How Does the NBA Trade Deadline Work? Rules and Timing

The NBA trade deadline is one cutoff, at 3 p.m. Eastern time on a Thursday in early February, ten days before the All-Star Game in a normal season. A trade that has been agreed and reported to the league office by then can be completed. After it, a team cannot trade a player, a draft pick or anything else until its own season has ended. Free-agent signings, waivers and 10-day contracts all carry on. Trades stop, and under the collective bargaining agreement between the National Basketball Association and the players' union there is no second window, no waiver-trade period and no exception for injuries.

On February 8, 2018, the Cleveland Cavaliers showed what that cutoff concentrates. They traded six players in a single day and brought four back, in three separate deals: with the Lakers, with Utah and Sacramento, and with Miami. Then the clock reached 3 p.m. in New York and Cleveland could do no more. The group it had at that moment went to the NBA Finals four months later.

How the NBA trade deadline works: one cutoff at 3 p.m. Eastern

The rule is short. From the opening of the league year in July until the deadline, any two or more teams can trade with each other whenever they like, subject to the salary rules. From 3 p.m. Eastern on deadline day, none of them can, for as long as they are still playing.

• 3Hour of the cutoff, p.m. Eastern
• 10Days before the All-Star Game
• 7Future drafts a pick can be traded from
• 48Hours a released player spends on waivers

Fixed features of the deadline under the current collective bargaining agreement. The calendar date itself changes each year with the All-Star Game.

Three in the afternoon in New York is noon in Los Angeles and 1 p.m. in Denver. West Coast front offices finish their business before lunch. The cutoff applies to all 30 teams at the same instant, and no club gets an extension for any reason. A team with a game that night can find itself short-handed, because players named in a trade that has not yet been approved are held out by both sides.

By the deadline most teams have played around 50 of their 82 games and have about 30 left. That placement is deliberate. It is late enough for a front office to know what it has and early enough for a new arrival to matter.

What the deadline covers is everything that can be exchanged between teams. Player contracts. Draft picks, in any future year the rules allow. The draft rights to players who have been selected and never signed. Cash. If it moves from one club's books to another's, it is a trade, and it is frozen.

What it does not cover is the relationship between one team and one player. A team can still add someone who is unemployed or cut someone it no longer wants. Those are signings and waivers, and they are governed by different sections of the agreement with their own dates. Much of the confusion about what happens after the NBA trade deadline comes from treating the two categories as one.

How the date is set, and why it moved ahead of the All-Star break

Until 2017 the deadline was set by counting Thursdays into the regular season, which put it in the second half of February, a few days after the All-Star Game. In 2015 that was February 19. In 2017 it was February 23.

The trouble with that timing was the All-Star weekend itself. General managers gather in one city for it, and they talk. Rumors peaked while the league was trying to stage its showcase. On the night of the 2017 game in New Orleans, the Sacramento Kings agreed to send DeMarcus Cousins, who had just played in it, to the host city's own team. The deal broke within hours of the final buzzer.

Starting with the 2017-18 season the league moved the deadline forward to the Thursday ten days before the All-Star Game. The reasoning given at the time was practical: players traded just after the break were joining new teams at the exact moment practices and games resumed, with no time to learn anything. An earlier cutoff gives a traded player about two more weeks of games with his new club and the break itself to settle in and find somewhere to live.

Where the date lands

Because the All-Star Game is played on a Sunday in the middle of February, the deadline falls between about February 5 and February 11. The league publishes the date with the rest of its calendar before the season starts.

Two seasons broke the pattern, both because the calendar itself was disrupted. After the 2011 lockout delayed the season to Christmas Day, the deadline was pushed to March 15, 2012. And in 2020-21, when the season began in late December following the pandemic, it was March 25, 2021. The principle held in both cases: roughly three-fifths of the schedule played, the rest still to come.

A deadline that sits this early has a cost. With 30 games left and the play-in tournament keeping the ninth and tenth teams in each conference alive, many front offices do not yet know whether they are good. A team two games out of tenth place on deadline day has to decide whether to sell its best veteran, and the standings will not tell it the answer for another month. Since the 2017 change the league has left the timing alone.

