Trade relationships in the NBA
At the Sloan conference a couple years back, a couple of the panelists made the point that the trade market is not an open market. There is not a public bid / ask price for each player. A lot of trades get done because of the relationships between team executives. Some teams trust each other and do deals, others do not.
I thought it would be interesting to create a table that illustrates the relationships between the various teams and how often they do deals.
Over the past 10 years, the most common trade partners have been:
1) Rockets - Grizzlies
2) Blazers - Nets
3) Celtics - cavs, hornets - rockets, blazers - nuggets, heat - timberwolves, and a few othersThere doesn’t seem to be much intra-conference trading bias.
One interesting note is that almost nobody in the Pacific Division trades with another Pacific Division team. See all of the white in the bottom right of the chart.
Check out the chart here ( each cell contains the # of trades ), you can adjust the date ranges to update the chart: The trade visualization
