see what he was doing. It was simple: If Giannis didn’t want a trade to happen, it wouldn’t have happened. But he tried to make it seem like it was the Bucks’ decision, as if he were just the good soldier following orders. We went through a bunch of verbiage like this throughout last season. Somehow, he stayed in Milwaukee past the deadline, but Giannis’ “good guy who would never demand a trade” act was officially turning into a joke.
Good actors make you believe scripted words are real. Giannis, who was traded to the Heat on June 22, is not a good actor. He knew he was going to get traded because that’s what he wanted, and his unwillingness to say it, while understandable for a while given his relationship with Milwaukee and all he meant to that city, turned totally insincere and, eventually, disrespectful to an organization that did everything but sell its soul to try to keep a guy who always knew he was leaving.
Best heist: Utah Jazz
The Lakers were always going to get a center this summer. That it wound up being Walker Kessler was no great surprise. We knew they coveted him, and we knew the Jazz didn’t want to pay him as much as he wanted. The assumption was that L.A., with the cap space to do so, would just offer Kessler a high enough number that Utah wouldn’t match and that would be that.
Instead, the Jazz held the threat that they might match up to a max offer for Kessler over the Lakers, who were spooked by the prospect of the Pistons doing the same with Jalen Duren and their center market drying up. And before you knew it, Lakers general manager Rob Pelinka was sending two unprotected first-round picks (2031 and 2033) to the Jazz for a player they had probably never really planned on re-signing in the first place.
Walker Kessler trade grades: Lakers get C+ in massive, albeit necessary, overpay; Jazz play it perfectly
Sam Quinn
Pelinka can perhaps justify the overpay because he got Luka Dončić for a cup of coffee (that Nico Harrison may have even paid for), so the capital that should have gone out in that deal goes to Utah, and it all evens out. But in the real world, those were independent deals. Pelinka had a chance to get Dončić and Kessler and keep his stack of draft chips in front of him. Instead, he sat down with Jazz CEO Danny Ainge, who basically comes to these negotiations in a ski mask, and got taken.
Best BOGO: Jaylen Brown and LeBron James
When the Bucks traded Jrue Holiday to Portland in the Lillard deal in the summer of 2023, they paved a path for Holiday to be rerouted to the Celtics, who won the title the next year with Holiday as perhaps the key piece in putting them over the top. Would the Bucks have done that deal again had they known Holiday would end up on one of their prime rivals? Who knows. The deal didn’t work out for Milwaukee for many reasons. But it’s an interesting thought on the unintended consequences of some deals.
Fast forward to this summer, and this time it was the Celtics, perhaps unintentionally, creating a monster rival by trading Jaylen Brown to the 76ers, which, in turn, led to LeBron James joining him. It’s hard to imagine LeBron going to Philly if that Brown trade doesn’t happen. Rich Paul has said as much. Would Celtics president of basketball operations Brad Stevens do it differently knowing that?
Probably not. The Celtics deemed Brown too expensive to move forward with and there wasn’t much of a market for him. They were ready to move on. Plus, Stevens is no dummy. He knew LeBron was sitting out there, and that Philadelphia was going to look like a pretty attractive destination with Brown on board. The possibility wasn’t that difficult to foresee.
Why the 76ers have the Celtics and Knicks to thank for landing LeBron James
Robby Kalland
And it turned out to be quite the “Buy One, Get One” deal for the Sixers, who by trading for Brown essentially got to throw LeBron in their shopping cart for free ($8 million over two years for perhaps the greatest player ever is about as close to free as exists in the NBA).
Like many BOGOs, the Sixers still paid a premium by having to pony up for the initial product. Sure, we’ll give you a second bottle of spaghetti sauce if you buy the first super overpriced one. The Celtics didn’t think they could handle two super-max players moving forward (Paul George is just as expensive as Brown but only for another two years, or possibly one if he doesn’t pick up his option next summer), and now Philadelphia has three max guys in Brown, Joel Embiid and Tyrese Maxey. That’s an expensive pill to swallow, but getting LeBron on the BOGO certainly makes the deal sweeter.
Top owner shenanigans: Steve Ballmer and Mark Walter
The allegations against current Clippers owner Steve Ballmer and former Lakers owner Mark Walter have been well chronicled. Both are under investigation — Ballmer by the NBA for possibly circumventing the salary cap to pay Kawhi Leonard more than his max allowable salary by funneling money to a third-party company which then paid Leonard for services he never provided, Walter by the feds for potentially using $21 billion in undisclosed loans from his two Delaware insurance companies (money that would obviously belong to the policyholders) to fund other “companies with ties to Walter or his TWG Global holdings company,” per the Los Angeles Times.
Again, these are all allegations at this point. Nothing has been proven. All we know for sure is that Walter just sold the Lakers to Bob Iger and Josh Kushner for $12.5 billion after buying the team 14 months earlier for $10 billion. Do the math, and that’s a $2.5 billion profit in a little over a year’s time for basically doing nothing.
Lakers sold for record-breaking $12.5 billion: Everything to know about Josh Kushner, Bob Iger’s purchase
Jack Maloney
These are both crazy stories that seem to get crazier with every new report. Pablo Torre has spent the better part of the last year going full Woodward and Bernstein on alleged Ballmer shenanigans. And as the NBA’s investigation has yet to conclude, so too has the agreed-upon trade that would send Leonard to the Raptors. It’s all on hold as the league tries to determine what, if anything, Ballmer did that was illegal under league rules. Walter is potentially in bigger trouble than that.
At any rate, the fact that this is happening with two current/former owners, in the same city, at the same time, would be impossible to believe if this weren’t already one of the wildest NBA summers on record.
