Culture
As Jimmy Butler trade rumors swirl, Mat Ishbia and Suns keep chasing short-term highs
Say this for the Phoenix Suns: They have one of the NBA’s most creative front offices when it comes to finding new and different ways in which to mortgage their future. Never mind that this strategy hit its peak two years ago and it has long since been time to turn this ship around; they’re still plowing full steam ahead and throwing lifejackets overboard as they go.
Sorry, I was in the midst of complimenting the Suns before I got sidetracked. In their way, Phoenix made a creative trade on Tuesday by sending an unprotected 2031 first-round pick to the Utah Jazz in return for three other first-round picks in 2025, 2027 and 2029. These picks aren’t likely to be nearly as valuable, and I’ll explain why in a minute. But in essence, the Suns broke a dollar bill into three quarters to improve their immediate trade flexibility, and The Athletic reported late Tuesday that there is rising optimism that Miami Heat star Jimmy Butler is closer to reaching his desired destination — Phoenix — as a result.
Of course, it’s that same impulsive habit under owner Mat Ishbia — chasing short-term sugar highs while burning the future to the ground — that motivates teams like Utah to enthusiastically participate in these deals.
In the last 18 months, the Brooklyn Nets, Houston Rockets, Memphis Grizzlies, Washington Wizards, Orlando Magic and Utah Jazz all have made bets of some size that the Suns will be terrible between 2026 and 2031. So far, so good: It’s early 2025, and Phoenix is an old, average team with zero cap flexibility and few draft assets.
The thing about having three quarters instead of a dollar bill, however, is that you can give one quarter to one team and one quarter to another team. The Suns essentially split the baby on their most valuable (not to mention only) remaining asset, that 2031 pick,. The obvious way that might matter is if they are involved in a multi-team trade that requires them to send draft capital to two different teams.
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In this particular case, it also allows the Suns to sidestep around the Stepien Rule, named for former Cavaliers owner Ted Stepien, who had a penchant for trading all his draft picks and leaving the team high and dry for the future. I can’t think of any other recent examples of that.
The Stepien Rule prevents teams from trading first-round picks in consecutive years by requiring that they have at least one pick certain to convey in every two-year window. However, the loophole for Phoenix is that it doesn’t have to be a team’s own picks. (Side note: We’re definitely getting an “Ishbia Rule” at some point in the next two collective bargaining agreements.)
Thus, having already traded their firsts in 2025, 2027 and 2029, and pick swaps in 2026, 2028 and 2030, the Suns couldn’t trade any future firsts aside from that 2031 choice. The picks they got from Utah will likely be at the back end of the first round — the worst of Cleveland or Minnesota’s pick in 2025 (so, likely 29th or 30th) and the worst of Cleveland, Utah or Minnesota’s in 2027 and 2029.
Sidesteppin’ Stepien means everything is back on the table now. The Suns can trade one or more of their swapped picks in 2026, 2028 and 2030, or they can trade one or more of the new picks they got from Utah in 2025, 2027 and 2029. They still can’t move picks in consecutive years, but Phoenix could conceivably mix and match and, for example, trade its swapped pick in 2026 and the pick it received in the Utah trade in 2029,
I bring this up because it could matter for trades that don’t involve Butler. As in, the Suns could send out Jusuf Nurkić and a pick in one trade to get something back, and Grayson Allen and a pick in another trade to get something back.
It’s just hard to believe that’s the actual reason they’re doing this — for two reasons. First, no team, no matter how badly run, is going to make a trade like this and then just say, “Well, now maybe let’s see what we can do?”
They already know the answer. You’re not doing a trade like this on spec; you’re doing it to satisfy a particular need that has already been communicated by another trade partner.
Second, Phoenix probably wouldn’t do this unless it was doing something big, because this is the Suns’ last chip. I can’t emphasize this enough since the Suns keep coming up with deals to squeeze more out of their diminishing draft-pick stock: This is where it ends.
Suns owner Mat Ishbia poses for a photos with Devin Booker, Kevin Durant and Bradley Beal before the start of the 2023-24 season. (Mark J. Rebilas / USA Today Sports)
No, they can’t rinse, lather and repeat a year from now. Because of repeatedly going over the CBA’s second apron, the Suns’ 2032 pick will be frozen and they can’t trade it. Ditto for every pick after that until they get their payroll under control.
Sure, they’ll likely trade their 2032 second-rounder within minutes of gaining access to it, but it’s not going to bring back much. The same goes for trading “swaps of swaps” to get access to more seconds, especially now that they’ve already done this on three different picks.
