A year and a half after inking Clint Capela to a 5-year, $90M deal, the Houston Rockets traded him to Atlanta, having decided no center was better than him. A few years prior, Roy Hibbert, then 27 and in the middle of a 4-year, $58M contract, was selected to the All-Star team and Second Team All-Defense. By 30 he’d been traded three times for a grand total of two 2nd-round picks and a Plumlee, then was out of the NBA for good.
All of which is to say sometimes the distance between the present and the future is farther than you think.