What "done by the deadline" means: the trade call

Every February, reports of new trades keep appearing at 3:10, at 3:25, sometimes close to 4 p.m. Those deals were not made late. They were made on time and reported late, and the difference lies in how a trade becomes official.

Two general managers agreeing on the phone is not a trade. A trade exists when the league office has approved it, and approval happens on a conference call between the teams and the league office.

1. 1AgreementThe teams settle the players, picks, protections and cash. Nothing is binding yet.
2. 2Report to the leagueEach team notifies the league office of the agreed terms. On deadline day this must happen before 3 p.m. Eastern.
3. 3QueueIf several deals arrive at once, the league logs them in the order received and takes them one at a time.
4. 4Trade callThe league office goes through the terms and each team confirms them. Contracts, cash timing and reporting dates are checked.
5. 5ApprovalThe league confirms the deal complies with the salary cap and roster rules, and the trade is recorded as a transaction.
6. 6PhysicalsEach player reports to his new team and is examined. A failed physical can still undo the trade.

The standard approval sequence for an NBA trade. On deadline day the terms must reach the league office by 3 p.m. Eastern; the later steps can follow that afternoon.

On an ordinary day the call is brief for a simple deal and can run far longer for one with four teams and a dozen moving parts. Each club has a few people on the line. The league official goes through the terms and asks each side in turn whether it agrees. The players' contracts are reviewed, the date on which any cash will change hands is fixed, and the teams settle how long each player has to report and be examined.

On deadline day there are not enough hours for every call to finish by three. So the rule the league applies is about the terms, not the paperwork. The parameters of a deal have to be called in before the cutoff. Once they are, they are locked. The teams cannot improve the offer, swap one second-round pick for another or add a player at 3:15 because a different deal fell through. The league then works through its queue in order.

That is why news breaks after the deadline. A reporter learns at 3:20 of a trade that was phoned in at 2:57. And two teams still arguing over a protected pick at 2:59 do not get an extension.

Why the league checks every contract

The call is also where the league enforces its salary rules. Most NBA teams operate above the salary cap, which means they cannot simply absorb a contract. The salaries going out and coming in have to fall within set ratios, and those ratios tighten as a team's payroll rises. Our explainer on how NBA trade rules match salaries works through the arithmetic. A trade that fails the test by a few thousand dollars is not approved, which is why so many deadline deals include a player at the end of the bench whose only role is to make the numbers add up.

What freezes and what does not after the deadline

Trades stop. Almost nothing else does.

Transaction	Allowed after the deadline	Limit that applies
Trading players, draft picks, draft rights or cash	No	Frozen until the day after the team's last game
Signing a free agent to a standard contract	Yes	Through the end of the regular season
Waiving a player	Yes	A player waived after March 1 loses playoff eligibility elsewhere
Claiming a player off waivers	Yes	The claiming team takes on the existing contract
Signing a 10-day contract	Yes	Available from January 5 until late in the regular season
Signing a player to a two-way contract	Yes	Until early March
Converting a two-way player to a standard deal	Yes	Until the regular season ends; required for the playoffs
Agreeing a contract extension	Yes	Where the player is eligible for one

The week after the deadline is in fact one of the busiest of the year for signings, and the trades are the cause. A two-for-one deal leaves the receiving team a player over the limit and the sending team a player short. A three-for-one leaves a bigger hole. Clubs are required to carry a minimum number of players on standard contracts and are given only a short grace period to get back to it, so the first days after the deadline are full of small moves: a veteran waived to open a place, a free agent brought in on a deal that runs to the end of the season, a prospect promoted from the developmental league.

The tools teams use to refill a roster

The 10-day contract is the usual first step. It lets a team look at a player for ten days or three games, whichever is longer, at a prorated minimum salary, and a player can sign two of them with the same club before it has to commit for the rest of the season or let him go. The mechanics are in our guide to the NBA 10-day contract.

