The 2024-25 NBA season is over a month underway, and with that comes more clarity surrounding where each team stands as far as being playoff contenders or pretenders. The last spot a team wants to be in is a borderline play-in tournament team that has no realistic chance of making a deep playoff run, yet a very minimal shot of landing a top draft pick next summer.
The Portland Trail Blazers are now 8-12 and run the risk of becoming a team stuck in "no man's land," as they currently have the seventh-worst record in the association. That alone makes them potential sellers to watch between now and February. Having veterans still on the roster makes them an even more intriguing team to watch.
The Chicago Bulls are stuck in "no man's land"
However, the definition of a team stuck in "no man's land" the past few seasons is the Chicago Bulls. The Bulls recently went all-in with their acquisitions of Lonzo Ball, Nikola Vucevic, and DeMar DeRozan (now in Sacramento), only to perenially hover around an eighth seed in the Eastern Conference. As a result, it comes as no surprise that Chicago is the team that is considered the most likely to be sellers to jumpstart their rebuild.
Jake Fischer covers the Bulls' impending fire sale (subscription required) on The People's Insider, mentioning that because Chicago moved DeRozan and Alex Caruso this past summer, they'd be potentially open to "moving anybody."
Blazers GM Joe Cronin should consider making a deal to take a flier on Lonzo Ball to help address multiple roster weaknesses for Portland. However, the Blazers and Bulls aren't the only two teams to keep an eye on.
Who else besides Portland and Chicago could be sellers?
Fischer says, "If you want trades this holiday season, you and general managers alike need the emergence of true sellers in the NBA's marketplace. It's no secret that the Washington Wizards have veterans to move. Utah, Portland, and Toronto likewise belong to that list. Yet no discussion of likely sellers, in today's NBA, starts without Karnisovas' Bulls."
Based on these veterans' ages not matching up with these rebuilding teams' timelines, some players that Fischer could potentially be referring to include:
- Bulls: Zach LaVine, Lonzo Ball, or Nikola Vucevic
- Wizards: Jonas Valanciunas, Malcolm Brogdon, or Kyle Kuzma
- Jazz: Jordan Clarkson, John Collins, Collin Sexton, or Walker Kessler (although he's only 23)
- Blazers: Jerami Grant, Deandre Ayton, Robert Williams III, Matisse Thybulle, or Anfernee Simons
- Raptors: Bruce Brown, Kelly Olynyk, or Jakob Poeltl
It's not typical to see two rebuilding teams trade with one another, as would be the case if Portland were to make a deal for Ball or someone else on this list. But the rebuilding Blazers also gave up future assets to acquire Deni Avdija, so a deal like that is certainly still on the table.
Still, it's more likely that if the Blazers were to make a deal to offload one or multiple of their veterans, it would worsen their roster (in hopes of landing a better pick) and acquire future draft capital in the process, which also applies to any of these other four teams as well.