Early returns on James Harden, Jonathan Kuminga and the biggest trade deadline moves

It’s been a month since the 2026 NBA trade deadline, which might not be quite enough time to find out whether my Winners and Losers column was completely wrong, but does seem like enough time to take stock of the early returns on some of the bigger moves of what was a historically busy transactional period.

Since some of the bigger names on the move — Trae Young, Anthony Davis, Darius Garland, Kristaps Porziņġis, Ivica Zubac, et al. — have either yet to play or just returned to the fold, we’ll have to reserve judgment on how they’re fitting in. (Although, for what it’s worth, Trae sure seems to be bought-in enough to defend his new teammates!) Let’s take a spin through some of those who have suited up, though, starting with the only former MVP to (once again) find his way to a new destination:

James Harden, Cleveland Cavaliers

God bless the honeymoon stage: The Cavaliers are 9-3 since trading for Harden and have gone 8-1 with him in the lineup, outscoring opponents by 35 points in his 297 minutes of floor time and continuing to thrive even as he plays through a fractured thumb in his non-shooting right hand.

The individual numbers aren’t quite as gaudy as we’ve come to expect from the 11-time All-Star: 19.1 points, 7.9 assists and 5.1 rebounds in 33 minutes per game. But Harden’s shooting 45.6% from 3-point range, getting to the foul line about six times per 36 minutes — a rate that, history tells us, will likely increase — and providing a just-what-the-doctor-ordered jolt to Cleveland’s offense. He’s isolating less and moving faster, dropping his usage rate from his customary superstar level (31.3% in L.A. this season) down to a more complementary, second-banana tier (23.5% thus far in Cleveland). It’s working: The Cavs are scoring 122.5 points per 100 non-garbage-time possessions with him on the floor — a rate of offensive efficiency that would lead the NBA over the course of the full season.

Long one of the NBA’s premier pick-and-roll facilitators, Harden predictably wasted no time in developing a rapport with center Jarrett Allen. He’s assisted on 21 of the screen-and-dive big man’s 66 baskets during their shared floor time, lofting lobs, slinging slick pocket passes and delivering on-point entries to reward Allen for rolling hard to the rim, establishing deep position in the paint, and making himself a threat lurking along the baseline:

While spoon-feeding Allen — and off-ball shooters Sam Merrill and Jaylon Tyson, for whom he’s already set up 21 combined 3-pointers — represents an important slice of Harden’s playmaking responsibilities, Job No. 1 for the new arrival is to make life easier on incumbent superstar Donovan Mitchell. The early returns there are promising: While Mitchell has yet to shoot the ball particularly well while sharing the floor with Harden, going just 4-for-27 from 3-point land, his overall shot quality, the share of his attempts that come at the basket and the share of those up-close tries that have been assisted are all up significantly with Harden on the floor, according to PBP Stats.

The general idea behind the deal was simple: Adding Harden to Mitchell should both make the Cavs better when they’re both on the floor and allow for a staggered rotation ensuring that they’ve always got an elite shot creator on the floor. Through the first seven games in which they’ve both appeared, Cleveland has blitzed opponents by 11 points-per-100 when Mitchell and Harden play together and by 23.2 points-per-100 in Mitchell-solo minutes, with Harden-alone lineups getting outscored by a single point in 98 minutes. Blow the opposition’s doors off for most of the game and tread water for the rest of it, and you’re probably going to be a pretty damn good team — which is precisely what the Cavs have looked like since their big trade-deadline swing.

Which, we should remember, wasn’t their only bit of deadline business.

Keon Ellis and Dennis Schröder, Cleveland Cavaliers

Turns out maybe there was a good reason why half the league reportedly wanted to get into the Keon Ellis business:

Since coming over from Sacramento, Ellis has rolled up 19 steals, 15 blocks and 33 deflections in just 252 minutes of work off the bench, during which the Cavs have outscored their opponents by 41 points. With him on the floor, Cleveland has forced a turnover on 19% of opponents’ offensive possessions (a rate that would lead the league for the full season) and has allowed just 112.2 points-per-100 (right in line with No. 5-ranked Houston’s full-season mark).

Whether Ellis can consistently knock down the open 3s he gets (he’s just 11-for-36 from deep in Cleveland so far) and continue to serve as a ball-mover and when-necessary complementary playmaker (a very nice 21-to-8 assist-to-turnover ratio with the Cavs) will likely determine how much head coach Kenny Atkinson will be able to rely on him come the postseason. If he can keep opponents honest offensively, that penchant for creating disaster on the defensive end could be a huge boon for Cleveland’s chances of making a deep playoff run.