Two-way players are the other source. Each team has three of these slots for players who split time with its G League affiliate, as our piece on two-way contracts explains. They are not eligible for the playoffs. A team that wants one of them in April has to convert him to a standard contract before the regular season ends, and a roster place vacated at the deadline is often used for exactly that.

All of this operates inside the same roster limits that apply all year, which our guide to how many players are on an NBA roster sets out.

The second deadline behind it: March 1 and the buyout window

Three weeks or so after the trade deadline comes a date that matters nearly as much to contenders. It is March 1, and the league's name for it is the playoff eligibility waiver deadline.

The rule is this. A player who is waived by an NBA team on or before March 1 may sign with another team and play for it in the playoffs. A player waived after March 1 may sign with another team and play out the regular season, but he cannot appear in the postseason for anyone. The date attaches to the release. The signing itself can come later, any time up to the final day of the regular season.

That rule creates the buyout window. Consider a 34-year-old on a team going nowhere, in the last year of his contract. He was not traded at the deadline, perhaps because his salary was too large for a contender to match. He would like to play in May. His team would like to save some money and give his minutes to someone younger. So the two sides agree a buyout: he gives back part of what he is still owed, and the team waives him.

He then spends 48 hours on waivers, during which any team can claim him and inherit his full contract. For a player on a large salary that almost never happens. Once he clears, he is a free agent, and he signs with a contender for a prorated share of the minimum salary. The whole process is covered in our guide to the NBA buyout market.

Who the rule does not touch

March 1 restricts only players cut from NBA rosters. A free agent who has been unsigned all year, a player returning from a season overseas or someone called up from the G League on a standard contract can sign on the last day of the regular season and be eligible for Game 1.

The 2023 collective bargaining agreement cut into the buyout market from another direction. Teams whose payrolls are above the first luxury-tax apron may not sign a player who was waived during the season if his salary before the buyout was higher than the mid-level exception. The clubs with the most expensive rosters, which are generally the contenders, were the ones signing those veterans, and the rule was written to stop it. It has worked. Buyout season has become quieter, and the players who do move are cheaper ones.

The sequence is worth holding in mind as two filters. The trade deadline is the last day to add a player by giving something up. March 1 is the last day another team's player can be set free and still help a new club in the postseason.

Why most deals land in the final 48 hours

Teams can trade from July. The majority wait until February, and within February, until the last two days. In a busy year dozens of players change teams in deadline week, most of them in the last 48 hours.

Part of the explanation is ordinary negotiation. A seller has no reason to accept an offer on Monday when a better one might arrive on Thursday morning, and a buyer has no reason to raise its bid until it must. A deadline is what makes both sides stop bluffing.

The rest comes from three features of the league's economics.

Expiring contracts. A player in the last season of his deal is worth something beyond his play, because his salary vanishes from the books in July. A team trying to clear cap room for the summer wants expiring contracts coming in. A team that fears losing a player for nothing in free agency wants to get something for him first. Both motives have a hard stop in February, since it is the final chance to convert an expiring deal into anything.

The tax bill. The luxury tax is calculated on a team's payroll as it stands on the last day of the regular season. It does not matter what the payroll was in November. A team sitting a little above the tax line in January can avoid the tax altogether by trading away one modest salary before the deadline, and since the deadline is the last moment salary can be moved off the books by trade, that is when it happens. Every February includes a handful of deals in which a decent player and a second-round pick are sent to a team with cap room for nothing in return. They look pointless and can save an owner a great deal of money. The same end-of-season snapshot applies to the stricter penalties described in our explainer on the second apron.

Buyers and sellers. By February the standings have sorted most of the league into teams that expect a playoff run, teams that know they will not have one, and a group in the middle. The first group wants veterans now and will pay in draft picks. The second wants picks and young players and has veterans to offer. The middle group is the problem, and it has grown. Since the play-in began, ten teams in each conference finish the season with a route to the playoffs, and a front office in eleventh place can talk itself into buying.

