Remember when so many plugged-in people were bracing us for a 2023 NBA trade deadline marked by crickets and fart noises and general inactivity?

It turns out they were wrong.

Chaos is already reigning supreme in advance of Thursday’s 3 p.m. EST transaction buzzer. Kevin Durant is on the Phoenix Suns. The Brooklyn Nets, somehow, have more future first-round picks than your favorite team. Probably.

D’Angelo Russell is back with the Los Angeles Lakers, and he’s bringing a couple of (very impactful) friends with him. Russell Westbrook will now have the “Utah Jazz” on his Basketball-Reference resume.

Mike Conley is headed to the Minnesota Timberwolves and tasked with replacing someone nearly a decade his junior. Josh Hart is a member of the New York Knicks, for some reason. The Portland Trail Blazers are wheeling and dealing after missing out on Jarred Vanderbilt.

Quiet. Trade. Deadline. My. Butt.

Stick with us as we grade every single deal that went down between Wednesday and Thursday’s 3 p.m. cutoff.

Kevin Durant to Phoenix

The Trade

Brooklyn Nets Receive: Mikal Bridges, Jae Crowder, Cameron Johnson, 2023 first-round pick (unprotected), 2025 first-round pick (unprotected), 2027 first-round pick (unprotected), 2028 first-round swap (unprotected), 2029 first-round pick (unprotected)

Phoenix Suns Receive: Kevin Durant, T.J. Warren

Grades

Nets: A-

You can’t technically win a trade in which you’re dealing an all-time great who, when healthy, still plays at an all-time-great level. But this presupposes the Nets had other options. They didn’t. Not really. This core was doomed since last offseason, at least, when both Durant and Kyrie Irving tried to get out of Brooklyn.

Behind-the-scenes combustibility nuked the Nets of some leverage, if not a truckload. Irving playing on an expiring deal and just generally creating negative attention only complicated matters. Durant has three more years left on his deal, all under team control. But he is 34, hasn’t played a full season in almost a half-decade and is recovering from an MCL injury at the time of this deal.

Securing a king’s ransom for both was never a given. The Nets got it anyway. Including the Irving blockbuster, Brooklyn’s haul amounts to Bridges, Crowder, Johnson, Spencer Dinwiddie, Dorian Finney-Smith, five unprotected first-round picks, one first-round swap and two second-rounders.

This doesn’t quite cancel out the opportunity cost of the James Harden trade tree. The Nets have essentially turned Jarrett Allen, Caris LeVert, three firsts (2022, 2024, 2026) and four swaps (2021, 2023, 2025, 2027) into Ben Simmons, Seth Curry, Philadelphia’s 2023 first-round pick and Philadelphia’s 2027 first-round pick (top-eight protection through 2028). That’s not ideal.

At the same time, Brooklyn now has 11 first-round picks in its possession. And it’s bound to get more if it fields calls—by the time you read this or over the offseason—on some combination of its many inbound players. The Nets could also look to remain competitive with their hodgepodge of good-not-great talent, a la the pre-deadline Utah Jazz from this season, in hopes of minimizing the value of the picks they’re sending to Houston. And given how well Bridges has shot off the dribble in recent weeks, we shouldn’t discount the possibility they just acquired a 26-year-old who’s tracking toward second-best-player-on-a-title-contender material.

So many different avenues are now open to the Nets—flexibility and possibility that weren’t available before. That is, unequivocally, spectacular under the circumstances. Their lone potential demerit: opting for a player-heavy, pick-light package in the Irving blockbuster rather than loading up on draft-equity-centric offers when they had to, on some level, know KD was on his way out.