What do you bring with you?

The things athletes carry with them when they're traded, and the attributes we want them to bring to new/next teams.

P.J. Tucker brought something like 50 pairs of shoes.

Bruce Brown brought the warmest clothes he had and none of his cowboy hats.

Norman Powell’s furniture had just been delivered to the house he’d bought three weeks earlier in Portland when he got the news, but he couldn’t bring any of it to L.A.

Robin Lopez brought a paperback to a courtside seat.

RJ Barrett’s family drove his four French bulldogs to Toronto from New York City a few days after Barrett arrived.

Kelly Olynyk stuffed what he could into two bags.

The language of trades, especially around the NBA’s trade deadline, is mostly focused on what the receiving team gets. Even when we talk about who they get, the details are broken down into what pretty fast. A skillset, a particular acumen, experience, a vet, a dog, defence, offence, help, a temporary solution, a bargaining chip, a body (descriptions of what kind of body can range from painstaking, almost achingly detailed, to “big” or just “another”) — it goes quickly, almost automatic, this process of who becoming what. The person is now the sum of the gaps they fill, the needs they will help to address.

What we think about less, if at all, is what they bring with them. Not the inventory sheet they’ve been turned into, but the physical things they sought to grab and pack and take from one place, quickly rendered as the past place, to the next, the future.

The now is not ever established in the language of trades, because we’ve already ferried athletes through it. They are certainly in the now, when they get the news wherever they are — at practice, waking up from a nap, out with friends or sitting down with family. The now never feels so pressing as when you have been made to feel profoundly and intensely aware of it shifting from the one you knew, and trusted to be true and solid, to the one that is suddenly taking its place.

In that middle and brief time of the present becoming past, what do you grab for to steady yourself? What do you bring with you?

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Buddy Hield knit his brows in bemused recollection when he was asked in his first Philadelphia postgame presser how he got the news of his trade. He was in bed.

Hield went on to describe the sleepy slur in his agent’s voice on the phone — for her, in L.A., it was 6am. “She’s just waking up because it’s six o’clock in the morning, her time,” Hield said. He blinked and his eyes stayed shut for a couple extra seconds. It’s a nice moment. There’s something particularly intimate and vulnerable about Hield sharing the detail with the room and then sitting in it, remembering a world thick with sleep and possibility, just under 24 hours earlier.

When he opens his eyes his gaze shifts to a notch below eye contact with the reporter who’d asked him the question, going softer now in the middle distance.

“She gave me the news that there’s a deal possibly 75% done,” Hield said, “I was like, ‘For Philly?’” His agent told him yeah.

“I’ve been hearing it a long time, it never happens,” Hield said, using the present tense and trailing off for a beat. Lingering there, maybe, in that liminal space of what he knew to be true and had experienced up to then. It’s worth noting that Hield had just played 39 and a half minutes in his brand new cardinal red and blue trimmed Sixers jersey, dashing away in transition and getting close to help wherever he could in Philly’s paint.

Photo by Mitchell Leff

He scored 20 points and handed off six assists, showered, changed, and still, sitting there, some part of his mind was behind his body having just gone through the motions of what it knows best.

Players talk about basketball being the ballast in the first few days, weeks, even months after a trade. Marcin Gortat, indomitable as he looked, told Holly once that “your legs get softer when you hear that information of being traded” and lamented, like an invocation, “everything is fast, everything is fast”. It’s hard to picture Gortat’s legs, most often appearing in-game as twin hydraulic presses, going wobbly, or him registering speed as anything but welcome, but trades upend even bodily equilibrium. Stability, or some NBA semblance of it, eventually returns to a player’s scope of daily life through a franchise’s help or their personal team’s organization in getting them settled, but the body seeks it first — finding the welcome phantom of it on court.

Their muscles understand the action and reaction required before they catch up on a new team’s plays or the slightly tweaked mechanics of the same ones they’re used to, adjusted for speed or length or their new running mate having an opposite dominant hand than the last person did. They might not know the fastest route to their new arena and their hands might be slapping bare walls in the dark, looking for the light switches they’re used to being there, but on the floor they are deft and useful and fluent again.

It’s the only thing they don’t have to think about bringing with them, the one thing they’ll never forget to pack.

