Similar to what I did for the NHL’s most popular deadline-deal targets, here’s a table of the NBA players most commonly rumored as transaction fodder ahead of that league’s trade deadline, Thursday at 3 p.m. Eastern time. I’ve sorted the players according to their long-term predictive Real Plus/Minus rating,1 and I’ve also included the offensive and defensive components of their RPM ratings.
Most of these players are quite unlikely to go anywhere; the list is simply a collection of names mentioned by various sources2 as potential trade candidates. It’s also worth noting that, even after including borderline-untouchable targets such as DeMarcus Cousins, the average player on the list has an RPM of -0.9. In other words, most rumored trade targets are below-average-to-bad players; otherwise they probably wouldn’t be dangled in trade talks.
But some of the players listed do have value or can at least fill a niche role. That’s why it’s always interesting to follow the moves on deadline day, even if zero hour is expected to be relatively quiet.
CORRECTION (Feb. 19, 2:00 p.m.): A previous version of the table in this article repeated some players. These duplicates have been removed. The current version was also updated to include seven new players.