Trade & FA 2025-26: Free Agency Starts 5pm CST/6pm EST

[mvossman]

Its looking like the Gafford/Lively pairing started the trend. OKC knew they had to get bigger and brought in Hartenstein.

Now we add AD to that, and teams are loading up.

But what is Houston going to do with Sengun, Adams, and Capela ??

OKC has two guys over 6' 5" in their top 9 and they stagger them as much as they can.  They added Hart because they were undersized, but they are still not a very big team.

Looking at recent playoff success, the formula seems to be to have at least one big able to shoot or create and generally (but not always) one other rotational big.  Thats it.  The Mavs were an outlier for having two rotation non shooting/creation bigs (they actually made it to the WCF with a poor mans version of this formula with Maxi/Powell).  

AD gives the Mavs a creation big.  What makes sense is to use the same formula as OKC and start Lively/AD together but stagger them as much as possible.  I get that AD and Lively are injury prone, but Chet and Hart missed almost a seasons worth of games between the two of them with nothing behind them and it didn't stop OKC from winning 68 games.  Paying 18 mil for a third center is massive overkill, and it has the added negative that it is pushing guys out of their natural position.  There is very little recent playoff history that suggests playing that big will be successful.

I have no idea what Houston is doing.