Kevin Durant trade sleepers: Four wild-card teams that could make a play for the former MVP

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Ever since the Kevin Durant-to-Golden State rumors arose and then fell apart at the trade deadline, five teams have stood out as likely suitors for the inevitable move coming in the 2025 offseason: the Houston Rockets, San Antonio Spurs, Minnesota Timberwolves, Miami Heat and New York Knicks. Sure enough, all of the reporting thus far has suggested that those are the five most prominent teams in the mix.

However, ESPN reported Wednesday several wild-card suitors had checked in. This makes a lot of sense on paper. Durant is 37 years old and on an expiring contract. The price for him is plausibly low enough for most of the league to submit reasonable offers. Yet his playing style is so portable that almost any roster could easily be a fit for him. Throw in the branding value that comes with acquiring a top-20 player in NBA history and you’re inevitably going to have a number of unexpected teams bat around the idea of a Durant pursuit.

Now, there’s a caveat here. Durant, thanks to that expiring contract as well as his often moody demeanor, has quite a bit of say here. If he doesn’t want to go somewhere, he can probably squash just about any deal. That makes any possible wild-card team a true sleeper here. We can broadly assume that Durant is interested in those first five teams. Any others would probably have to sell him on joining them. This would be an uphill battle. But on paper, the following four teams make some degree of sense as basketball fits for Durant.

On deadline day, ESPN reported that the Grizzlies were interested in Durant… but he said no. It’s possible, and perhaps likely, that he would simply refuse the Grizzlies no matter what. Memphis isn’t exactly popular among stars, with Jimmy Butler also reportedly not being interested in heading there. The basketball fit, though, makes perfect sense.

The sort of player that fits best next to Durant at this point in his career is a guard that can get to the rim. That provides offensive balance with his perimeter shotmaking. Ja Morant obviously fits the bill. Ideally, a Durant team also has plenty of defense in the front court as well so he doesn’t need to take too much of a physical beating as a rim-protector. Jaren Jackson Jr. and Zach Edey would allow him to play small forward. This team is reasonably deep with a front office that drafts extremely well. They could compete for a championship if Durant is interested.

Desmond Bane would probably be the primary outgoing talent on the Memphis end. The Suns don’t need a scoring guard with Devin Booker in place. That’s fine. It would be easy enough to loop in a third team — Orlando makes plenty of sense, and Houston could too if the Rockets are comfortable helping someone else get Durant — that has assets that would satisfy Phoenix. Memphis controls its future first-round picks, so it has plenty to send the Suns on that front. The Grizzlies are even technically below the salary cap, at least for the moment, so they could make a trade with far fewer financial restrictions than some suitors.

The catch is that they already have plans for their cap space. The idea there is going to be renegotiating and extending Jackson, who is severely underpaid this season. They’d also probably like to keep restricted free agent Santi Aldama, so they’ll need to preserve some flexibility there. Ultimately, the Grizzlies might decide that maintaining their future optionality is the priority here. But given where they are, they probably need to take a big swing of some sort in the near future if they want to meaningfully contend for titles. They have three players who will be making max money in the near future, but none of them are surefire All-NBA talents. Durant is a risk that would offer a substantial possible reward.

The Grizzlies have a salary and star power problem. The Pistons have neither. Cade Cunningham figures to be an All-NBA fixture moving forward, and the bulk of their core is still on rookie deals. The Pistons can go in just about any direction this offseason. They can create cap space to chase external free agents if they want to. They can run it back and plan to just keep building around their youth.

But Boston’s presumed absence as Jayson Tatum recovers from a torn Achilles tendon has created a vacuum at the top of the Eastern Conference. Someone is going to try to fill it. Could a team built around Cunningham, Durant and an elite defense reach the Finals in this Eastern Conference? Yea, probably. You could argue they’d have the two best players in pretty much any playoff matchup, provided Durant does not suffer from significant, age-related decline.

The question for Detroit is how much of its future it is willing to spend on the present. It’s entirely possible that the Pistons already have enough young talent in the building to organically build a champion, but that would mean waiting a few years for all of it to develop. They might also preserve to keep their bullets in the chamber so they could one day trade for a star closer to Cunningham’s timeline. He might have a decade of winning ahead of him. Durant, obviously, doesn’t.

