Visits: 4
Which teams left the NBA Draft smiling? Which teams failed to get the most from their selections? Sky Sports NBA analyst Mark Deeks evaluates Draft winners and losers.
Winners: Chicago Bulls
In a year in which almost every pick was seemingly traded either before or after the Draft, the Bulls played with a straight bat and came out with exactly what they wanted.
Drafting seventh for the third consecutive season, their main position of need was point guard, and there were rumours they would trade up to get one of the two best attainable (i.e. not Ja Morant) point guards in this one, Darius Garland or Coby White. It turns out they did not need to, as White fell to them anyway.
0:43 A quick player with an excellent shot, White is an aggressive and dynamic scorer with good size at the position if not much length, and the fact that he is a score-first player does not mean he can neither defend or pass. In this respect, he is very much the opposite of Kris Dunn, the defensive specialist who struggled badly in his third year and whose uncertain projection going forward is what left the position so wide open.
In selecting White, Chicago may have continued a run that has seen them select Lauri Markkanen and Wendell Carter Jr at the seventh spot in the last two Drafts. They may have rebuilt without ever getting to the top of the lottery.
0:53 Chicago’s only other activity on Draft night was in the second round, where they chose Daniel Gafford out of Arkansas at No 38. Gafford is an under-skilled player with no handle or shot, but as an athletic 6ft 11in center, he runs the court, tries to dunk everything, often manages it, and is a rim-protecting presence of the basket. There is a lot of nuance to learn and skills development to do, yet he is only 20-years-old and has a lot of time on his side.
The Bulls have struggled for front-court depth since resolving their excess of power forwards, particularly so given how Cristiano Felicio in no way blends in with the modern NBA. Gafford, however, should do.
Winners: Indiana Pacers
As further explored below, Indiana managed to extract great value from nowhere.
They agreed to trade for TJ Warren from the Phoenix Suns in a pure salary dump move that also saw them land the No 32 pick, one they subsequently moved to the Miami Heat for three further second-rounders.
Whereas before they were faced with the reality of potentially having to overpay an over-30 Thaddeus Young to stay, they now have a ready-made replacement on a team-friendly contract, and found themselves three second-round picks better off for it.
The Pacers also subsequently traded the No 50 pick, used on Jarrell Brantley, to the Utah Jazz in exchange for a 2021 second-round pick. The 2021 Draft will likely be the first that allows for high schoolers to once again enter, leading to a much-expanded field of essentially two years’ worth of prospects in one. If you’re going to have a late second-round pick, that is the year in which to have it.
In the first round, Indiana made a very un-Pacers pick when they drafted Goga Bitadze, the very young Georgian center who had been playing in Serbia. The EuroLeague is the second-best league in the world – the equivalent of football’s Champions League were there no such thing as the NBA above it – and very rarely do teenagers play in it at all, let alone well.
Bitadze, however, has been a very talented and versatile player on both ends of the court in his young EuroLeague career, recording a +12 net rating and a 23.4 PER.
Bitadze’s skill, smooth athleticism and potential going forward are excellent value at No 18 in a Draft that lacks for star potential. Indiana do not normally go the European route, but in doing so in this Draft, they made the right choice.
Losers: Phoenix Suns
The Suns made the first reach of the night, drafting Cameron Johnson from North Carolina with the No 11 overall pick, an excellent shooter but otherwise limited player who does not move his arms much when he runs. Prior to drafting Johnson, they had traded down in a deal with the Minnesota Timberwolves from the No 6 pick to this position, taking on Dario Saric in the process.
The deal itself was understandable. Saric is a good player, and if a team feels as though it can still get the guy at No 11 that it wants at No 6 – or if they are not interested in the players everyone else wants at No 6 – it makes sense to leverage the position, trade down and get a good extra asset out of it.
However, there is no reason to believe that the Suns could not have got Johnson lower than that. Even if they really thought he was at least the 11th best player in this Draft – and that is a whole other issue – there were players like Sekou Doumbouya, PJ Washington, Brandon Clarke and Goga Bitadze still on board.
The teams that wanted those players were not going to pick Johnson ahead of him – if nothing else, if you really want Johnson, why not take someone like Doumbouya at 11, and make the team that wants him trade up to get him just like Minnesota did with Culver?
More importantly, why a team that has been at the bottom of the NBA for so long and still lacks for core talents found themselves targeting Johnson in the first place is the biggest mystery. They need more upside than this, had it available to them in the forms of Culver, White, Jaxson Hayes and others at No 6, and they passed on the opportunity.
Saric and Johnson will now join a forward rotation that prior to the start of the draft also featured TJ Warren. In a complete salary dump, however, the Suns moved Warren onto the Indiana Pacers, further giving up the No 32 pick in the process (see above).
Phoenix used a part of the subsequently-availed space on Saric’s contract, and used a large chunk of the rest to take on Aron Baynes from the Boston Celtics; they gained an extra first-round pick (No 24, Ty Jerome) in the process, but gave up one in next year’s Draft going the other way to do so, a Draft which by all measures figures to be stronger.
What started out as the No 6, No 32, a 2020 first-round pick and TJ Warren therefore became Cameron Johnson, Dario Saric, Aron Baynes and Ty Jerome. Find a starter among that quartet if you can.
Losers: Miami Heat
Miami’s overall team building strategy for a while has been murky. It seems they refuse to rebuild or reload for as long as Pat Riley is there, yet it is obvious to all-comers that there is not a path to contention with the current construction of the roster.
The Heat have been able to stay afloat by having good success with minimum salary contracts and second-chance players – Hassan Whiteside, Rodney McGruder, Derrick Jones Jr, Dion Waiters, Tyler Johnson, James Johnson, et cetera – yet in overpaying four of those afterwards, they are now having to nibble around the margins of the luxury tax.
To dodge the tax this past season, they had to move Tyler Johnson and Wayne Ellington, one of the league’s best shooters, in return for nothing but the unwanted salary of Ryan Anderson. Rumours abounded that Miami would use their No 13 pick in this Draft to trade either Anderson, Waiters or James Johnson’s unwanted contracts to the Cleveland Cavaliers in exchange for the salary relief of JR Smith. If nothing else, this would allow them to at least use their mid-level exception and improve the team that way.
That, however, did not happen. They instead drafted Tyler Herro out of Kentucky, a freshman guard with a sweet outside shooting stroke and nice pull-up game, who gets after it on defense, but whose athleticism from an NBA point of view is at best average, capping his upside.
This is a team that needs upside, that needs creators, that traded one of the world’s best shooters to save money only to spurn a much better opportunity to save money in order to draft a replacement shooter with higher upside players on the board.
Herro has a fairly high floor as an NBA player – it is hard to imagine him being bad – but he also has a low ceiling. And in that respect, perhaps he embodies this team.
Miami further traded three second-round picks to Indiana – thus leaving the cupboard almost entirely bare in the future for both first – and second-round picks – in exchange for KZ Okpala (see above). The Heat have long had a love of length, believing it to be a market inefficiency and something to acquire as much as possible. Okpala now, however, joins the roster with the very similar Jones Jr, and if the intent is to add yet more length of the roster, Herro and his short wingspan jars with that.
The only other move was to acquire the No 44 pick before the Draft began in exchange for a future second, only to use it to draft Bol Bol (the great faller in this year’s Draft), and then immediately re-trade his rights to the Denver Nuggets in exchange for another future second-round pick and cash.
It is not obvious what the strategy is, short term or long term. The hope will be that Herro can be a shooter in the vein of JJ Redick and that Okpala realises his potential as a slasher and defender. Neither of them, however, seem like percentage plays.
