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The second trade of the 2025-26 NBA season has arrived, and it’s a doozy. Almost a month after the Hawks kicked off trade season by sending Trae Young to Washington, the Cleveland Cavaliers, Sacramento Kings and Chicago Bulls have gotten together for a subtle but meaningful three-team deal that should beef up Cleveland’s bench for the stretch run. Here are the details, according to ESPN’s Shams Charania:
Cavaliers receive: Dennis Schröder, Keon Ellis
Kings receive: De’Andre Hunter
Bulls receive: Dario Šarić, two second-round picks
So, how did all three teams do in the deal?
Cleveland Cavaliers: A-
Cleveland came into the 2025 offseason needing to address two areas. The first was point-of-attack defense, as their defense relied heavily on their two stellar big men. The second was a backup ball-handler to replace Sixth Man of the Year candidate Ty Jerome, who was critical to last year’s roster but was going to be out of their price range as a second-apron team in free agency. Cleveland tried to tackle both slots at once by trading for Lonzo Ball, who was stellar for Chicago last year, but has struggled for the Cavaliers this season.
So instead, they made this deal to address both needs. Let’s start with Schröder. He is obviously inconsistent, and played badly for Sacramento this season. However, I’d like to point out one of the strangest trends in the NBA. Cleveland will be the seventh team Schröder has played for in the past four seasons… and he seems to alternate between playing great and playing badly with each passing move.
He was so good for the 2022-23 Lakers that the Raptors rewarded him with a mid-level contract. The Raptors had him for half of a season, said no thanks, and dumped him on Brooklyn. He was so good for the Nets that they had to trade him on Dec. 15, the first day Golden State could legally make the trade, just to stop him from winning them games as they tried to tank. He was so badly afterward for the Warriors that Golden State traded him less than two months later in the Jimmy Butler deal. He was great for Detroit down the stretch, and he used that success to get another mid-level deal from the Kings, with whom he struggled this season. So if the trend holds? Cleveland gets the Sixth Man of the Year candidate version of him, not the bad contract version.
In all seriousness, Cleveland ranks 23rd in the NBA in bench scoring. The Cavaliers score 10 fewer points per 100 possessions when Donovan Mitchell goes to the bench. Schröder theoretically helps on both fronts, and while he’s small, he’s a ferocious on-ball defender in the right matchups. Against other small guards, he’s actually fairly valuable on defense. Speaking of valuable on defense, we have Ellis, who has undergone one of the stranger playing time sagas in recent memory.
Ellis, a 2022 undrafted free agent, emerged as a key starter for the Kings down the stretch of the 2023-24 season. He was perhaps the best defender that team had, and he shot above 40% on 3-pointers in a supporting role. That’s exactly the sort of player the modern NBA prizes. Which made it all the stranger when head coach Mike Brown started yanking his minutes around last season. The trend continued this year. His effectiveness hasn’t really dipped, though he’s now shooting “only” around league average from 3 after multiple years above 40%. The Kings just seemingly soured on him as a player. Their loss is Cleveland’s gain, as the Cavaliers get two very helpful role players in this deal.
The cost for Cleveland? De’Andre Hunter… a player they were seemingly trying to cap dump anyway. The Cavaliers acquired Hunter at last year’s deadline, but his shooting declined precipitously this season, and despite excellent defensive tools, he has never consistently been a high-level defensive player. Hunter fits the vague outline of a 3-and-D wing. He’s big and athletic and he takes a lot of shots. But his production has never matched the idea of what he could be. He’s now 28. He went through a playoff run last season. It seems like if it were ever going to happen for him, it would have already. And with the emergence of breakout young forward Jaylon Tyson coupled with the impending return of Max Strus, Hunter had simply been edged out of Cleveland’s long-term plans.
And that’s the cherry on top of this trade for the Cavaliers. Hunter was arguably bad salary not only for this season, but next year, when he’s owed almost $25 million. The Cavaliers not only got off of that money, but they saved around $50 million in the process. The Cavaliers had such a gargantuan luxury tax bill that the drop from Hunter to Schröder and Ellis trims a huge chunk off of their payroll. Now Cleveland could even potentially get out of the second apron entirely by dumping Lonzo Ball and making some other moves around the fringes. The Cavaliers entered this deadline cycle with a payroll approaching $400 million while operating around $22 million above the second apron. Improving their team while potentially ducking the second apron without having to give up a first-round pick would be an absolute home run of a deadline. Cleveland owes most of its draft capital to Utah from the Donovan Mitchell trade, so they’ve made lemonade out of the deadline lemons they were working with.
Sacramento Kings: D
We covered what was happening to Ellis on the court in the Cavaliers section. I briefly want to touch on what happened to Ellis off of the court last summer that necessitated this trade. Sacramento had a team option on Ellis’ contract worth roughly the minimum. This is fairly standard for undrafted or second-round success stories, and the smart play is usually to decline that team option. Why? Because it makes the player a restricted free agent. That way, he can get guaranteed, life-changing money faster, while you can lock the player up under team-friendly terms thanks to the matching rights that come in restricted free agency. Oklahoma City uses this strategy all of the time. It’s how the Thunder locked Lu Dort, Aaron Wiggins, Isaiah Joe and Jaylin Williams into below-market contracts.