At this point all roads lead to Butler, obviously, given that he is the one glittery, shiny object on the trade market, and the Ishbia-era Suns cannot resist shiny objects. The fact that Phoenix went through with this Utah trade is a sign we’re getting warm, and not necessarily on a two-team deal.
Most notably, a trade involving Bradley Beal going to Milwaukee, Butler going to Phoenix and at least one other team being involved besides Miami, seems highly plausible, based both on reporting by my intrepid colleagues at The Athletic and the common sense of looking at a cap sheet.
The logistics are hairy but not insurmountable: The Bucks have to send out at least $58 million in salary to take back Beal’s $50.2 million salary and stay below the second apron once they backfill the roster for all the empty slots on what is likely a four-for-one or five-for-one deal. Beal would also have to waive his no-trade clause; presumably the teams involved would ascertain whether this was a realistic possibility before marching headlong into a deal.
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If we assume Giannis Antetokounmpo, Damian Lillard and Brook Lopez are off limits, getting to $58 million basically requires the inclusion of Khris Middleton, Bobby Portis, Pat Connaughton and two other low-salary players, possibly MarJon Beauchamp and Chris Livingston. Backfilling the roster with three minimum deals and keeping the roster at 14 the rest of the season would leave the Bucks about a half million dollars below the threshold.
This is where the deal likely takes some time to get to the finish line: All that salary flotsam has to go somewhere, and it’s not in particularly high demand. Multiple teams would likely get involved, and the Heat might end up with only one or two of those Bucks mentioned above. (One interesting sidebar, for instance: Could the Suns possibly stuff a Nurkić-for-Portis sidebar into it? Seems unlikely, but surely they would ask.) From Miami’s perspective, most notably, a deal that ends up with the Heat under the luxury tax is probably a lot more palatable given the fairly minimal draft compensation likely coming their way; a Butler-for-Middleton swap gets them there, but the other Bucks would have to go elsewhere.
And that, in turn, is likely why the Suns made their trade in the first place. A two-team deal with Miami wouldn’t require them to break their bill into coins like this; a multi-team trade, however, likely compensates Miami with one or two of the firsts and then sends the other(s) to compensate other teams for taking unwanted contracts.
Either way, we’ll end up where every Suns deal ends up: They’ll be slightly more competitive in the short term, but they’re Stepien even deeper into the abyss in the long term. I say “long term,” but that doom cycle is basically 24 months away even if everything breaks right, and very possibly more like four months.
Butler, or some other star, would help win a few more games this year, but it won’t change the Suns’ overarching reality: Their best player is 36, they have no draft picks, they have no good young players, and they can’t sign any free agents above the minimum.
Basically, the fields have been salted through 2031. All that’s left to do now is starve. No wonder everybody wants to trade for Phoenix’s picks.
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(Top photo of Jimmy Butler, Bradley Beal and Kevin Durant: Megan Briggs / Getty Images)
She was blond and he was dark-haired; they were almost photonegatives. She looked as if she’d been in Bergman films. He was, visually, America’s Camus — wary, heavy-lidded, wreathed in cigarillo smoke, an intellectual turned out in black Levi’s and sheepskin-lined leather jackets.
Hustvedt and Auster’s double-barreled impact could prompt strange reactions. Before their wedding dinner, Hustvedt writes, a poet friend of Paul’s lifted a glass and said, “To the bride and groom, two people so good-looking I’d like to slice their faces with a razor.” Hustvedt wasn’t surprised when he slowly faded from their lives.
Auster was diagnosed with cancer in January 2023, when he was 75. Hustvedt tells the story of his illness — the chaotic E.R. visits, the hair loss, the shrinking and then metastasizing of his tumor, the wracking immunotherapy, the wheelchairs, the inability to write and the gradual loss of language — largely by reprinting the matter-of-fact group emails she sent to close friends to keep them apprised of his progress.
These sorts of missives, as anyone who has written or received them knows, are an art form of their own. When delivering good news, Hustvedt urged caution. “There is an important difference between optimism and hope,” she wrote in one such email. “The optimist’s tendency to cheer every piece of good news and predict a good outcome is understandable but creates emotional swings that, at least for those who love the patient, are unsustainable. Hope, on the other hand, is necessary for living on.”
Auster was stoic about his illness, but restless and held captive in the borderless region he termed “Cancerland.” No longer able to write fiction, near his death he began to compose a series of letters to his grandson. These letters, which are largely about family history, are printed here and are models of that form: warm, direct, undogmatic.
Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about books, authors and literary culture. This week’s challenge is focused on unfinished novels that their authors didn’t live to see published. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.
CHERNOBYL, LIFE, AND OTHER DISASTERS, by Yevgenia Nayberg
“You have to share many things with others … but what you remember belongs to you and you alone,” Yevgenia (Genya) Nayberg writes in the author’s note to her graphic memoir, “Chernobyl, Life, and Other Disasters.”
The elegantly composed pages of this moving story, told largely through Nayberg’s effervescent illustrations, make clear the special place she holds in her heart for memories of her childhood in Kiev (now spelled Kyiv), Ukraine.
It is 1986, Ukraine is still part of the Soviet empire, and the entire world is anticipating Halley’s comet. Yet there are more important things in Genya’s life than the approaching comet. She is 11 years old and preparing for the entrance exam to Kiev’s National Secondary School of Art.
Inspired by her mother, who is an artist, Genya loves to draw and paint. But there is an obstacle: The family is Jewish and the art school — like many schools in the former Soviet Union — accepts only 1 percent of Jewish applicants.
When Genya was 5, her grandpa, who lived through Stalin’s Terror, told her she should “not stick out in school.” He taught her to read using Pravda, which was filled with articles about imperialism and inflation — evil spirits that haunted her dreams. (Pravda and Izvestiya — The Truth and The News — were the two major newspapers in the Soviet Union, and everyone knew the joke that accurately reflected Soviet reality: There is no news in The Truth and no truth in The News.)
In first grade, Genya’s “Honorary Teacher of the Soviet Union” — as manipulative and sinister as the government she served — demanded unconditional love from the pupils in her class, going so far as to ask them to raise their hands if they were willing to give blood to her in the event she needed a transfusion.
The same year, in military training class, the children learned the pretending game: When Genya complained that the gas mask she was supposed to practice putting on, in case of an American nuclear attack, was too big for her face, the instructor replied, “Pretend that it fits.” Both teachers and students were to pretend that everything in the country was ideal, while they waited for the promised dawn of a bright Soviet future. Nobody knew then that the nuclear fallout would come not from across the ocean but from within.
Now it is spring and Genya is bored, painting Young Pioneers with red neckties (a Soviet national scout group) over and over again at the behest of the tutor who is helping her get ready for the July exam. She consoles herself with the thought that if she is accepted she can paint whatever she likes.
On April 26 there is an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant, 90 kilometers from Kiev, but there is no official information about the damage or even about the accident itself. On May 1, International Workers’ Day, everyone goes outside for a parade, as usual.
On the left-hand page of a double-page spread, Kiev, in Nayberg’s exquisitely wrought, soft-hued rendering, is “blooming like a giant cream cake with white, pink and purple chestnut flowers.” On the right-hand page, as if it were part of the same scene, Nayberg has drawn a stark picture of the Chernobyl nuclear plant, stamped with the word “RADIATION” in Russian, that makes it look like a colossal tombstone. “Like every year,” young Genya wryly comments, “it is a perfect day.”
In the absence of information, Genya’s family must rely on rumors. Her mother, the driving force in the book, adds iodine to the children’s milk and takes Genya and her 3-year-old brother 1,300 kilometers away to Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad), in Russia, to stay with their cousins.
As Genya bikes by the city’s many World War II monuments that depict victorious soldiers, she encounters “war survivors that never quite survived,” begging for bread. In Soviet Russia, it turns out, they play the pretending game, too.
In July, to their hosts’ horror, Genya and her mother return to Kiev for the exam that cannot be missed. The three-part test — two days for composition, two days for painting and two days for drawing — is grueling.
Happily for Genya and her repeated painting of Young Pioneers cheerfully performing selfless deeds, the theme of the composition portion is “In the Morning of Our Country.” Weirdly, this could be her ticket to freedom of expression.
Nayberg’s narrator is resilient, funny and ironic, observing her surroundings with an artist’s probing eye.
Her story gracefully brings to life the Soviet world — torn down in 1991 and recently resurrected by the latest Russian dictator — provoking thorny questions about different approaches to art, the cost of trying to conform and the complexity of family ties.
“Stories let us hold on to people a little longer,” Nayberg writes at the end of this tender memoir dedicated to her artist mother. Genya’s mom, and the rest of the characters in “Chernobyl, Life, and Other Disasters,” will stay with me for years to come.
CHERNOBYL, LIFE, AND OTHER DISASTERS | By Yevgenia Nayberg | (Ages 10 and up) | Neal Porter Books | 200 pp. | Paperback, $15.99
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