NBA Finals 2022: How Celtics and Warriors are changing the perception of what makes a bad contract

In the summer of 2019, the Houston Rockets attached two first-round picks and two first-round swaps to trade Chris Paul for Russell Westbrook, and a number of theories have been offered to explain the disastrous deal since. He and James Harden reportedly didn’t get along. Paul was aging and injury prone. After consecutive losses to the Golden State Warriors, Houston may not have seen a need to try the same thing a third time and expect a different result. But ESPN’s Tim MacMahon offered a somewhat more direct explanation on an episode of “The Lowe Post.”

“That trade was made because Tilman Fertitta wanted it made — he thought Chris Paul’s contract was the worst that he’d ever seen in business or sports,” MacMahon said. None of this negates the other possible explanations for the trade, but there’s something visceral about this rationale. Fertitta wasn’t just trying to make the correct basketball decision. He was trying to dump a distressed asset because he considered it toxic. That’s not an especially unique stance in the NBA.

Daryl Morey was Fertitta’s general manager when the Paul trade was made. A year later, he moved on to Philadelphia to take over the 76ers. What was the first move he made? Using a first-round pick to trade Al Horford — and the three remaining years on the $109 million contract Elton Brand had signed him to only a year earlier — to Oklahoma City. Take a look at any list of the NBA’s worst contracts and the first thing you’ll notice is how many of those players have been traded. John Wall. Kristaps Porzingis. Davis Bertans. If Russell Westbrook gets moved this offseason, he’ll have spent all five years of his super-max contract playing for different teams. Once a team identifies one of its own contracts as toxic, it does everything in its power to dump it before it gets any worse.