There is a timing constraint that pushes in the same direction. A player a team acquires in a trade generally cannot be combined with other salaries in a second trade for roughly two months. A club that picks someone up in mid-January cannot package him with a teammate at the deadline. That makes early-season trades slightly costly in flexibility, one more reason to wait.

The dates that lead into it: December 15 and January 15

The trade market does not open in a meaningful way until the middle of December, whatever the calendar says, because until then a large share of the league's players cannot legally be moved.

1. 1December 15Most players who signed as free agents in the offseason become eligible to be traded.
2. 2January 5Teams may begin signing players to 10-day contracts.
3. 3January 10Contracts that were not fully guaranteed become guaranteed for the rest of the season.
4. 4January 15A second group becomes tradable: certain players who re-signed with their own teams for large raises.
5. 5Deadline Thursday3 p.m. Eastern, ten days before the All-Star Game. Trades stop.
6. 6March 1The last day a player can be waived and still be playoff-eligible with a new team.
7. 7Day after a team's final gameThat team may trade again.

Recurring dates in a standard NBA season. Where a date falls on a weekend the practical effect can shift by a day.

The December 15 rule exists to stop sign-and-flip arrangements. A free agent who signs a new contract cannot be traded for three months or until December 15, whichever comes later. Since most free agents sign in July, December 15 is the day on which dozens of players across the league all become available at once.

January 15 unlocks a smaller group. It applies to a player who re-signed with his previous team using its right to exceed the cap for its own free agents, received a raise above a set percentage, and whose team was over the cap. Those conditions describe a familiar type: the useful veteran kept on a big new contract. In some years one or two of them are among the more sought-after names, and they cannot be dealt until a month after everyone else.

Between the two comes a quieter date. Contracts that are not fully guaranteed lock in for the season on January 10, so a team has to decide in the first week of January whether a player at the end of its bench is worth paying through April. The ones released at that point are the first wave of the free agents that teams will sign after the deadline.

Players who sign later in the year carry their own three-month clock. A handful of others have a say in whether they move at all. A player with a no-trade clause can refuse any deal, though very few have had one. More commonly, a player on a one-year contract who would lose certain re-signing rights by being traded has the power to block it. That veto surfaces in a report or two most Februaries and has complicated more than one negotiation.

Draft picks as deadline currency: seven years, swaps and protections

A contending team rarely has good young players to spare. It has draft picks. So the typical deadline trade sends a veteran one way and future selections the other, and the rules on trading picks do much to shape what February looks like.

The basic limit is seven years. A team can trade a pick in any of the next seven drafts and no further. At a February deadline that reaches a draft more than six years off, when some of the players who will be chosen are still in middle school.

The second limit is known as the Stepien Rule, after Ted Stepien, who owned the Cleveland Cavaliers in the early 1980s and traded away first-round picks so freely that the league had to step in. A team may not leave itself without a first-round pick in two consecutive future drafts. In practice a club can trade its own first-rounder in every other year, and no more, unless it holds another team's pick to fill the gap.

General managers get around the gap with two devices.

A pick swap gives the other team the right to exchange first-round picks in a given year if its own is worse. No pick has left, so the Stepien Rule is satisfied, but the trading team has given up the upside of a bad season. A contender that has already dealt its picks in alternate years can add swaps in the years between and mortgage most of a decade.

A protection is a condition on the pick. A first-rounder that is "top-10 protected" stays with its original team if it lands in the first ten selections and goes to the other team if it falls anywhere after that. Protections usually roll over for a year or two and then convert into something lesser, often a pair of second-round picks. They let a seller price in the risk that the buyer collapses, and they are why trade announcements read like contracts.

Second-round picks are the small change. They have no consecutive-year restriction, and they are thrown into deadline deals in twos and threes to balance value.

The 2023 agreement added a penalty that bears directly on February. A team that finishes the season above the second apron has its first-round pick seven years out frozen, meaning it cannot be traded. The league's most expensive teams therefore have fewer picks to offer just when they most want to buy. The draft itself, including how the order is set, is explained in our guide to how the NBA draft works.

When the freeze lifts: the day after a team's last game

Nobody announces the end of the freeze, because it does not end on one day. It ends 30 times.