“Unique, unique player,” Atkinson said after a recent win over the red-hot Hornets, according to Danny Cunningham of The Inside Shot. “Sometimes he gets his deflection and you don’t even see how it happened. Like, his hands are so fast, you don’t see how he got the deflection. Then he’s a quick jumper off the floor to get contests. He’s obviously got good length. Man, what a unique player, really. Game changer.”

Schröder can be one of those, too, both with his ability to provide instant offense off the bench — to wit: his 15-point, five-assist performance in Tuesday’s win over the East-leading Pistons — and his work as something of a defensive change-up at the point of attack. Or, maybe, more of a fastball: The well-traveled German has picked up opposing offensive players in the backcourt and pressed the length of the floor on nearly 15% of Cleveland’s defensive possessions since joining the team, according to Synergy.

Ramping up the pressure doesn’t always produce the desired result; in fact, Cavs opponents have scored more than 1.1 points per possession with Schröder pressing so far, well below Cleveland’s full-season defensive efficiency mark. It’s a long game, though, and Atkinson and Co. saw first-hand last postseason just how valuable length-of-the-floor pressure can be in wearing down opposing ball-handlers when the Indiana Pacers used it on the Cavs in the second round. Having Schröder — whose full-court hectoring as a member of the Pistons made Jalen Brunson work overtime in the opening round last spring — and Ellis on hand to pick up the full 94 feet puts another arrow in the Cavaliers’ quiver.

Jaren Jackson Jr., Utah Jazz

Jackson logged just 72 minutes across three games in a Jazz uniform before being shut down to undergo season-ending knee surgery; we’re not going to draw any grand, sweeping conclusions from that microscopic sample. We’ll just note that Utah outscored its opponents by 48 points in those 72 minutes, that the early defensive returns on big-ball lineups featuring JJJ and Lauri Markkanen alongside a center looked promising, and that we’re eager to see a healthy — and presumably actually-trying-to-compete — Utah team next season … if only to find out whether they can cheer head coach Will Hardy up.

Kevin Huerter, Detroit Pistons

Rather than push a lot of chips into the middle in pursuit of a big swing aimed at addressing the lack of bankable shooting on a roster that ranks 28th in made 3-pointers, 27th in 3-point attempts and 25th in 3-point percentage, Detroit flipped about-to-enter-restricted-free-agency guard Jaden Ivey to Chicago in exchange for Huerter — a 37% career 3-point shooter with playoff experience from his time in Atlanta and Sacramento.

The eight-year vet’s season-long struggles with his shot have continued with the Pistons, though, as he’s missed nine of his first 10 triple tries. Those early misfires, combined with a strong and entrenched perimeter rotation for the East’s No. 1 seed, have led to limited opportunities: Huerter has seen the floor in just five of his 11 games as a Piston, and has topped 15 minutes just once.

“He’s in a difficult spot. It’s not his fault,” Pistons head coach J.B. Bickerstaff told reporters last week. “Our guys have been playing well, so trying to find somebody who doesn’t deserve to play to give him minutes isn’t going to be always easy. […] We believe in his ability. I just gotta find a way to balance his opportunity versus what the other guys have earned.”

If Bickerstaff finds that balance, and Huerter rewards it by rediscovering the long-range stroke he’s shown for most of his career, he could be a valuable bench piece for a Pistons team intent on making a long playoff run. For now, though, we’ll grade this one “incomplete.”

Jared McCain, Oklahoma City Thunder

In fairness, who among us could have foreseen McCain — who’d looked like a Rookie of the Year favorite before suffering a season-ending meniscus tear, and missing the start of his sophomore season after tearing a ligament in the thumb on his shooting hand — starting to look much better once he got a steadier stream of minutes, touches and opportunities in Oklahoma City?

[looks down, puts finger to earpiece]

Sorry — I’m hearing “everyone.” The answer to that question, apparently, is that everyone could have foreseen that. Even the dummies!