Well, apparently the Kings, lottery dwellers in 17 of the past 18 seasons, know better than the defending champion Thunder, because they picked up their option on Ellis. That allowed them to keep him at roughly the minimum, but it meant he would be an unrestricted free agent in 2026. They used the extra financial flexibility gained by keeping Ellis at a low cap figure to sign Schröder, whom they spent most of this season trying to dump when he got outplayed by Russell Westbrook on a minimum salary.
As all of this was happening, the sharks started circling on Ellis. Sacramento never seemed bothered by the fact that the smartest teams in the league, lik the Cavaliers, the Celtics and the Spurs, were all interested in Ellis. Nope. This was a player the Kings needed to dump… probably because they knew one of those smart teams was going to swipe him in free agency next summer for nothing. Reporting had indicated the Kings wanted a first-round pick for Ellis. Shocker: they didn’t get one. Because they’ve mismanaged this situation for months in ways that the entire basketball world vocally criticized them for. How the team that gave away Tyrese Haliburton generated this level of self-confidence, I will never quite understand.
The end result here is Sacramento winding up with Hunter. Now, in theory, the Kings are very short on wings. Keegan Murray is the only good one on the team. But think about where Sacramento is as a franchise. The Kings literally have the worst record in the NBA right before a generational draft class arrives. Virtually every player on their roster is on the trading block as they seem set to kick off a rebuild. And they’ve added an expensive veteran in his prime, taking them far beyond the projected luxury tax for next season unless they make follow-up moves.
What on Earth is the plan here? What is the version of this trade that qualifies as a success for Sacramento? If Hunter struggles as he did in Cleveland this season, they’ve effectively given up one of their few trade chips for someone the league will perceive as a bad contract. But if Hunter bounces back and looks more like he did last season before Cleveland traded for him, they will have added someone who will help them win games they really should be trying to lose.
Are the Kings so bad that they don’t fear improvement, and merely like the 28-year-old Hunter as a long-term fixture to hover around the background while they tank and maybe help them two or three years down the line when they’re ready to try to win again? That seems the likeliest explanation here, and for what it’s worth, despite this year’s struggles and the generally disappointing arc his career has taken relative to his potential, Hunter is a serviceable NBA wing. Those are in short supply and the Kings needed one. They just took the Kingsiest possible route to getting one. The Beam Team has never felt further away. The good old Kangz are back in full force.
They avoid an “F” mostly because the trade isn’t big enough to be genuinely harmful. They’re not giving away unprotected picks or taking on four-year deals. And hey, I guess they saved the $4.3 million guarantee on Schröder’s deal for the 2027-28 season, so that’s… something. They’ll also be able to convert two-way big man Dylan Caldwell, who has been a pleasant surprise defensively, to a standard contract. You just had to imagine there were easier ways to go about doing that.
Chicago Bulls: C+
Look, Chicago’s end of the deal here is harmless enough. The Bulls take on the $5.4 million in salary owed to Dario Šarić in order to make the money work for Sacramento. They get a couple of second-round picks for their help. This is broadly what bad teams like the Bulls should be doing with their money. It’s no game-changer, but hey, incremental improvements are nice, so the Bulls get an above-average grade.
However, I do want to take a moment and talk about the optics of Chicago and Sacramento uniting in yet another three-team trade. This is the third consecutive calendar year in which the Bulls and Kings have collaborated on a three-team deal. Let’s look at how that’s gone for them…
- In the summer of 2024, the Kings wanted to acquire DeMar DeRozan in a sign-and-trade from the Bulls. The Bulls, however, did not want to take on the salary of Harrison Barnes to facilitate the deal, so they looped in the Spurs. The Kings gave San Antonio unprotected first-round swap rights in 2031, you know, right as Victor Wembanyama should be smack dab in the middle of his prime, just for taking on Barnes, who has been a solid starter and beloved locker room veteran for them as they’ve ascended back in to the Western Conference contender class. Meanwhile, the Kings are trying to cap dump DeRozan, whose contract runs a year longer than Barnes’ did. Great work, guys.
- At the 2025 deadline, DeAaron Fox tried to force his way to San Antonio through a trade request. The Spurs ultimately paid what was regarded as a meager draft asset price and no meaningful young talent to land their All-Star point guard. The Kings, not wanting to accept the need to rebuild. looped the Bulls in and traded for Zach LaVine, who, as we keep saying over and over again today, they’re now trying to cap dump. Don’t give Chicago credit for getting off of the contract, either. LaVine seemingly had positive trade value at the time. The Bulls got a first-round pick back for him, after all. The problem? It was their own 2025 first-round pick… which was top-eight protected. The Bulls traded for a pick they easily could have tanked in order to keep because they were that desperate to reach the Play-In Tournament and suffer their annual April loss to the Heat. The cherry on top: Sacramento didn’t regain control over its 2031 pick in the Fox deal. That pick, which the Kings regarded so lightly that they paid it to dump a contract six months earlier, was suddenly so valuable that the Spurs wouldn’t give it up to get an All-Star.
Now, we have this deal. Chicago’s end of it was fine, but there’s something ominous about any trade that involves both the Bulls and Kings. They’ve spent the past few seasons co-running a charity for well-run organizations. I shudder to think of what sort of heist their 2027 dalliance will create for one lucky contender.