“Who do we pay?” and “Who can we get to play with them?”

Shell out for the right guys, get the proper two or three sidekicks and prosper. Sure, there are a dozen other roster spots to worry about, but what I just described is 90 percent of the challenge in building a winner.

Thanks, Captain Obvious, that sounds easy, but the answers are perhaps less obvious than they used to be. This past weekend’s shock trade of Luka Dončić to the Los Angeles Lakers is proof of concept on that front, showing how complicated these questions have become in an era when supermax extensions can run six years beyond the current season and virtually guarantee apron issues within the collective bargaining agreement every year. It’s a high-wire act: Pay the wrong guys, or put the wrong surrounding parts around them, and things can start looking bleak awfully quickly.

Ergo, the first words of this column. I went to San Antonio this weekend to see the Spurs play the Milwaukee Bucks and Miami Heat, in what seemed a veritable Bermuda Triangle of 2025 deadline rumors, at least until the Luka news spewed forth from my laptop like fiery hot lava when I got back to my hotel Saturday night.

These questions were the crux of every discussion I had while I was there. To wit: Is De’Aaron Fox a guy you feel good about paying? Is he the right guy to put next to Victor Wembanyama? If not, is somebody better coming along to market like this one, and if so, when? Those considerations dwarf any other analysis about what picks to give up or which players to include as matching salary.

What’s true for Fox applies equally to the other bold-face (or Bigface) names you’re hearing about this week. Remember, part of the whole mess in Miami with Jimmy Butler is that the Heat concluded they weren’t comfortable paying him beyond next season.

The same applies to Zach LaVine, another All-Star who got paid back in the day but for whom, in our current CBA era, it took the Bulls nearly two years to find a home. Even at that, it took a stealth salary dump to land him on another roster. (Enjoy that $36 million of Zach Collins and Kevin Hurter next year, Chicago.)

But the biggest example, by far, is still Dallas. The Mavericks were so worried that a supermax contract for Dončić would be an example of paying the wrong guy that they opted to pay Anthony Davis instead, even though Dončić led them to the NBA Finals last year and is unquestionably one of the league’s five best players when at full strength.

While many neutral observers, including yours truly, don’t think highly of that bet at the moment, the fact the Mavs were considering this is a brave new world on its own. Depending on your perspective, it was some combination of daring, dangerous or daft, but zoom the camera out for a minute and another conclusion is possible: The era of “Just Pay the Guy” may be coming to an end.

That’s true even if some of the explanatory logic for this particular deal seems specious. You can’t simultaneously say that teams were lining up around the corner to poach Dončić for nothing in free agency in 2026 and also he’d be an untradeable liability on a supermax signed in summer 2025 — even if the move to trade a player of Dončić’s age and capability in the absence of a trade demand is basically unprecedented.

Beyond Dončić, though, it’s a larger theme as we head into trade deadline week, a theme that is likely heavily impacting other trade considerations as well. For instance, part of the logic for both the Spurs and Kings this week doesn’t just involve paying Fox and LaVine; it’s whether they have enough left in the cupboard to pay other players in addition to Fox and LaVine.

San Antonio gave up what is effectively three first-round picks and five second-round picks in the trade, one of which is going to the Bulls. That’s a heck of a price, especially when two of the picks are unprotected. Nonetheless, the Spurs managed to acquire Fox without sacrificing all their fine china, partly by amassing an impressive draft-pick hoard and partly by betting on themselves via including their own 2027 first-round pick in the deal.

As a result, the Spurs still own an unprotected 2025 pick from the free-falling Atlanta Hawks, another unprotected Hawks pick in 2027, an unprotected pick from either Dallas or Minnesota in 2030 and unprotected swaps with the Hawks in 2026 and the Kings in 2031.

The whole point of making these deals is to live to fight another day and also build their teams further. San Antonio, for instance, can sign Fox to a four-year, $228 million extension this summer. (He is no longer eligible for a supermax by being traded, even if he makes All-NBA.) The Spurs could possibly top that up an extra $9 million by using cap room to do a renegotiate-and-extend. However, this would seemingly be a poor use of the team’s resources since the Spurs don’t project to have space once we account for their two first-round picks, and they would forfeit their nontaxpayer midlevel exception.