Injuries to top facilitators Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Jalen Williams and Ajay Mitchell left a shot-creation void in the Thunder’s backcourt, and McCain has quickly set about filling it, averaging 11.9 points in 19.2 minutes per game, shooting 54% on 2-pointers, 42% on triples and 90% from the foul line. After spending large chunks of the first half of the season stuck behind Tyrese Maxey, VJ Edgecombe and Quentin Grimes, parked in the corner and/or in Nick Nurse’s doghouse, McCain seems to be relishing the chance to stretch his legs a bit, moving more with and without the ball and has sprinted out en route to scoring 20 or more points three times in his first 12 games with the Thunder.

It’s reasonable to be skeptical that McCain will stay this hot and this productive if and when the Thunder’s perimeter corps gets healthier and his opportunities dwindle. If nothing else, though, this smooth start to his tenure in Oklahoma City has offered evidence that the prospect that McCain appeared to be didn’t just disappear; the high-level movement shooter who can run a pick-and-roll, knock down pull-ups from the midrange and get to the paint to finish on the interior is still in there.

Dudes like that can be awfully valuable weapons — especially on cost-controlled rookie-scale contracts. It’s possible that Philly flips the draft compensation McCain returned into something bigger and better come the offseason. Right now, though, it feels equally possible that McCain could play a significant role in the Thunder’s attempt to repeat as NBA champions — and the just-turned-22-year-old could wind up making the Sixers regret the choice to move him for a long, long time.

Jonathan Kuminga, Atlanta Hawks

As with JJJ in Utah, three games is obviously not enough time to draw real conclusions about Kuminga’s fit and future with the Hawks. I will say, though: It’s been a pretty friggin’ cool three games.

Kuminga has opened his Atlanta account with alacrity: 64 points in 80 minutes, two 20-point performances in three games, shooting 16-for-22 inside the arc and 5-for-9 beyond it, generating more than seven free throws a night. That isn’t particularly surprising, though; the 6-foot-8 über-athlete’s always been able to get buckets when given minutes, touches and a runway to the rim. The more noteworthy — and potentially encouraging — part is what else he’s shown his new club in the early going.

“The things we talked about as a team, clearly it was a focal point for [us],” Hawks coach Quin Snyder told reporters after Kuminga’s emphatic debut. “Playing with the pass, as you heard me say it since October, and [Kuminga] really demonstrated that right away, to the point where I told him, ‘It’s OK to shoot.’ But he let himself get into the game and got connected with his teammates, and just let the game come to him. […] I think that shows a lot of maturity on his part, and shows a lot of kind of how he feels about the group.”

Kuminga won’t continue to make two-thirds of his shots, but if he continues attacking while working to make more of an impact in the other facets of the game — tracking back on the defensive glass, using his size and athleticism to body up opposing scorers, sprinting out in transition, moving the ball and his body quickly in the half-court, etc. — he’ll have a chance to make a real impact on a Hawks team that, perpetual midness notwithstanding, is in line for a spot in the play-in tournament (and just 2.5 games out of sixth in the East). Keep that up, and he could earn himself a spot alongside Jalen Johnson, Dyson Daniels and Nickeil Alexander-Walker (and possibly ahead of struggling former No. 1 overall pick Zaccharie Risacher) in Atlanta’s core — and, along with it, perhaps a longer and more lucrative deal than the one he had to grind out in restricted free agency last summer.

Ayo Dosunmu, Minnesota Timberwolves

The Wolves had three goals at the 2026 trade deadline:

Add another ball-handler who would represent an improvement, both right now and in the future, over Rob Dillingham;
Add another source of reserve scoring punch who could ease Minnesota’s overreliance on Naz Reid and Bones Hyland for points off the bench;

(You can add “shed enough salary to get under the first apron while still having enough financial wiggle room to add someone on the buyout market” as a fourth goal, if you want. But it’s not the Comedy Rule of Fours, y’know?)

Dosunmu — a bigger, stronger, more defensively capable guard than Dillingham, who also gets to the rim more and shoots the 3 better — represented a tidy path to achieving those first two goals. And while Minnesota hasn’t been better overall with Dosunmu on the floor, getting outscored by 41 points in his first 236 minutes in town — a crooked number largely resulting from the Wolves getting torched by a god-mode Kawhi Leonard in his first appearance, and blown out by the Sixers without Reid or a suspended Rudy Gobert — he’s shown signs of being able to offer the sort of off-the-bench bump that the Wolves will need to go toe-to-toe and blow-for-blow with the best out West.

