Thunder agree to stunning Paul George trade with Pacers, per reports
Henry Bushnell,
The Indiana Pacers have agreed to trade Paul George to the Oklahoma City Thunder in a stunning deal on the eve of free agency, according to multiple reports Friday night.
According to the reports, Victor Oladipo and Domantas Sabonis will be headed to Indianapolis in the other direction. Per The Vertical’s Shams Charania, the deal includes no draft picks.
George, who will hit free agency after the 2017-18 season, has made it clear that his preferred destination next summer is Los Angeles, and specifically the Lakers. The trade, therefore, represents a major risk for Oklahoma City, which appears to be going all in to keep pace with the Golden State Warriors and Houston Rockets in the Western Conference.
George will team up with Russell Westbrook, who himself is entering the last year of his contract. The Thunder are expected to offer Westbrook a massive extension worth in the range of $200 million over five years once free agency begins. He and the Thunder organization, led by general manager Sam Presti, will likely spend the next year trying to convince George to join him in Oklahoma City for the long haul.
The move also could be viewed as a message in the other direction. Presti must convince Westbrook to re-up with the Thunder for the foreseeable future. A trade for a fellow superstar in George is about as big a commitment to contending as there is.
Indiana had been backed into a corner when George informed management earlier in the month that he would not be re-signing with the franchise after the final year of his contract. The news sucked all leverage away from the Pacers, and depressed the trade market for George.
But it also sent a message to all 28 teams outside of Indiana and the Lakers: The only chance to woo George was by trading for him, and proving to him over the course of a season that the situation here is better than the one in Los Angeles. Several teams had been rumored as possible landing spots for the 27-year-old. Boston and Cleveland seemed like the two most plausible. Houston was mentioned after the Chris Paul trade. The Lakers themselves also considered a deal to all but ensure they remained in George’s future plans.
The Thunder, however, had rarely, if at all, been mentioned as a possible definition. That’s what made the deal so shocking.
Also shocking was that Indiana would pull the trigger with a relatively meager package coming to them in return for the four-time All-Star. Oladipo, 25, is a nice young piece, and the Pacers are clearly priming themselves for a rebuild. Sabonis has shown promising signs as well. But neither is a surefire future star by any stretch of the imagination. The Pacers could have remained patient, and perhaps could have squeezed at least one extremely valuable future first-round pick out of Boston a week into free agency.
Or maybe the market for George just wasn’t there, and Indiana struggled to leverage one offer against another to up its asking price. It is by no means a disaster of a deal. But it was remarkably abrupt, and, with under three hours to go until the official beginning of free agency, left heads around the basketball world spinning.