A team's ability to trade returns on the day after its season finishes. For the ten clubs that are not in the play-in or the playoffs, that is the day after the regular-season finale in the middle of April. For a team knocked out in the first round it is a day in late April or early May. For the champion and the runner-up it is the day after the last game of the Finals in June.

So the answer to whether NBA teams can trade after the deadline has a second half. Not during their season. Immediately after it.

Eliminated teams use this more often than is generally noticed. On June 18, 2021, Boston sent Kemba Walker and a first-round pick to Oklahoma City for Al Horford and other pieces. The Celtics had been eliminated in the first round. The Thunder had missed the postseason. The conference semifinals were still being played, and the Finals did not end until the following month.

Most teams still wait, for reasons of information more than rules. The draft lottery in May settles who picks where, and a pick is worth far more in a trade once everyone knows whether it is third or ninth. The draft itself, in late June, is the natural meeting point: every team is finished or nearly so, the order is fixed, and the new league year with its fresh cap room is days away. A large share of the trades agreed around the draft cannot be formally completed until early July for that last reason, since they depend on cap space or contracts that do not exist until the new league year begins.

One group gains from the rule's design. A team eliminated early has several weeks in which it can talk to other eliminated teams with real offers while the remaining contenders, the clubs most likely to outbid it in July, are locked out and busy. The sign-and-trade deals that follow in free agency are a separate device, covered in our guide to the NBA sign-and-trade.

Deadline-week deals that changed a title race

Most deadline trades shuffle the eighth and ninth men in a rotation. A few have decided who won.

Date	Trade	What followed
February 14, 1995	Clyde Drexler from Portland to Houston	The Rockets won the 1995 title as a sixth seed
February 19, 2004	Rasheed Wallace to Detroit in a three-team deal with Atlanta and Boston	The Pistons won the 2004 title
February 1, 2008	Pau Gasol from Memphis to the Lakers	Three straight Finals and titles in 2009 and 2010
February 7, 2019	Marc Gasol from Memphis to Toronto	The Raptors won the 2019 title
March 25, 2021	Aaron Gordon from Orlando to Denver	A starter on the Nuggets' 2023 champions
February 2, 2025	Luka Doncic from Dallas to the Lakers, Anthony Davis to Dallas	The most startling in-season trade of the century

Rasheed Wallace is the model case. Detroit already had one of the league's best defenses and wanted another big man who could score. Wallace had been traded from Portland to Atlanta ten days earlier and played a single game for the Hawks before the Pistons, on deadline day, pulled him out in a three-way arrangement. Detroit beat the Lakers in five games that June. It is the cleanest example of a contender identifying the one thing it lacked and buying it in February.

Marc Gasol's move to Toronto fifteen years later followed the same logic. The Raptors gave up Jonas Valanciunas, Delon Wright, C.J. Miles and a second-round pick for a 34-year-old passer and defender on deadline day, and four months later he was the starting center in a Finals win over Golden State. There is a family footnote. Gasol's draft rights had been part of the package Memphis received in 2008 when it sent his older brother Pau to the Lakers, a February trade that produced two championships of its own.

The one nobody saw coming

The Doncic trade belongs to a different category. It was completed four days before the 2025 deadline, in the small hours of a Sunday morning, and it involved a 25-year-old who had made the All-NBA first team five years running. Utah was the third team. Dallas received Anthony Davis, a younger guard and a first-round pick. Players of that age and standing are simply not traded in the middle of a season, and rival front offices said afterward that they had not known he was available. Nearly every other deal in the table was preceded by weeks of public speculation. This one was not.

A caution belongs here too. For each trade in the table there are several that carried the same excitement and delivered nothing. Phoenix acquired Kevin Durant at the 2023 deadline for a large haul of players and picks and did not get past the second round with him. Buying at the deadline is a judgment that a team is one player away. Most teams are further away than that.

How the NBA deadline differs from the NFL, MLB and NHL versions

All four leagues stop trades partway through the season. They put the line in different places and attach different conditions to it.