Biggest gamble: The LaMelo Ball trade
This goes for both Charlotte and Minnesota. For the Hornets, there’s real risk in cutting loose of the best and most popular player on a team that performed like one of the league’s elite over the second half of last season. Charlotte had the best five-man lineup in basketball in 2025-26 with a total point differential of +280 with Ball at the helm, including a team-best +5.8 per 100 possessions with Ball on the floor.
Over the last five years, the Hornets have posted a cumulative net rating north of +25.0 per 100 possessions with Ball on the floor, per Cleaning the Glass, and he has never posted a negative on/off split for a season during that span.
Sometimes these numbers can be leaned on too heavily, but in this case, we’re not talking about a Hornets team that has been blessed with supporting talent. For Ball to be a constant positive on the scoreboard, you know he was driving winning basketball on a real level.
Is LaMelo Ball a winning player? The Timberwolves are betting yes, and it’s a risk they had to take
Brad Botkin
The problem was that he couldn’t stay on the court consistently. He’s fallen short of 50 games played in four of his six seasons. Last year, he played 72 games and the Hornets are betting that they’re selling at the top with three years and $130 million still left on his contract. They got Naz Reid and have Coby White to turn the offense over to and the path is cleared for Brandon Miller and Kon Knueppel to take off. But still, Ball was the engine. It’s a roll of the dice.
Meanwhile, the Timberwolves are betting the immediate future of a team that has been to two conference finals in the last three years on a guy who hasn’t played in a single playoff game in his NBA life, to say nothing of the injury concerns. Julius Randle is out, and he was good for them. Their floor-spacing center in Reid is out. They believe Ball can relieve the double-team pressure Anthony Edwards faced, particularly in last year’s playoffs, and Edwards’ already great catch-and-shoot numbers could skyrocket off Ball’s playmaking. Statistically, everyone shoots better off of Ball’s passes.
Minnesota was at a ceiling and didn’t have many options to break through in a loaded Western Conference. Ball is no sure thing. But he gives the Wolves a chance to take another level offensively, with the defensive infrastructure to support him inside and out. The range of potential outcomes for this particular trade, on both sides, is extremely wide. It could genuinely make or break both teams. Wolves president of basketball operations Tim Connelly bet big on Rudy Gobert the second he showed up in Minnesota. Then he traded Karl-Anthony Towns after a conference finals run. Now he’s all in on Ball. The dude is nothing if not a gunslinger.
Saddest summer: Denver Nuggets
This is a toss-up between the Warriors and Nuggets, but I’m going with Denver. The Warriors put all their eggs in the LeBron James basket and came up short. Until they signed Georges Niang and Brandon Williams this week, they hadn’t brought in a single new player via free agency or trade. But those two guys will help some, and adding Summer League MVP Yaxel Lendeborg with the No. 11 overall selection is potentially significant.
Meanwhile, the Nuggets basically flipped Peyton Watson, who represented their only real upside heading into next season, for DeMar DeRozan. Yeah, they get the Cavs’ 2031 first-round pick, but in the near term, that is a big downgrade, and it happens with Nikola Jokić’s potential free agency on the horizon next summer.
Since the 2023 title, the Nuggets have consistently trimmed meaningful players without suitable replacements.
The Nuggets are daring Nikola Jokić to leave after a listless summer
Brad Botkin
They never found another 2023 Bruce Brown. They didn’t want to pay Kentavious Caldwell-Pope. They tried to swap Michael Porter Jr. for Cameron Johnson, thinking they fit the same player archetype, but Porter Jr. was just way better. Now they lose Watson, their one young, athletic player with the upside to represent at least a plausible path to improvement from last year’s first-round-losing team, because they paid Christian Braun $125 million (at least double what he’s worth) and couldn’t stomach another money dump as they endeavor to get under the second apron.
This is the new NBA reality. Nobody wants any part of the second apron. But the cumulative frustration of Denver losing all these players while Jokić, arguably the best player in the world, only gets older and perhaps less patient, is starting to mount.
Dumbest quote: Monta Ellis
I grew up a Warriors fan and have a lot of love for Monta Ellis. He was a good player and, at times, an unstoppable scorer. So I say this with as much respect as possible. This dude is delusional.
If you didn’t see the news, Ellis was recently hired as the general manager at Alcorn State, and in speaking to reporters about this new job, his old one naturally came up. Ellis said his Warriors teams laid the foundation for the dynasty that came after, which isn’t really true. In fact, it was the trade that sent Ellis to Milwaukee that got the championship ball rolling. But that’s not the delusional part. This is …
“If you switched me and Steph [Curry] out with the team that won the championships, it’d be the same thing,” Ellis said, via ESPN. And some three weeks later, I’m still trying to wrap my head around how even an all-time competitor who is, rightfully, programmed with an outrageous amount of self-belief could actually say such a thing with a straight face.
But he did. Ellis said, basically, that he was held back by his teammates, while Curry, if you read between the lines, was a product of his and could’ve been swapped out for pretty much any other high-scoring guard.
Keep in mind, this is the same Monta “have it all” Ellis who once put himself in the same category as Dwyane Wade, so the man is no stranger to crazy. But still, after all Curry has accomplished, the four championships, the two without Kevin Durant while Durant has never been able to win one without Curry, all the on-off splits that say Curry was always Golden State’s driving force, the scoring title, the two MVPs, the all-time 3-point record, to think there are still guys saying stuff like this is wild.
I mean, it would be one thing if someone said you could swap in peak Damian Lillard or Kyrie Irving for Curry and have similar success with those Warriors teams. It wouldn’t be true, but it would at least provide the basis of a halfway intelligent debate. But Ellis? The 31% career 3-point shooter who didn’t make a single All-NBA or even All-Star team in 12 seasons in the league? Come on, man.
Warriors fans love you, Monta, but let’s bring the talk back down to planet earth.