The 26-year-old is averaging 11.4 points, 2.9 assists and 2.0 rebounds in 26.2 minutes per game as a Wolf, shooting 58.5% on 2s, 37% on 3s and 92% from the charity stripe. He’s driving to the cup just under seven times per 36 minutes of floor time and taking 47% of his shots within 4 feet of the basket — a necessary source of rim pressure for a team where nobody but Anthony Edwards and Julius Randle really takes it to the rack.

Dosunmu gives head coach Chris Finch another defensive option on the perimeter — one quick and active enough to stick with movement shooters like Corey Kispert and Klay Thompson, physical enough to body up the likes of Jrue Holiday and VJ Edgecombe, and disciplined enough to pull shifts on stars like Jamal Murray. His combination of quickness, shooting, size — 6-4 and 200 pounds with a 6-10.5-inch wingspan — and physicality also opens up the possibility of Finch rolling out three-guard lineups with Edwards and Donte DiVincenzo against the right matchups. It’s still early days, but in 55 minutes, lineups featuring that trio have outscored opponents by 19 points, scoring at an elite level despite not shooting well from 3-point range.

Finch clearly already trusts Dosunmu: During a vital game last weekend against the rival Nuggets, when the coach tightened up to a playoff rotation and went just eight deep, the newcomer was one of the three reserves he tapped, chipping in 9 points, 4 assists, 2 rebounds and 2 steals in 21 minutes off the bench in what could prove to be a critical win in the tightly packed Western Conference standings.

“It is a real weapon,” Gobert said of the contributions of Dosunmu, Reid and Hyland in the Denver win, according to Dane Moore. “I think championship teams need bench. And I think we do have a really good bench now.”

Whether the Wolves have enough to push past the conference finals berths of the last two springs and break through to the NBA Finals remains to be seen. But Dosunmu — who made just one postseason appearance during his tenure in Chicago — sounds eager to meet the challenge of helping them get there.

“I want to be labeled as a guy who plays in the playoffs, a guy who’s a winning player, a guy who does whatever it takes to help the team win,” Dosunmu told reporters last month. “So now that I have the opportunity, don’t take it for granted.”

Coby White, Charlotte Hornets

A left calf strain kept the Hornets from finding out just what they got in White for the first three weeks after the trade. (It also led to them keeping one of the second-round picks they’d dealt for him, so hey: no harm, no foul.) In the early going, though, he’s been a high-volume, high-level pick-and-roll ball-handler; a shot creator adept at both driving to the basket to pressure the rim and stopping on a dime to pull up and nail a jumper; a facilitator capable of setting the table for teammates; and a credible accelerant capable of keeping the pedal smashed to the metal for one of the league’s highest-octane offenses.

All of which is to say: White’s been pretty much precisely what the Hornets had hoped … because he’s been kind of like having another LaMelo Ball to put on the court when you take the first one off of it.

After a sterling 17-point, six-assist outing in Charlotte’s emphatic, 118-89 beatdown of the Celtics in Boston on Wednesday, White’s now averaging 13.5 points and 4.3 assists against 1.3 turnovers in 18.3 minutes per game off the Hornets’ bench, shooting 37.5% from 3-point land and 77.8% from the free-throw line. In the four games in which he’s played (all wins), the Hornets have won White’s 73 minutes by 42 points — and, most excitingly, are scoring a scorching 131.4 points-per-100 when he’s been on the floor without LaMelo.

Even with the emergence of rookie sniper Kon Knueppel and a healthy bounce-back season from Brandon Miller, those are the minutes that have been the most challenging for Charlotte this season: The Hornets’ offense has gone from the top of the pops to the depths of the dumps whenever Ball hits the bench, even if head coach Charles Lee puts his other two bright young wings on the floor in an attempt to stop the leaks. If White can keep serving as the Flex Tape that keeps that from happening, a Hornets team that has been as good as anybody in the NBA since Christmas becomes even better — and, potentially, all the more dangerous for some unlucky top seed come the first round of the Eastern Conference playoffs next month.

Luke Kennard, Los Angeles Lakers

The top-line takeaway to the start of Kennard’s tenure with the Lakers is that it’s looked broadly the same as his tenure everywhere else. He’s making 3-pointers at an elite clip (50%) while not taking as many as you’d like (just under five per 36 minutes), and his team scores really well in his minutes (125 points-per-100, which would rank No. 1 in the NBA for the full season) and defends really badly with him on the floor (118.5 points-per-100, which would rank 25th). Obla-di, obla-da, life goes on, brah.