Either way, even after paying Fox and Wembanyama (who surely will get a max extension of his own in the summer of 2027), San Antonio’s books are clean enough, and its assets tempting enough, to freely pursue a third star. That, ultimately, was probably the argument that won the day in San Antonio. You can question paying a speed merchant into his 30s, but the Spurs are set up in such a way that Fox doesn’t necessarily have to be their second-best player.

That wasn’t the case in Sacramento, which is what made that deal more logical from the Kings’ end. LaVine makes more than Fox, but the Kings removed a pain point by sending out Huerter and added enough draft equity and floated below the luxury-tax line (enough to use their nontaxpayer and biannual exceptions and still take on money in trades) to be a player in future deals.

No, LaVine isn’t as good as Fox, but he’s having a good year and is still in his prime. Sacramento also bought significant flexibility in a trade it likely had to make to recoup value on its star guard. If the Kings’ top-12 protected pick to Atlanta conveys this year, the Kings will be able to put six firsts into a trade come June (I’m not suggesting they should do this), and their salary structure allows them to construct matching salary fairly easily.

• The Bulls can save face that they got a first-round pick for LaVine, but it’s closer to reality to say they didn’t get anything at all for him and instead got their 2025 first-round pick back in the salary dump of Huerter and Collins that accompanied this deal.

• Sacramento is now paper-thin at point guard and center, has a $16 million trade exception for Huerter, has $11 million in wiggle room below the tax line and has an open roster spot. Do the math: The Kings might not be done. Armed with five new second-round picks, look for them in smaller deals.

• Chicago dropped roughly $10 million from next year’s cap sheet and, depending on where that draft pick falls, is now looking at roughly $30 million in cap room this coming summer. That amount goes away if the Bulls max re-sign one or both of Josh Giddey and Lonzo Ball and use their nontaxpayer midlevel exception, but the Bulls do have more flexibility. Even if the Bulls don’t end up with oodles of cap space, they also created a $17 million trade exception by taking Huerter into the existing trade exception from the DeMar DeRozan deal.

• One not-uninterested party in the events of the weekend: the Hawks. Atlanta is owed a top-12 protected 2025 first-round pick from Sacramento, one that would likely convey to the Hawks provided the Kings make the Play-In Tournament. Meanwhile, the Hawks also own an unprotected pick from the Lakers in 2025; whether the Dončić trade improves or worsens the fate of that selection is an interesting story for the season’s second half.

• Dallas’ roster seems to be unbalanced after the trade, and it could result in more deals from the Mavs. The arrival of Max Christie would seemingly call into question the future of Quentin Grimes, who is a restricted free agent after the season. With Christie signed for three more years at reasonable money, it wouldn’t be shocking to see Dallas look to move Grimes for either draft equity or a bigger wing.

• Up front, meanwhile, P.J. Washington, Daniel Gafford and Dereck Lively II will have to split up a much smaller pool of frontcourt minutes now that the newly arrived Davis will be playing 35 or so a night. Lively is out right now, so this could become more of an offseason problem, but Dallas would seemingly benefit from trading frontcourt talent for another ballhandler.

• Kyrie Irving is a low-key winner here, right? He has a player option for $44 million this summer, and the Mavs effectively committed to him as the team’s go-to guard. In keeping with my earlier theme: How far out do they want to pay him given his age (he turns 33 next month) and injury history? A three-year deal that lines him up contractually with Davis through 2028 might be the sweet spot.

• Meanwhile, the Lakers desperately need a rim-running center to pair with Dončić’s pick-and-roll wizardry. L.A., however, has no significant expiring money to put into trades, and swapping out its lone remaining tradeable first-round pick (in 2031) feels expensive for the type of role and price point the Lakers are trying to fill. They’ll make calls, but this feels like it might be more of a summer project.

• The Lakers also need a defensive ace on the perimeter, as swapping out Davis and Christie for Dončić will make them extremely vulnerable on two levels: First, they have a bunch of slow guards, and second, they have no rim protection. What could go wrong? Getting Dončić was a no-brainer move, but the roster is far from optimized around him. This could take a minute to jell.

• Finally, score one for the anti-tankers: Chicago reacquiring its 2025 first-round pick, which was going to San Antonio if it fell outside the top 10, liberates the Bulls from having to drop into one of the league’s worst records to retain a lottery pick. While the Bulls still may possibly achieve that on their own, Chicago finished Sunday 10th in the Eastern Conference at 21-29, one game ahead of the Philadelphia 76ers for the final Play-In spot.

Required Reading