The NBA trade deadline rarely delivers on the white-knuckled anticipation that precedes it. Last season, when damn near every team in the league swapped starting point guards, was unusual. Typically, we’re blessed around this time of year with a surfeit of interesting rumors that culminate in minor salary dumps and a couple contenders slightly upgrading a bench spot or two. The best trade of this deadline was probably Detroit nabbing a combo forward Tobias Harris for unwanted flotsam in the form of Brandon Jennings and Ersan Ilyasova. The most important deal might be the Cavs shipping out Anderson Varejao for Channing Frye, who will give the Cavs some big-man spacing that Tristan Thompson and Timofey Mozgov cannot. But this is all pretty minor stuff, considering we’ve spent the past week-and-a-half wondering if a trio of All-Stars might be on the move.

Dwight Howard’s run with the Rockets is coming to an end, one way or another. He has a player option for next season that he likely will turn down in search of what would likely be the last mega-contract of his career, but even if he were to decide to give Houston one more go this summer, it’s unlikely that Daryl Morey would feel the same. The Rockets are an experiment gone bad, a mish-mash of undeniably talented players who don’t amount to a coherent, championship-contending squad. James Harden, regardless of the fact that he showed up for this season out of shape and not altogether focused, is 26 years old and one of the very best guards in the league. He’s unmovable. Everything else needs to be retooled, Howard included.

This is why, at various points over the past few days, Dwight has been linked with the Heat, Celtics and Hornets. The Rockets have been shopping him to anyone to anyone who will listen. The hurdle they’ve met is that they’re trying to move a 30-year-old center who is still a fine player but isn’t nearly the glass-eating, paint-ruling force he was before suffering through back and leg issues that have sapped his athleticism. It’s difficult, in the modern NBA, to justify paying a big salary to a player who can’t shoot and isn’t an extraordinary defensive player. That the Rockets couldn’t rid themselves of Howard likely speaks to the paucity of halfway-decent offers for him. Morey has apparently removed his hand from the detonation button that he’s now going to have to press this summer.

Doc Rivers doesn’t like to talk about why his team invariably plays better when either Blake Griffin or Chris Paul are out with injury, but it’s a reality the Clippers need to confront, if they want to have a legitimate shot at making their way out of the Western Conference in the next few seasons. The wrap on the Clips during the Blake-CP-DeAndre Era has been that they’ve been good but not quite great, and considering that Warriors look like a squad on par with the ‘96 Bulls and the ‘87 Lakers, mere competence isn’t going to cut it. Whether Blake fully recovers from the broken hand he inflicted upon himself (and a team equipment manager's face) this season or not, the Clippers can’t hope for much more than a second-round playoff exit, which is why Griffin was made available before the trade deadline closed. The prevailing wisdom is the Clips need shaking up.

But they need not do so at the expense of shipping out Blake Griffin at a cut rate. Hothead or not, Griffin does the best Charles Barkley impression since the Round Mound of Rebound himself, and he shouldn’t be exiled from Los Angeles on a whim. His value is as low as it’s been in a while due to his late night idiocy and shaky health record, but it will rebound in the summer, when the rest of the league remembers he’s a relatively young, do-it-all forward who can win games by himself. As maligned as Doc Rivers has been for his personnel decisions, not jettisoning Blake is one for which he should be praised. There will be plenty of time to reassess the situation in June and July.

The Cavaliers don’t work. There’s something obviously fundamentally wrong with them, even as they lead the Eastern Conference, from the way they play down to whatever competition they’re facing to their habit of taking entire quarters off. More than anything totally explicable, they just radiate bad vibes. This intangible stuff is perhaps unfixable, but one thing that’s real and certain is the Cavs don’t use Kevin Love properly, and Kevin Love doesn’t look like the same player he was in Minnesota two seasons ago. It would probably be best for all parties involved if Love was moved on for either a different sort of star or a couple of rotation players who could solve some of Cleveland’s wing deficiencies.

Of course, a team can’t do a deal without sufficiently tantalizing offers, and none came in for Love. There was one possibly apocryphal swap on the table that would have turned the Cavs into an unwieldy LeBron-Kyrie-Melo triptych, but that evaporated about as quickly as anyone had time to ponder whether it was actual.

Like a version of the Clippers who don’t have nearly as difficult as a path to the NBA Finals, the Cavs must know they don’t have the firepower to take on the Spurs or the Warriors. The difference between the teams is that the Cavs have another few months under a relatively new coach—the stylistic differences between Ty Lue and David Blatt are overstated, but they exist—to try to figure themselves out. If they crash and burn in a four- or five-game Finals blowout, Love will almost definitely get moved, but there’s the slightest bit of hope that things could change for the better, even if they’re unlikely to.

In the end, the lack of significant trade activity has set us up for what should be an eventful summer. There are three clocks ticking down in cities that began the season looking forward to a championship but are primed to be disappointed. Even though the minute-hand hasn’t hit zero just yet, it inevitably will. This dud of a deadline all but guarantees we’ll see some excitement somewhere down the road.