As Tom Petty once said, “The waiting is the hardest part.”
That’s never more true than on draft night. With five minutes between picks and, often, not a whole lot to do in between them, it can be torture for executives who are fixated on a particular player.
And it can cause ruinously short-term thinking, as well. Value propositions a team would never, ever even consider in the cold calculus of a mid-April mock draft start looking more reasonable when teams have done interviews and workouts and built up a certain target as that guy, the one they must have. That’s even when they know what history says about drafts and trading up, and that every other team that has done it has also thought they were getting that guy.
Once in a while, they’re right: The 2019 draft saw trade-ups for Luka Dončić and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, for instance. Often, however, they’re disastrously wrong, and incredibly expensive to boot. Teams paying with a present or future first to move up a few spots outside the lottery is an incredibly poor allocation of scarce assets.
Which takes us to the 2025 draft, and the standout takeaway from it: The incredible price a few teams were willing to pay just to move up a few picks.
The most obvious and notable one, which had execs around the league already chortling in the moments after the draft, was New Orleans’ decision to trade a 2026 “superfirst” to the Hawks to move up from 23 to 13 on draft night and select Maryland big man Derik Queen.
This followed the decision to trade a top-four protected 2026 Pacers pick to grab the 23rd pick this year while Indiana was still playing games, an already iffy decision that looked spectacularly worse once Tyrese Haliburton tore his Achilles in Game 7.
But the Queen trade was on a completely different level, and the talk of the league. For instance, I texted one exec from another team not involved in the deal after the draft, congratulating him on what I thought was a solid move by his club.
The reply: “Thanks, but I’d rather be the team that traded Derik Queen for AJ Dybantsa.”
The pick New Orleans sent to Atlanta is a so-called “superfirst” because it is completely unprotected, and it is the better of either Milwaukee’s pick or the Pelicans’. In other words, the Hawks have a strong chance of generating a high lottery pick out of this, because A) the Pelicans are the Pelicans, B) Milwaukee’s Damian Lillard tore his Achilles, and C) only one of the two teams needs to be bad for the Hawks to reap a huge payoff.
Set aside the wobbly logic of the Pelicans falling into this thirst trap because they wanted Queen at No. 13, and think of how awful this asset management is. New Orleans could have protected this pick, for starters; in a similar deal with the Hawks a year ago, they protected an outbound pick Nos. 1 through 4.
Also, um … can we set the bar a little higher than 13 here? Execs I talked to thought New Orleans could have moved up much higher than 13th if they had made that pick more widely available, perhaps even into the top 5.
The Pels also could have just offered a different pick, perhaps coming to Atlanta, dangling a lightly protected future pick like a normal team, probably in 2028 or 2030.
Instead, they recklessly chased a guy who wasn’t good enough for them to take at seven, but still somehow warranted sending out both the 23rd pick and a likely future lottery pick to take at 13. In doing so, by the way, New Orleans took its ability to tank next season off the table … bold stuff from a team that won 21 games a year ago and, though not without talent, still looks like a complete mess.
This takes us, inevitably, to larger questions about the Pelicans. After their postseason non-search for a new GM led them to Joe Dumars, and only Joe Dumars, the stories leaking out of New Orleans already are generating smirks around the league. They have a coach none of the players like, that they somehow can’t fire, a star player nobody wants around but they can’t get rid of, and, as the last 48 hours showed, a new front office throwing spaghetti at the wall.
One of the giant mysteries of Dumars’ already, um … interesting … tenure is that the Pelicans have seemingly gone all-in on the Troy Weaver Experience despite the four years of ruin it brought to Detroit. (Ironically, it took the arrival of former Pelicans executive Trajan Langdon to pull that franchise out of the ditch.)
While Dumars is in charge, sources say he’s leaned heavily on Weaver, along with some of the other ex-Detroit staffers Dumars recently hired, to run things — especially the draft. Just in the last three days, the Pels traded for Jordan Poole, who was with Weaver in Washington. They traded for Saddiq Bey, whom Weaver drafted in Detroit and then had again in Washington last season. And, in Wednesday’s trade for Queen, they brought in a big guy from the Maryland-D.C. area, combining the two go-to defaults for virtually every decision Weaver made in Detroit.
Look, maybe Queen becomes a player. But the process here is awful. The odds of him being better than the guy the Hawks get next year aren’t great, and with two potential stars at the top of the draft (Dybantsa and Kansas commit Darryn Peterson), the differential could be spectacular. Meanwhile, Atlanta still got a big man at 23 (Asa Newell) who might match Queen, too.
OK, enough about the Pels. They’re not alone. Memphis raised eyebrows when it once again traded up on draft night, this time surrendering a future unprotected first from Orlando in 2028 and two seconds just to move up five spots from 16 to 11 and select Cedric Coward. In doing so, Grizzlies spent two of the four picks they got from the Magic in the Desmond Bane trade.
Yes, they acquired those picks to trade, not wait until 2028 draft night, but think of the opportunity cost of other future moves that could have been made with the same picks. Does the difference between Coward and the guy they would get at 16, just five picks later, really offset those?
Similarly, Utah paid to move up just three spots with Washington from No. 21 to 18 and select a player who may very well have lasted ’til pick 21, surrendering three seconds (the 43rd pick in Thursday’s second round, and seconds in 2031 and 2032). While this wasn’t as expensive as some recent move-up trades (such as teams trading two picks in the 20s just to move up into the late teens), you wouldn’t say they got great value either.
In fact, trade-ups virtually always involve a pretty hefty overpay from what would nominally be “fair,” because the other team is just as caught up in hot, sweaty panting over the next guy on the draft board.
I wrote earlier this year that patience is the most important attribute for NBA front offices, and Tuesday’s first round was another great example. Organizations that can’t pass the marshmallow test rarely build themselves to a point of contending, because they’re continually stepping on rakes as they chase shiny objects. A year from now, Atlanta will reap the reward of their draft night patience, and New Orleans will wonder what might have been.
(Photo of Derik Queen: Jesse D. Garrabrant / NBAE via Getty Images)