There is this one thing, though. While everyone knows that Kennard is an outdoor cat, perpetually stationed beyond the 3-point line and almost never coming inside the arc, what his first 11 games as a Laker presuppose is … maybe he isn’t?

Kennard has actually taken more 2-pointers (37) than 3s (32) thus far in L.A., and he’s made a crisp and clean 70% of them. He’s looking to be aggressive off the catch, beating the sort of aggressive closeouts you get when everyone knows you make half your 3s, with a determination to take a couple of hard dribbles toward the rim in pursuit of paydirt. He’s also shown a good sense of how to remain threatening on a play, opportunistically relocating and hunting backdoor cuts, with the understanding that, if you just keep moving with purpose, there’s a really good chance that Luka Dončić and LeBron James will find you.

It’s reasonable to wonder whether Kennard’s L.A. story will also unfold in a similar fashion to his stints elsewhere, with his defensive shortcomings and relative shyness about letting it fly at a rate commensurate with his field goal percentage leading his coach to move him to the fringes of the playoff rotation. If Kennard keeps up the aggression, though, while continuing to scorch the nets from wherever he shoots, maybe this time around he’ll have a chance to write a different ending.

Nikola Vučević, Boston Celtics

Vučević hasn’t been quite the Al Horford Lite stretch-5 option some among the Celtics faithful hoped he’d be after arriving from Boston, making fewer than half of his shots seven times in 11 games with the C’s and shooting just 3-for-12 on pick-and-pop 3-pointers, according to Synergy. On balance, though, he’s been a useful complementary piece in Joe Mazzulla’s center rotation, kicking in 11.4 points, 7.8 rebounds and 2.0 assists in 23.4 minutes per game while offering a change-of-pace behind starting center/energetic revelation Neemias Queta. Opponents are shooting just 47.3% against him at the rim thus far in Boston, according to Second Spectrum — a wild and almost certainly unsustainable rim-protection blip, but one that the Celtics will gladly take for as long as it lasts.

Even with Vooch posting a .532 true shooting percentage that would be his worst in nearly a decade, the Celtics are winning his minutes handily — all you can ask for in a backup big man. The occasional 28-and-11 might be tougher to come by in the postseason, where he won’t be seeing the moribund Nets:

If he does manage to swing a playoff game at some point over the next couple of months, though, the Celtics will … well, they won’t build a statue or retire his jersey, because they’ve already got, like, a ton of those, and they have to conserve space and availability. But it’ll sure make the deadline pickup look awfully good!

Jose Alvarado, New York Knicks

It was a mortal, no-doubt-about-it, absolute-lead-pipe lock that Alvarado — a diminutive Puerto Rican dude from Brooklyn who has carved out an NBA career by leading with his heart, his chin, his hustle and his defense — would be an instant fan favorite at Madison Square Garden. Immediately coming up with a pair of steals and a pair of 3s to beat the hated Celtics …

… and then doubling down with a 26-point, five-steal masterclass in a blowout win over the also-hated Sixers …

… only further solidified the 27-year-old’s claim to the hearts and minds of Knicks partisans. New York has gone 7-4 with Alvarado in the lineup, playing even or better in his minutes in seven of 11 appearances and outscoring opponents by nearly 21 points-per-100 with him on the floor, all told — monster stuff for a 6-foot backup point guard.

Alvarado has been his customarily disruptive defensive self, notching 16 steals and 33 deflections since his arrival — both team highs — while holding opponents to 42.5% shooting in his minutes, during which New York’s defense has clamped down at an elite level. He has also ably stepped into the ball-handling void behind top table-setter Jalen Brunson, posting a 4.2-to-1 assist-to-turnover ratio and quickly developing some chemistry with star big man Karl-Anthony Towns — a critical component of second-unit, non-Brunson lineups. (Head coach Mike Brown has been willing to experiment with smaller looks in which Brunson and Alvarado share the floor, too; New York is plus-29 in 85 such minutes, scoring and defending like gangbusters.)

Everything about Alvarado’s game, presence and swagger screams MSG folk hero; actually cementing that status will require him coming up with some big moments in the postseason, where his shaky jumper — just 29.4% from 3-point range since coming over from New Orleans — could make him a tricky fit. But Leon Rose and Co. bet that Alvarado’s ability to defend larger than his stature, distribute with a steady pair of hands, and change games through sheer force of will would make him the kind of playoff riser who could help the Knicks make their first trip to the Finals since 1999. This much seems clear: If Alvarado falls short of that mark, it won’t be for lack of effort.

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