It’s been clear since the news first broke obscenely early Saturday morning, Sam Presti had found himself facing a fleeting chance at a record haul for his star player, Paul George, who he re-signed less than 12 months prior.
Exactly how fleeting the chance was may be clear now.
While hosting the ESPN’s “Brian Windhorst & The Hoop Collective,” Jackie MacMullan laid out a timeline for Paul George’s trade request during a conversation about player empowerment with agent and Las Vegas Summer League founder Warren LeGarie.
… and then Paul George, in the 11th hour, requesting a trade and giving Sam Presti exactly 48 hours to do it, very interesting also.
MacMullan doesn’t return to George’s request, but she did bring up the topic and the 48-hour timeline during an ESPN Summer League broadcast this week.
In the early reporting, the timeline was left fuzzier. ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne reported, “in the middle of the week, (George) went to Oklahoma City general manager Sam Presti and asked for a trade — to the Clippers.” She tweeted he asked for a trade “within the last few days.”
If true, the logical next step is to question what leverage George had to force a trade so quickly? Under contract for two more years before reaching a player option in the summer of 2021, his biggest threat would be to go public — the Jimmy Butler Method — but even that likely wouldn’t force the hand of the measured Presti before training camp, when he could become a true distraction.
What Presti might have felt was the pressure to take advantage of an offer that would evaporate immediately if Kawhi Leonard picked the Lakers. If Leonard was going to decide on a landing spot by the weekend, and Oklahoma City needed George to seal the deal, Presti could have looked at his offer — five first-round draft picks (four unprotected), two pick swaps, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Danilo Gallinari — and figured he’d never get that type of offer for George alone.
As Shelburne put it at the day the trade went down: “For Presti, it was a chance to make something good out of a bad situation while he still had leverage.”