If they’re willing to push some chips in now, though, they have a lot that would appeal to Phoenix. Jaden Ivey‘s ability to get to the rim would pair well with Booker’s shotmaking, and trading him gets Detroit out of the thorny issue of extending him after an injury. Isaiah Stewart could help solve some of Phoenix’s front-court issues, and Tobias Harris, contract jokes aside, is a valuable two-way forward. Ausar Thompson and Jalen Duren are almost certainly off of the table, but even without them, the Pistons have youth, picks and role players to dangle here.

Reports around the trade deadline suggested that the Mavericks were unlikely to get involved in the Durant sweepstakes… but Cooper Flagg might change the equation. The sort of depth and interior defense it would have cost to get Durant at that point likely would have doomed any championship hopes that a Kyrie Irving-Anthony Davis-Kevin Durant trio might have had, but if Dallas believes Flagg could replace it, there’s an argument to be made that now is the time to push all-in for a title. After all, they don’t control their first-round picks between 2027 and 2030. They don’t have an immediate path to rebuilding around Flagg’s timeline anyway unless they go the other way and trade Davis (which they potentially should, but are unlikely to actually consider).

The Mavericks can check just about every box for the Suns. Need a center? Here’s Daniel Gafford. The Mavericks probably can’t afford to extend him anyway. Wings? Dallas has plenty: P.J. Washington, Caleb Martin, Naji Marshall, Max Christie, take your pick. Klay Thompson would probably have to be involved for salary purposes, but that likely wouldn’t bother the Suns. Dallas doesn’t have any of its own picks to dangle until 2031, but it has a 2029 Lakers pick that would have some value. It would take a bunch of players to match salary and would likely require a third team, but there’s a deal to be made here.

All of this comes down to priorities for Dallas. If Irving can get healthy by February or March, a Durant-Irving-Davis-Flagg-Dereck Lively core would have a genuine chance to compete for a title so long as the Mavericks could retain a modicum of depth. They’d have to go find cheap guard play to get them by while Irving is injured, but Durant lowers the bar on what they’d need on that front. This is doable.

But man, would that involve taking a lot of eggs out of the Flagg basket. The No. 1 pick was a lifeline after the disastrous Luka Dončić trade. What good will that second chance do the Mavericks if, in three years, they’re mostly bereft of youth and picks to rebuild around Flagg’s prime? That’s the struggle here. There’s an argument to be made that Dallas has already so thoroughly sold out its future that the only way to gain Flagg’s trust would be to win now and ask him to be patient through some lean years later. But try that and miss and, well, don’t be surprised if he starts angling for his own trade four or five years from now. Dallas could probably adjust to the Flagg timeline smoothly with a Davis trade, but again, Nico Harrison bet his reputation on his old Nike buddy. He’s not going to take that plunge even if they need to. 

The likeliest path for Dallas is to try to win now with what they have, which they probably aren’t good enough to do, while not sacrificing what little remains for Flagg’s future, which probably won’t be enough at that point anyway. There’s an argument to be made here that Dallas just needs to pick a lane. The future is the better one, but this is Harrison we’re talking about here, so the present should probably be acknowledged as well.

Glass half empty: the Clippers were knocked out in the first round. Glass half full: the Clippers pushed the Nuggets to seven games, and the Nuggets pushed the Thunder to seven games. If you believe in the transitive property, you probably don’t think the Clippers are necessarily that far away from high-level contention so long as they remain healthy (never dependable in their case, but hey, it’s possible).

The Suns would almost certainly ask for Ivica Zubac here. The Clippers would say no. They’re not giving up a borderline All-NBA center on a bargain contract for a 37-year-old. But that shouldn’t be a deal-breaker here. The Clippers obviously have a perimeter defense surplus which the Suns might like to pluck from. Derrick Jones Jr. and Kris Dunn should both interest them. Norman Powell probably doesn’t make sense for the Suns, but he’d be an obvious chip to use in a multi-team deal. Why don’t we loop in the Nets to get Phoenix its center? The Clippers still have two tradable first-round picks in 2030 and 2032 to work with. Maybe one goes to the Nets for Nic Claxton and the other goes to the Suns.

Would Durant ever want to play with James Harden again? That’s a possible holdup here. The two seemingly didn’t break up in Brooklyn on the best terms. But a foursome of Durant, Harden, Kawhi Leonard and Ivica Zubac makes perfect sense in basketball terms. The Clippers would have a lethal pick-and-roll duo and two of the best difficult shotmakers in basketball history. So long as they could hold onto a modicum of the perimeter defense that meant so much last season, that team could win the 2026 championship.

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