The dread of empty-handed free-agent departures forces professional franchises to liquidate their pending star assets.
When a team realizes an elite player on an expiring contract will not re-sign, it is systematically forced to engineer a trade before the deadline rather than risk losing them in free agency for minor compensatory draft returns.
The same conclusion keeps arriving from across the workspace's research — 1 topics independently instantiate this theme. Filter the evidence by where it came from:
Knowing that Kelsey Plum would test the open market as a free agent, the Sparks chose to trade her before the deadline to salvage future assets and launch a complete rebuild.
The Tigers traded away their dominant Cy Young winner rather than risk losing him in free agency for nothing.
Rather than letting their star catcher reach free agency, the Orioles traded him to secure valuable young assets.