Josh Hart was one of the players sent to New Orleans this summer in the trade that sent Anthony Davis to the Lakers, and he has embraced his new team and home, making it known he doesn’t want to be dealt again.
Being traded has to be a surreal experience, as you are suddenly needing to move to a new city and start all over on a new team. The experience is even stranger in the social media age, as speculation and rumors abound, and for players, it’s almost impossible to fully block out that noise. The Davis trade hung like a cloud over the Lakers for the entire second half of the season, with young players wondering if they would be dealt at the deadline and then continued to wonder if their time would end in L.A. this summer.
Sure enough, Davis was dealt to L.A. this summer, and Hart, Lonzo Ball, and Brandon Ingram all had to pack up and move to the Big Easy. For Hart, he found out he was being traded the same way as everyone else, via reports on Twitter, as he explained in a recent episode of his podcast.
“I find out, really, over Twitter,” Hart says. “My agent’s calling me and right before I pick up my phone, all I hear is in the background my brother just say, ‘aw, f*ck.’ I’m like, what is going on? I’m playing video games. I’m chilling. So I pick up the phone like, yo waddup. ‘Yo dawg, I think you’ve been traded.’ What, huh? You think? What do you mean you think? ‘I’ll call you back.’
“So I go on Twitter and I see it like, ‘OK, that’s interesting,'” Hart continued. “Like you said, with players and all that, the biggest thing is just the communication aspect of it. For a lot of players, if stuff happens, then it is what it is and we’ll handle it the best way we can handle it. All you have to do is let me know this is a possibility. Don’t let me find out over Twitter.”
It’s far from the first time we’ve heard that a player found out he was traded on social media, but as Hart points out, it’s something that frustrates players when they aren’t at least given a heads up that a move is a possibility. Trade talks move quickly and sometimes a deal just needs to get done before you can call all parties involved, but in the lead up to that, teams probably should give the agents, if nothing else, the alert that they could have their name brought up and things are being discussed. For example, Davis learned of this trade on Instagram, but at least he wasn’t caught wholly off guard.
In any case, Hart finds himself in a pretty good situation all things considered in New Orleans, with a team some believe has a real shot at the playoffs this year. Hopefully the deal works out for all parties, but teams need to understand the way of the social media world now and be a bit more proactive in giving players the alert that talks are happening.
