Tuesday afternoon gave us our first stunner of the 2026 NBA trade deadline in the Jaren Jackson Jr. deal, and now, we have yet another blockbuster. Darius Garland is headed for the Los Angeles Clippers along with a second-round pick. James Harden is joining the Cleveland Cavaliers. It is one of the most surprising trade the NBA has given us since, well, last February, when the Dallas Mavericks sent Luka Dončić to the Los Angeles Lakers in the dead of night for Anthony Davis in a move so controversial it eventually got their general manager fired.
Just by virtue of the ages of the principle figures here, this trade will almost certainly be compared to that one. Part of what made the Dončić trade so unusual was that the Mavericks gave up a 25-year-old for a 31-year-old. Well, the age-gap here is even bigger. Harden is 36. Garland is 26.
So… is this deal as bad for Cleveland as that one was for Dallas? Or did the Cavaliers have more justifiable reasons for making their point guard swap? Let’s grade the deal below:
Cleveland Cavaliers: C
On first glance, this trade makes no sense for Cleveland. Rarely does it ever make sense to trade a 26-year-old for a 36-year-old. Garland is a homegrown All-Star who was critical to Cleveland’s 64-win season a year ago. The more you look at it, though, the more Cleveland’s logic starts to come into focus.
The Cavaliers have now had Garland in the building for seven years. They’ve seen him play 70 games just once, last season, which was ultimately ruined by a toe injury. That same toe injury lingered into this year. Garland has not played since Jan. 14, and while he had picked things up in the weeks before then, his season overall had been a mess. It is entirely possible that Cleveland simply looked at Garland and decided he was unlikely to remain healthy moving forward.
That was a significant problem for them in financial terms. They’re a second-apron team as is. Jarrett Allen gets more expensive on an extension next season. Donovan Mitchell will presumably re-sign on a supermax deal in the summer of 2027, and Evan Mobley got a Rose Rule max after winning Defensive Player of the Year last season. They simply were not equipped to continue paying Garland max money. He has two years left on his original max contract after this one, and he is eligible for an extension this offseason.
Cleveland could have waited things out. Maybe Garland would have stayed healthy in the playoffs. Maybe he would have been amenable to a pay cut. But we live in a world in which Trae Young just got cap dumped and Ja Morant is almost untradeable. The landscape just isn’t kind for small guards right now. The Cavaliers seemingly didn’t want to risk getting stuck with a max contract they didn’t want. Perhaps they could have gotten draft picks for Garland elsewhere, but that probably would have meant taking back bad money. With so much invested in winning this season, that wasn’t tenable.
So instead, they took a player who will probably make them better this season. For all of his foibles, James Harden is durable. He’s been a better player than Garland this season, and he’ll take a significant burden off of Donovan Mitchell’s shoulders to create every shot. Big men thrive next to Harden. Jarrett Allen and Evan Mobley are about to get some of the easiest shots of their life. Harden is bigger than Garland, so while he may not be a star defender, he’s easier to hide in the context of an overall scheme. And, most importantly, he’s cheaper. They make roughly the same money this season, but Harden only has next year left on his deal, and it’s only partially guaranteed for $13.3 million. Just given his age, he’s not going to command the sort of long-term money Garland would. Cleveland can now go for it this year and next and then reset its books in the summer of 2027, when Harden expires and Mitchell’s new deal begins.
So, yes, in a perfect world, you really shouldn’t trade a 26-year-old for a 36-year-old. Under the narrow circumstances that Cleveland found itself in, it’s defensible. The Cavaliers simply couldn’t score when Mitchell went to the bench. Now they can. They haven’t been able to rely on Garland to stay healthy. Harden tends to stay healthy. They’re holding their nose and hoping Harden doesn’t have another of his playoff collapses, but all things considered, they probably made this year’s team better and they got out of a contract they seemed to want no part of paying. Confusing as it looks on paper, it makes enough sense to take the plunge.
Los Angeles Clippers: A
All of those risks that the Cavaliers wanted to avoid with Garland apply to the Clippers. He might not be able to stay healthy. He might be overpaid on his contract. As a league, we might be moving away from small guards as centerpieces of championship teams. But this is an enormously simple calculation. The Clippers entered this week as a Play-In team with the NBA’s oldest roster and no control over their next four first-round picks. Their future was hopeless. It was just a matter of when Harden and Kawhi Leonard finally broke down.
Garland is not the salvation the other Los Angeles team got when it was handed Luka Dončić on a silver platter, but the principle is similar. The Lakers were old and going nowhere. Getting Dončić at least gave them direction, an early-prime player to build around as it figured out how to pivot from the last era into the next one. The Clippers badly needed something like that. Garland is their chance at it, and not only did they acquire him, they managed to get a draft pick in the process. That would have felt unthinkable earlier in the season. It wasn’t long ago when we assumed the price for Garland might be, say, a Trey Murphy-esque wing, or a package of several first-round picks. The Clippers got him for an older player who wasn’t long for their team anyway.
The financial risks to the Clippers are far lighter than they were to the Cavaliers. Los Angeles doesn’t have a Mobley or a Mitchell to pay. In fact, Garland is now one of only two players on the roster with a guaranteed contract in the summer of 2027 along with Ivica Zubac, their 28-year-old center. Neither player is equipped to be the best player on a contender, but both would be valuable supporting pieces for whoever that player turns out to be.
Los Angeles is fertile recruiting ground. The Clippers will have all of the financial flexibility they need to rebuild their roster. And as time passes — assuming the Aspiration investigation doesn’t lead to a severe punishment — they’ll start to regain access to future draft picks to trade. Eventually, the plan will presumably be to either sign a star to play next to Garland and Zubac or use their draft picks to trade for that player. That might not have been possible without Garland. You typically need some young talent in place to convince stars to play for you.
So it might not be the obvious home run the Lakers got in Dončić, but it’s about as straightforward a win as the Clippers could have reasonably hoped for. They have a future now, or at least a blueprint to build one. If it goes belly up, so what? The time in which Harden and Leonard could have led them to a championship had long passed. Whether they waived his partially guaranteed contract this summer or let his contract expire fully in 2027, the Clippers weren’t keeping much longer anyway. Turning him into someone who might be a cornerstone is an absolute no-brainer.
