Everybody’s a trade deadline expert these days.



Combine the nearest armchair general manager with the ESPN trade machine and the social media platform of your preference, and you get an NBA world in which almost anyone could fix their favorite team’s roster by the 3 p.m. EST, Feb. 7 finish line that looms so large, right?



Wrong.



As three longtime front office men discussed in great detail with The Athletic, the real NBA trade deadline is a battle of wills and wireless signals. All those months of planning – owners, executives, scouts and coaches all discussing thousands of scenarios internally en route to hundreds of cell phone calls to see what sort of personnel magic might be possible – and most teams wind up in the proverbial dead zone by the time the deadline arrives.



But the process is pivotal regardless of the annual outcome, with endless intel to be gathered and entered into the hoops databases that guide each...