The Internet’s Favourite Trades, Priced

Every day, thousands of people open a trade machine, build a deal that sends their team’s worst contract to a rival for two good players and a pick, and post it with a title like “this actually helps both teams.” We are, all of us, sick. I include myself.

Fanspo, one of the most popular of these machines, ranks the proposals by community vote. So we took the 20 highest-rated trades posted there in the month to September 24 and ran every one through the Trade Lab, on the rosters as they stand now.¹ 9 of them couldn’t be priced: signings and waiver claims, sign-and-trades, and a trade with more teams than the Lab stages. That leaves 11.

How to read what follows. Players is what the players who change hands are worth to each roster, minutes and all. Picks is the draft capital, priced as if unprotected.² Title odds is the change in each team’s share of championship equity. Net is the sum, in today’s dollars. Every trade has a link that opens it in the Trade Lab, already staged, so you can check the work and then change it until it says what you wanted. And under each, the only question the comment section ever asks: who says no? The team the trade costs more than a million dollars, if any; how often trades graded like it actually left that team behind, because a grade is an average and not a promise; and, on the five I wrote about, whether I agree with the model.

Five that the model has strong feelings about

“Reshape” is doing a lot of work in that title. In this four-team deal Milwaukee comes out furthest behind by a distance: it sends out two first-round picks and more player value than it takes back. Brooklyn, again, is the team holding the picks when the music stops.

The title promises Orlando a Big Three. What it delivers is Julius Randle, in exchange for Jalen Suggs, Jamal Cain and a first-round pick, and the model thinks Orlando loses on both halves: the players it sends out are worth more than the one it gets, and then there’s the pick. Brooklyn would be thrilled. Brooklyn, it will turn out, is thrilled a lot this month.

The model’s favourite trade of the month, and it isn’t close. San Antonio swaps one wing for a much more valuable one and, as a contender, gets the biggest bump in title odds on this page. New Orleans gets Keldon Johnson and a second-round pick for Herbert Jones. If the Pelicans’ front office is reading this: please don’t.

A three-team trade in which the third team is essentially a notary. Charlotte wins, Minnesota loses by about the same amount, and Portland stamps the paperwork and goes home with Grant Williams, a second-round pick and a verdict of almost exactly zero.

Here is a trade that makes Indiana better and poorer at the same time. The Pacers get Devin Booker and the biggest projected jump in wins of any team on this page. They also hand over two first-round picks and three rotation players, and the picks are what sink it. Phoenix, meanwhile, would be getting worse on purpose, and the model thinks that is the correct move.

The rest of the list

The other 6 are below, each a click from the Trade Lab. I’ve left them without a verdict in prose, and the sides marked † are why: there, most of the net, or its sign, comes from how the Lab reshuffles the minutes of the players who didn’t move, which is the part of the model I trust least.³

So, should you be a general manager?

The pattern across the month is the pattern across every trade machine ever built: somebody gets the famous name, and somebody else gets “assets.” The model’s view is that the assets are real. In every one of the 8 trades above that moved real draft capital (the † sides aside), the team taking the most of it came out ahead. Build your own in the Trade Lab. It won’t let you win them all. It will tell you why.

Prices: the Trade Lab on current rosters, for a snapshot of Fanspo’s 20 top-rated proposals of the month, taken September 24, 2026. Wins are on this model’s own scale and dollars at the open-market price of a win; the method explains both.

1. Popularity is relative. The top proposal of the month, “5 Team Eastern Conference Blockbuster (Kevin Huerter to the Raps as well)”, had 12 votes. This is a niche hobby, and we are its most annoying members. ↩
2. Fanspo records protections; the Trade Lab prices a pick over its landing distribution and does not yet apply them, which flatters whoever receives a protected pick. ↩
3. For the curious: the Lab values a trade as the change in each whole roster, and part of that change is a residual from redistributing minutes around the new arrivals. On most trades it is small. On a few, notably a team at the fifteen-man limit taking on one more rotation player, it is large enough to flip the sign. See how the Lab works. ↩