How NBA Draft shakes up trade market: Players, teams to watch and five biggest questions worth asking

Usually, the NBA Draft is one of the busiest trade days of the year. Unsurprisingly, teams frequently have interest in players they lack the picks to actually draft, so they dangle veteran players to go and get them. But that wasn’t the case on Wednesday. Only one veteran player was traded throughout the first round, and it was someone whose original team tried to trade five months ago: Mark Williams, who went to the Phoenix Suns.

We got plenty of activity in the week building up to the draft with Kevin Durant and a handful of other big names moving, though, but there’s still plenty of work left to be done. In fact, the draft offers a fair bit of clarity on that front. A lot of needs were filled. A lot of questions were answered. So let’s look at the trade market with the first round of the NBA Draft in the books. While many preexisting storylines remain untouched, others were meaningfully affected by Wednesday’s proceedings. Here are five questions worth answering as the offseason rolls along.

1. Is another Boston blockbuster less likely?

The Celtics traded Jrue Holiday and Kristaps Porziņģis earlier in the week. That represented the necessary portion of their offseason. They needed to get below the second apron. They’ve now done so. The optional portion of their offseason is the more interesting conundrum. 

By all accounts, the Celtics have been offered significant packages of assets for Jaylen Brown and Derrick White. Brown will turn 30 right around opening night of the 2026-27 season, when Jayson Tatum is expected back from his torn Achilles. White will be 32 then. He has an expensive long-term contract. Brown has a supermax deal. If any part of them wants to get younger and retool for a new era around Tatum, the time to do so would have been before the draft. The advantage of acting then is that they actually knew where the 2025 picks were slotted. You’re not fully trading for future draft picks at that point. You’re trading for specific prospects in specific slots that already interest you.

But Boston didn’t make a move. Brown and White are still Celtics. That doesn’t mean that they can’t still be traded later, especially if someone comes with a big enough offer in the coming days, but now a return package would be more of a mystery box. You’re getting draft picks that may or may not be good, and if those picks come in the next few years from a team that’s employing Brown and/or White, odds are they likely won’t be. That was less of a concern in a package built around a pick whose slot was already determined. So, for the time being, it looks like the Celtics have made most of their major moves. If a team wasn’t willing to blow them away before the draft, why do so afterward?

2. What exactly is going on in New Orleans?

From the outside, the moves New Orleans made on Thursday are incongruous with a Zion Williamson-centric roster build. Williamson is at his best as the primary ball-handler in lineups with a lot of shooting. Well, the Pelicans proceeded to use the No. 7 overall pick on Jeremiah Fears, a point guard who doesn’t make 3s and needs the ball in his hands to thrive. They proceeded to move up to draft Derik Queen, a big man who doesn’t shoot many 3s, at No. 13. Lest you believe the Pelicans simply plan to stagger he and Williamson, remember that starting center Yves Missi, the No. 21 pick last year, also does not shoot 3s, and that key defender Herb Jones has only shot league-average or better from deep once in his career. Fred Vinson, the best shooting coach in the NBA, left New Orleans last offseason for Detroit.

Now, here’s where you might be thinking, “ok, the Pelicans are just going to try to trade Williamson, right?” Well, maybe, but doing so comes with complications as well. Putting aside the question of whether or not teams would be interested, you’d likely have to accept that trading Williamson means being bad for a little while. That’s especially true with last year’s major acquisition, Dejounte Murray, recovering from a torn Achilles (and publicly criticizing the organization). Except to move up to No. 13, the Pelicans traded away their unprotected first-round next season, so there’s no benefit to being bad.

So where does that leave the Pelicans? Well, we have no idea beyond knowing that the current team just doesn’t make much sense. Their two point guards, Murray and Fears, overlap meaningfully as individual shot-creating guards who don’t really stretch out behind the arc. Between those two and Jordan Poole, there are a lot of high-usage guards on this team. Queen and Williamson, as creative, on-ball bigs, overlap quite a bit as well. Neither rebound or defend much, and both have conditioning issues. The acquisition of Saddiq Bey throws another forward who wants the ball into the mix, which seems notable right as Trey Murphy is ascending into possible stardom. The only two reliable defenders on the team are Jones and Jose Alvarado, both of whom are sorely underpaid and will need new deals in the coming years. 

There’s just no immediately obvious plan here, which suggests that more moves may be coming to help clarify all of this. What are the Pelicans trying to accomplish? Are they a win-now team or a rebuilder? Do they have a coherent vision for their playing style? These are questions another move or two could potentially clarify.

3. Could Heat send Wiggins back to Warriors?

The Heat took advantage of a surprising draft tumble on Wednesday by landing Kasparas Jakučionis at No. 20 overall. The expectation was that the Illinois guard was going to be selected in the lottery, so Miami lucked out by landing a hihg-upside player with a later first-round pick. However, that wasn’t the most interesting part of Miami’s draft day.

ESPN’s Shams Charania reported that the Heat are interested in pursuing Golden State Warriors restricted free agent Jonathan Kuminga, a scoring small forward with stellar physical traits. The Warriors have openly acknowledged the tricky fit Kuminga poses in their new, Jimmy Butler-centric roster, so they are seemingly willing to facilitate a move. Notably, the Heat and Warriors cooperated on that Butler trade during the season. That left the Heat with another scoring small forward with stellar physical traits, Andrew Wiggins. It would stand to reason, therefore, that Wiggins would be available in a world in which the Heat are pursuing Kuminga.\

There were rumblings of a possible Lakers trade leading up to the draft. The Lakers, in need of an injection of athleticism and perimeter defense, could swap the expiring contracts of Rui Hachimura, a better shooter at forward, and Gabe Vincent, a former Heat guard, to take on Wiggins, who has a longer deal that is getting in the way of Miami’s 2026 cap space ambitions. The Heat may need draft capital to make such a trade, or the Lakers could include last year’s No. 17 pick Dalton Knecht.