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When Garrett Temple was traded from the Grizzlies to the Clippers, he flew from Oklahoma City to Boston to join his new team. Shortly after, he was in a rideshare heading out to the closest Wal-Mart, “I didn’t have anymore underwear,” Temple said.

Isaiah Roby told me that when he moved to Oklahoma City, upset as he was that his dog, Max, couldn’t come with him at first, he was sure to pack a suit. It was the first real suit he’d ever bought, and he drove it with him the three hours it took to get there from Dallas.

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Winners and losers of trades often come down to which team made the most transactions, had the most bodies coming in. A franchise that decides to stand pat is deigned more dull than one that had a trade fall through, because at least in the latter scenario there’s an alternate reality that can be dissected, readily fantasized about.

So-called winners of trades have gone on to ruin, losers to triumph. The franchises that fare best in the long run still generally tend to be the ones that exist quietly in the middle.

We want movement, we grow bored without it. I get the appeal of watching a majority new roster take the floor for the first time and the sense of acclimatizing with them. Up in the press box this week, as the lights that dimmed for Fred VanVleet’s homecoming montage came back up and Immanuel Quickley, RJ Barrett and Bruce Brown reset after the timeout, I zoned out of the overarching action of the game itself and zeroed in on their individual movements and rhythms, curious and happy to be wrong when I misjudged where they might pass instead of shoot, switch instead of drive. It was all new to me and by design, it’s a newness that can’t, isn’t supposed to, last.

Likewise, in their pregame introductory pressers it was hard not to feel the excitement and good-nerves catching through Kelly Olynyk and Ochai Agbaji, who’d just landed in Toronto hours before. Olynyk especially, who let himself wend out loud through memories of growing up in the east end of the city, shooting in his driveway and pretending to be a Raptor or falling asleep with a portable radio in bed with him, listening to Chuck Swirsky on the call for Toronto. His mom was a scorekeeper for the team, his dad an assistant under Lenny Wilkens, and despite all that history Olynyk said the Raptors “came out of nowhere” with his trade. I thought of him, 10 seasons deep and now on his sixth team — this one, he said, he’d love to end his career with if it worked out that way — and how much movement it took for him to stand still in the place where it started. Everything he left so another ecosystem of people could debate over what it was he brought.

Sitting in the back row my fingers, without thinking, crossed for him.

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You’re away from your kids, your wife, your family, for several months… There’s a lot of stuff to it that people don’t realize. Sometimes, if dudes struggle after a trade, they’re like, why is this dude struggling? This is not how it’s supposed to be. But you don’t realize everything that you—you pick up and move at the drop of a hat. — Josh Hart

Larry Nance Jr. and Josh Hart, close friends, were FaceTiming each other the night before the 2022 trade deadline and joked if they were both traded for the other, could they just swap houses? The next day, Larry Nance Jr. was traded from Portland to New Orleans, and Hart from New Orleans to Portland.

After his first few nights in Nance Jr.’s house, Hart joked that he was probably going to take down the framed wedding and baby photos on the bedroom walls. It was getting weird waking up and looking at them. Nance Jr. said he could take them down if Hart got him the key to his wine cellar, locked like he’d left it in New Orleans.

Hart, a big wine guy, had ostensibly taken the key with him to Portland. Probably nestled on the ring with the rest of the keys that opened his old life.

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There are times I think we assign a higher degree of object permanence to the things we leave strewn in our cars than to athletes, who tend to exist most fully for us when they are in motion — on the floor, or from one team to the next.

Whether they could or would want to name it explicitly, there’s a sense of that in athletes picking what’s most immediate and taking it with them. These objects, whether important or practical or just reached for in a rush, become anchors.

I picture mints or matchbooks left in pockets from the last place they went to eat, receipts from the last time they stopped for gas; well-worn sweats, a favourite hat, a tennis or lacrosse ball they can roll their feet over on the flight from past to future. Maybe a gaming console, or a child-sized sweater or baby’s swaddling blanket that got mixed up in their laundry, clinging stubbornly with affectionate static. All of it a mix of practicality and comfort, nerves and doubt, and tucked under everything with just enough room to fit, balled-up anticipation and excitement — potentially fraying, but still intact.