League	When	Cutoff, Eastern time	After the deadline
NBA	Thursday in early February, about three-fifths of the way through	3 p.m.	Signings continue; March 1 waiver date governs playoff eligibility
NFL	Tuesday after Week 9, at the season's midpoint	4 p.m.	Signings continue; trades resume with the new league year in March
MLB	Late July or the first days of August, about two-thirds through	6 p.m.	A player must be in the organization by the end of August to be postseason-eligible
NHL	Early March, about three-quarters through	3 p.m.	A player must be on a team's list at the deadline to play in the playoffs

Baseball used to have two deadlines, with a second period in August when players could be traded after passing through waivers. That was abolished in 2019, leaving a single date like the NBA's. Our guide to MLB trade deadline rules covers what remains. Hockey's version comes latest and is the strictest about the postseason, as the NHL trade deadline rules explain.

The NBA's deadline produces more movement per roster place than any of the others, and the reasons are structural.

NBA15players

NHL23players

MLB26players

NFL53players

Regular-season roster limits: standard contracts in the NBA, the active roster in MLB, the NFL and the NHL. Two-way players, practice squads and injured lists are not counted.

Show the numbers

Standard active roster size in the four major leagues

Item	Value
NBA	15players
NHL	23players
MLB	26players
NFL	53players

Rosters are small. One player is a fifth of a starting lineup and can play 35 of the 48 minutes, so a single trade can change a team in a way that no single arrival changes a football roster of 53.

Contracts are guaranteed. A football team that wants to shed a salary can usually release the player. A basketball team owes the money regardless, so the only way to get a contract off the books is to find someone to take it. That turns every unwanted deal into trade material.

Salaries have to match. A team over the cap cannot acquire a highly paid player without sending out salary close to his, which forces deals to include two or three extra players. A trade for one star routinely moves five people.

And a new player can contribute at once. A wing who arrives on Thursday can play on Saturday knowing a handful of sets. A quarterback or an offensive lineman changing teams in November has a playbook to learn, which is a large part of why the football deadline, though busier than it once was, remains modest.

How to read a deadline-day report: agreed, pending and voided

The first word of a trade usually comes from a reporter, hours before either team says anything. The vocabulary in those reports is precise, and reading it correctly saves a lot of confusion.

"Agreed in principle" or "have agreed to" means the general managers have settled the terms. Nothing has been approved. Before the deadline, the terms can still change.

"Finalizing" means the main pieces are set and the details are not. The details are usually draft-pick protections or which low-salary player goes in to make the money work. Deals fall apart at this stage more often than at any other.

"Pending a trade call" or "pending league approval" means the terms have been submitted and the conference call has not yet happened. After 3 p.m. on deadline day this is the status of every deal still in the queue.

"Pending physicals" means the call is done and the players have yet to be examined by their new teams. A traded player cannot suit up until he has reported and passed, or until the team has waived the requirement.

"Official" means the teams have announced it. Until then the players involved are in limbo, often sitting out games for a team they are about to leave.

What can still undo a trade

A failed physical is the main risk, and its consequences are harsher at the deadline than at any other time. If a team's doctors find a problem, the team can void the trade, and everything is returned to where it started. In July the two clubs could renegotiate. After the deadline they cannot. In February 2025 the Lakers and the Charlotte Hornets agreed a deadline-week trade that was rescinded two days after the cutoff following the medical review. Every player and pick went back, and neither team was able to make a replacement deal, because the window had closed.

A veto is the second. A player whose consent is required can decline, and occasionally one does.

The third is the league itself. A deal that breaks the salary rules is rejected on the call, and before the deadline the teams simply fix it and resubmit. After 3 p.m. there is nothing to fix it with.

It also helps to know that first reports are often incomplete. A two-team trade announced at noon can become a four-team trade by 2:30, as other clubs are folded in to absorb a salary or supply a pick. The version that counts is the one in the teams' own announcements, which list every player, every pick and every condition.

At 3 p.m. Eastern the rumors stop being useful and the rosters are what they are. The rest of our coverage of the league is on the basketball hub.