However, the Warriors are legally able to reacquire Wiggins once the league year turns over in July. They obviously know him quite well having won a championship with him in 2022. They may have preferred to trade Kuminga in February, but he wasn’t capable of matching salary in a Butler deal. Now, perhaps there’s a sensible deal in which the Warriors get Wiggins, the superior 3-point shooter, back while Miami gets to take the upside swing on the younger Kuminga. Other teams could get in the mix here as well, with the Warriors using Kuminga’s outgoing salary in a sign-and-trade to pursue someone it prefers. Either way, Wiggins now stands as one of the more interesting veteran trade candidates of the summer.

4. Are there any pick-created logjams?

Yes, we have a few picks to cover:

• At No. 3, you have to take the best player available regardless of position. However, V.J. Edgecombe plays the same position, shooting guard, as both last year’s breakout 76ers rookie, Jared McCain, and last year’s breakout trade deadline acquisition, Quentin Grimes. This makes Grimes, a restricted free agent, an interesting possible sign-and-trade target.
• The Raptors are, quite famously, comfortable having a roster in which everyone is 6-foot-8 or 6-foot-9. But man… there sure are a lot of forwards on this roster. Where exactly do the Collin Murray-Boyles minutes come from with Scottie Barnes, Brandon Ingram and RJ Barrett already in place, especially after the surprisingly successful rookie season Jonathan Mgobo just had? Is someone here going to play backup center, because Khaman Maluach was a commonly mocked Raptor to fill that hole. Barrett stands out as the obvious trade candidate here, but with two years and around $57 million left on his contract, that won’t be easy unless someone views him as the missing piece.
• Portland made the most surprising pick of the draft when it nabbed Chinese big man Yang Hansen at No. 16 overall. Hansen was widely expected to be drafted in the second round, but the Blazers instead invested a real asset on him in the middle of the first round. Whether or not he was worth that pick, only time will tell, but for now, he adds a fifth center to Portland’s already large roster. That might not be the worst thing. Robert Williams III is hardly ever healthy, Deandre Ayton is on an expiring deal, Duop Reath is more of a deep-bench player, Donovan Clingan hasn’t shown he can play major minutes yet and Hansen might not be ready to play at all at the NBA level. Portland could probably get away with carrying four next season, but they were already a trade candidate, and the Hansen pick suggests that they don’t believe either Williams or Ayton are long-term Blazers. Both are possible trade candidates for the center-needy Lakers, and Williams makes sense for a handful of other teams looking for cheap centers as well.
• Utah already had several shoot-first guards in Collin Sexton, Jordan Clarkson and Keyonte George. They added a shoot-first wing in Ace Bailey and a shoot-first guard in Walter Clayton in the first round. Sexton and Clarkson likely weren’t long for this roster anyway, but now, either could probably be had at a discount. This roster badly needs more passing, and starts with getting some of the older gunners off of the team.

5. Who’s dealing with roster crunches

We have two notable teams to discuss here. The first are the champions. Everyone knew Oklahoma City was not making both of its first-round picks at No. 15 and No. 24. The Thunder literally don’t have the roster spots for two rookies. They enter the offseason with all 15 of last year’s players under guaranteed contracts or options. Even adding one rookie was going to force them to move an existing player off of the team.

And, despite trading No. 24 away, that’s what they did by taking Thomas Sorber at No. 15. Someone now has to go here. The most common candidate speculated about would be Dillon Jones, the No. 26 pick last season who didn’t show much as a rookie. Another rookie, Ajay Mitchell, has a non-guaranteed contract, but he showed enough in his debut campaign to justify getting kept over Jones. Third-year forward Ousmane Dieng hasn’t been able to earn minutes consistently, but he’s defended well when he’s played, so the Thunder likely keep him around for another year.

Here’s a stealth candidate to get moved: Jaylin Williams, the backup center who can shoot some 3s and provided critical relief minutes against the Denver Nuggets in the second round. He has a team option for next season at basically the minimum. Oklahoma City’s standard operating procedure in that situation has been to decline the option, make the player a restricted free agent and re-sign him to a team-friendly long-term deal. But Williams has no path to steady minutes next season with Chet Holmgren and Isaiah Hartenstein still in place, and Sorber, a developmental center, is probably getting prepped to replace Hartenstein in the long run. That leaves Williams on the outside, but only by Thunder standards. A normal team would absolutely love to have him as a backup center at the minimum next season, so perhaps the Thunder could pick that option up and trade him for value to solve this roster crunch.

And then there’s Brooklyn. The Nets have 15 players under contract now with their rookies included, and if their offseason goes the way we think it will, there are likely more players incoming. The Nets are this offseason’s major cap space team. They used some of that space absorbing Terence Mann to get the No. 22 pick, and similar moves are likely in the offing as they rent out their cap space for draft picks. However, they also have their own free agents to consider. They’d probably like to re-sign Cam Thomas and Day’Ron Sharpe, for example, and there are other players they could choose to retain as well.

They have five non-guaranteed contracts on their team, but they are attached to young players they’d likely prefer to keep. With five first-round rookies coming in and possibly a sixth at No. 36 joining the team as well, the Nets probably do need to find a way to move some veterans. That should suit them just fine. They can get positive value for Nic Claxton and Cam Johnson if they want to, and both helped them win too many games for their rebuild a season ago. If the Nets had been able to consolidate those picks and move up, that would be one thing. But after having used all of them, the pressure is even greater now to get their veterans off of the team so they can devote more minutes and shots to these incoming youngsters.