The pot is officially stirred and the wheels are turning around the NBA. The trade this week of Kyle Korver kicked off trade season in the NBA.
The NBA trade market is beginning to heat up. It just needed a little push to get over the edge.
The Atlanta Hawks kicked things off trading Kyle Korver to the Cleveland Cavaliers for Mo Williams, Mike Dunleavy and a future first round pick. And that only started the wave of trade rumors involving the Hawks. It is shaping up to be a bigger-than-expected trade deadline.
The Orlando Magic will be active at the deadline. Team CEO Alex Martins said publicly the team intends to be active at the trade deadline. And rumors are already pretty rampant about what the Magic might do and who they might look to move.
Brian Windhorst of ESPN.com reported on a podcast a few weeks ago the Magic had been in conversations with the Portland Trail Blazers and Sacramento Kings and were shopping around Nikola Vucevic and Elfrid Payton.
The reality, of course, is a lot can change in the course of a few weeks. That is how these things go. And it will only speed up as the Feb. 23 trade deadline creeps ever closer.
Nothing concrete has emerged on what the Magic are looking to do. But it is safe to assume the team is working on something — perhaps something big.
Orlando entered the season with one goal. They made no illusions, their goal was to make the Playoffs. The moves they made this offseason were done to achieve this seemingly simple goal, abandoning in some ways four years of slow growth to speed things up for a restless fan base.
The process has not been clean.
Rebuilt with defense in mind — both on the roster and the coaching staff — the team is a middling defensive team, at best. And the Magic sit five games below .500 and out of the Playoff spot by three games with a daunting six-game road trip ahead.
It may not take long for the Magic to get involved in some trade rumors or for their discussions to leak and become public knowledge.
With the Korver trade going through, the trade winds appear to be open. And there are more than a few serious rumors that may have some effect on the Magic moving forward.