NBA Trade Deadline: Every Timberwolves trade rumor from this week
By Ben Beecken
DeAndre Jordan
The Clippers were rumored to be considering a complete tear-down for the first few months of the season, and they finally took the first official step by shipping five-time All-Star Blake Griffin to the Detroit Pistons 10 days ago.
The player that everyone thought would be moved, even if Griffin wasn’t, is center DeAndre Jordan. And as of this writing, he’s still a member of the Los Angeles Clippers.
The first report that mentioned alleged Timberwolves interest in Jordan was from Gary Woelfel of the Racine Journal Times back in early December. (Woelfel all but doubled-down on the four teams he claims are hottest on the trail of Jordan earlier this week.) We covered it as a highly unlikely occurrence, as our own Jake Paynting identified that it would surely have to be a Gorgui Dieng/Cole Aldrich/Jazz first-round draft pick coming from Minnesota, and it remains unclear whether or not that would appeal to the Clippers.
Surely, L.A. is trying to stockpile picks and young players, and while a trade with Minnesota would net them a first-round pick, it’ll be a late first-rounder, and they would get back exactly zero young players. And to make matters even more tepid, the Clippers would have to take back Dieng’s contract, and while they reportedly like him as a player, the price tag is surely too high for a team that just got out from under Griffin’s mammoth deal.
Unless there’s a third-team involved, it’s extremely difficult to see the trigger being pulled on Jordan-to-the-Wolves. The Clippers will surely have better offers, and while the Wolves are right to have interest in the best defensive center in the league, it’d be mildly shocking if Tom Thibodeau and Scott Layden pulled this one off.