Paul George is one of the finest two-way players of his generation. Six-foot-eight, arms like windmill blades, can guard four positions and drop 28 on you before you notice the halftime whistle. But the strangest thing about his career isn’t what he’s done on the floor. It’s what happens to the team that ships him out.
Both teams in the 2025 NBA Finals — the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Indiana Pacers — built their rosters by trading Paul George. Not by signing him. Not by building around him. By sending him somewhere else and cashing the chip.
Indiana drafted George 10th overall in 2010 out of Fresno State. By his third year he was Most Improved Player, going toe-to-toe with LeBron James in the Eastern Conference Finals. The Pacers won 56 games the next season and returned to the conference finals. Then George suffered one of the most gruesome leg injuries in league history, missed nearly all of 2014-15, and came back strong — but the roster around him crumbled. Roy Hibbert, Lance Stephenson, David West, all gone. First-round exit in 2016. Frank Vogel fired. George’s future became a daily rumor mill.
On June 30, 2017, the Thunder swooped in. Oklahoma City got George. Indiana got Victor Oladipo and Domantas Sabonis.
Oladipo immediately became an All-Star in Indiana, winning Most Improved Player himself. Sabonis became an All-Star by his third season. Then the Pacers flipped Sabonis to Sacramento in February 2022 for Tyrese Haliburton and Buddy Hield — a deal SB Nation called “an all-time fleecing” that has only aged better with time. Haliburton is the engine of the 2025 Pacers Finals run. None of it happens without the George trade.
Two years after acquiring George, Oklahoma City traded him to the Clippers. That deal — the one Kawhi Leonard essentially demanded as a condition of signing with LA — may go down as the most lopsided trade of the decade. The Thunder received Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Danilo Gallinari, five first-round picks, and two swap rights. Gilgeous-Alexander just won MVP. The Clippers’ 2022 first-rounder became Jalen Williams, now an All-Star and Third-Team All-NBA selection. The Thunder also used their own pick at No. 2 overall that same draft on Chet Holmgren.
As the NBA’s own trade review noted, Gilgeous-Alexander and Williams — both acquired in that single George trade — are Oklahoma City’s top two scorers, combining for nearly 48 points per game. George never averaged 30 in any season of his career. Gilgeous-Alexander has done it back-to-back.
The Clippers got one Western Conference Finals appearance out of the George-and-Leonard era. Injuries gutted the pairing — Leonard missed the entire 2021-22 season with a knee injury, and the two played just 142 games together over four years. The whole point was a championship. They never got close enough to smell it.
Now Bleacher Report reports a third George trade has occurred, sending him to the Boston Celtics in exchange for Jaylen Brown. If that deal holds, the pattern holds with it: the team trading George away receives a former Finals MVP and a foundational piece.
Three trades. Three franchises transformed. Indiana got the assets that became Haliburton. Oklahoma City got the assets that became an MVP and a Finals roster. Boston, if the deal stands, gets a championship-caliber wing in Brown while shedding George’s contract.
You can call it a theory. You can call it coincidence. But three times in eight years, the team that handed off Paul George came out the other side with a better future than the one they had with him. The film doesn’t lie.
