The NBA is famously a league of transactions. Teams must nail their trades, signings and draft picks to compete for the title, and fan interest in those dealings is often higher than in the games themselves.
Some of these transactions result in meteoric success. Just look at the past two NBA champions: The Oklahoma City Thunder and Boston Celtics traded for Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Alex Caruso, Derrick White, Jrue Holiday, Al Horford, Kristaps Porzingis and draft picks that became Jalen Williams, Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown. Other recent champions landed their MVPs with the No. 41 (Nikola Jokic) and No. 15 (Giannis Antetokounmpo) picks.
Yet other transactions flame out spectacularly. It's those rotten deals that we've put under the microscope.
Following ESPN colleagues who have done the same for NFL, MLB and Premier League teams, we're highlighting the worst decision every NBA team has made thus far in the 2020s, ranking them from least to most damaging.
Note that we're ranking the disastrousness of these deals in retrospect, so even moves that made sense at the time can be included here. As ESPN's Bill Barnwell wrote in his NFL ranking, «I'm evaluating the outcome. If the process was clearly bad at the time, that's a bonus, but this is measuring the severity of each wrong choice, not why something happened.»
The process here is the same. Let's take a look at the most damaging moves NBA teams have made this decade.
Jump to a tier:
Tier 1: Franchise-altering trades | Tier 2: High cost, low reward
Tier 3: Midtier mistakes | Tier 4: Draft disasters
Tier 5: Small-scale problems
30. Cleveland Cavaliers
Biggest mistake: Declining Isaiah Hartenstein's qualifying offer (2021)
The Cavaliers haven't made many mistakes this
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