All Hail Your Second Team.
The NBA Finals' two brightest stars are on pro stop No. 2
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It isn’t that the Los Angeles Clippers didn’t want Shai Gilgeous-Alexander; they just wanted somebody else — or something else — more. And while the Sacramento Kings drafted Tyrese Haliburton 12th overall one summer, they ultimately decided he was an impediment, not an avenue, to their playoff aspirations.
Wrong and wronger, it turns out. But this isn’t such an uncommon story in the NBA. In fact, these Finals provide us with a great object lesson in how difficult it can be to see the road before you, even if you somehow find your franchise in possession of a real and potentially transformational talent.
The second team to get you — that’s the team that often sees the far horizon. That’s the way it goes.
The Oklahoma City Thunder and Indiana Pacers are those second teams this year, the landing spots for SGA and Haliburton, respectively. To say they’ve reaped a record harvest from acquiring these talents might overstate things, but not by much. Gilgeous-Alexander is the NBA’s Most Valuable Player; Haliburton is the player without whom the Pacers absolutely do not make it to the Eastern Conference finals, much less win them.
If you go back to the deals that brought these men to their current uniforms, you can see how loaded their trades really were, that there was high risk and high reward on either side of both transactions. It isn’t as though nobody understood that talent was being swapped for other talent.
No, this was about franchises and their visions. Some look just down the street; some play the long game, peering beyond the neighborhood and off into open country. Guess who won this time?
The Clippers drafted Gilgeous-Alexander in 2018. (More accurately, they paid Charlotte a couple of second-round draft slots to do it for them with the 11th overall pick.) But just one year later, the L.A. club landed Kawhi Leonard in free agency, and Leonard wanted a star veteran to be paired with.
Enter the trade from hell. In exchange for receiving a prime-of-his-career Paul George from the Thunder to play off Kawhi, the Clippers sent to OKC the still-blooming Gilgeous-Alexander, Danilo Gallinari and seven future first-round draft picks beginning in 2022.
It looks clinically insane now — but it’s actually worse than that. Consider that the 2022 pick turned out to be Jalen Williams, who has since become an All-Star, the Thunder’s second-best player (until Chet Holmgren matures as a pro) and an almost perfect complement to SGA. Not only that, but in this summer’s draft the Thunder get to swap picks with the Clippers, allowing them to select 15th rather than 30th — and they still have an unprotected 2026 first-rounder from L.A. on the books.
Gruesome. In reality, though, there were a great many basketball people in the summer of 2019 who liked this deal for the Clippers — a lot. Here was a team, after all, that wasn’t afraid to go for it and try to win a championship right now by adding a veteran superstar to the one they’d just bought.
The Clippers felt that pressure to act, to create an immediate window of opportunity rather than develop one. They did not see what the Thunder saw in Gilgeous-Alexander, it’s true; but even if they had, their primary drive was the coming season, not a few years down the road. L.A. did enjoy short-term success with the Leonard-George axis, but injuries and diminished play put the emphasis on short.
Oklahoma City, coming off three straight first-round playoff exits by the summer of 2019, was willing to take a temporary hit and see if they could retool — or rebuild, if that’s what it took. Viewed from that angle, a franchise philosophy to build rather than acquire (hey, it’s cheaper), it was easier for them to glimpse the player that SGA might become rather than the one he was at that very point in time. And that’s the difference.
The Kings drafted Tyrese Haliburton in the summer of 2020, and it’s safe to say that within a season, they had at least some idea of how good he could be. Haliburton was an All-Rookie first-teamer and finished third in Rookie of the Year voting. By then, though, Sacramento had signed its incumbent offensive spearhead, De’Aaron Fox, to a five-year, $163 million extension, and it was apparent that the club wasn’t going to keep both guards — or that if they did keep both, they weren’t going to be able to play them together very often. It was a stylistic duplication.
The franchise’s brain trust (they’re virtually all gone now) had also drafted another guard, Davion Mitchell, in 2021. Realizing far too late how guard-heavy they were in terms of the concentration of their talent, they looked to acquire Indiana center Domas Sabonis in the winter of 2022. They dangled Fox. The Pacers said no thanks, despite the fact that Fox was clearly a dynamic player. Indiana wanted the other guy.
That moment alone should’ve given Sacramento pause, but the Kings simply lacked the vision and their terminally meddlesome owner, Vivek Ranadive, wanted to see some progress, dammit. In the end, they sent Haliburton to the Pacers in a multi-player blockbuster before the talented guard had even finished his second year in the NBA. They got Sabonis in the deal, and in 2023 Sacramento did indeed end the longest playoff drought in league history at 16 seasons.
The road ended there. Last season the Kings 1.) Fired their successful coach, 2.) Traded a publicly unhappy Fox to San Antonio and 3.) Sacked the GM. Since their owner didn’t fall on the sword in the process, we can presume they’ll continue flailing away rather than patiently building a platform for long-term success.
Indiana? Well, the Pacers added Haliburton, watched him grow into an All-Star, surrounded him with complementary talent, let Rick Carlisle coach the heck out of him, made the Eastern Conference finals two years in a row, and now are standing toe to toe with OKC for the right to lift the Larry O’Brien Trophy.
Whether Haliburton could have become in Sacramento the player that he is for the Pacers is a fair question, and since I know a little about the Kings, I’m inclined to agree with those who say it never would’ve happened. Same with Gilgeous-Alexander, who clearly was given space to grow in Oklahoma City that would have been hard to find in the win-now atmosphere around the Clippers, who’ve spent so much of their recent franchise history trying not to be known as the other team in L.A.
You can argue that, on balance, smaller-market teams have to practice patience, since they’ll never outspend the big boys. That’s largely true. But these deals also represent vision — the willingness to believe that your own coaches, your own staff can tease out ever higher levels of performance from outstanding young talent, and the understanding that it doesn’t happen in a month, or six months, or a year.
Both Oklahoma City and Indiana have that, which is one reason why each of these franchises has the chance not only to get up on a winning run, as they currently are, but stay there. Famous last words, right? But if you’ve got to start somewhere, it might as well be with confidence in your own process.
As an on-again and currently off-again Kings fan, I had my doubts about the Haliburton trade. The kid seemed always to make the right decisions. He had a funky shooting motion, but it was very effective.
But Sabonis made a big difference, and Fox seemed to be an emerging superstar. They made the playoffs and battled the Warriors for 6 games until Steph took total control in Game 7.
And now it has all gone back to pot while Haliburton is on top of the world.
Been watching the brains of Sam Presti in OKC for more than a decade. Nothing happening in OKC is by chance, indeed as you point out, patience and brilliance on the trade floor and in the draft have changed everything. Add some 100 decibel crowds in Loud City, and the formula is a good one for the next decade as well.