Lessons and Trends from Draft Night Trades

What NBA teams can learn from 50+ trades across five previous drafts.

Picture yourself in an NBA team’s war room on the night of the draft. The phone rings, multiple times. In fact, the team has been taking calls from nearly every other team in the NBA during the past few weeks, as they are offering to trade up or trade down to your upcoming draft selection.

While you’re mulling multiple offers, you think about the NFL draft; it sure seems easier to make decisions over there. The talent is more spread out across the draft’s seven rounds, so you can afford to make a mistake because you might be able to compensate for it in later rounds. You think about how much you’d like to have the tools that they do to make decisions, you ask if there’s an NBA equivalent to the NFL Draft Trade Value Chart (there is, but it was made all the way back in 2009). You think about the research they’ve done on previous drafts, and the rules of thumb that have originated from it, such as “teams trading up for a non-QB in the first round almost always overpay.”

While your team is on the clock, you ask yourself: What if you looked at the recent history of the NBA Draft when making those selections?

In this piece, I’ll be doing just that. I’m going to look at every draft night trade between the 2014 and 2019 NBA Drafts and see how things went for every team who traded up, down, in or out of the draft, and see if there are lessons that we can learn from recent history.

---

Methodology

• I’ll be looking at all the draft night trades between the 2014 and 2019 NBA Drafts. I made 2019 the cut-off not only because players from the 2020 draft onwards haven’t completed their third NBA seasons, which makes it a bit too early to evaluate the trade, but also for a practical reason: a large majority of the picks traded from 2020 onwards haven’t conveyed yet. You can’t determine which team got the best player in a trade if you don’t know which players were traded.

• Trades involving players who were already active are not going to be considered. When a trade involves an already active player, it’s more complex to evaluate who won the trade, as there are more factors (contracts, team context, players asking out) than simply looking at who got the best player in the transaction.

• After asking a couple of friends in NBA front offices, I’m going to use the LEBRON metric, which was built by Krishna Narsu and Tim/Cranjis McBasketball at BBall Index, and attempts to estimate “the total impact a player has on their team” according to their website. You can check the database here and learn more about the metric here. I also set up a minimum of 150 minutes for a player’s season to be considered.

• Finally, I’ll exclude trades involving draft rights for stashed players who ended up making their way to the NBA, namely the Bogdan Bogdanovic trade in the 2016 Draft and Sasha Vezenkov in 2022. The rest of the stashed players whose rights were included in trades will be considered as throw-ins without any particular value.

---

When we think about trading up for a player, probably the first example that comes to mind also works as a cautionary tale: Philadelphia moving up to #1 and selecting Markelle Fultz in 2017, while the Celtics picked Jayson Tatum. However, when it comes to trading up at the top of the draft, the Fultz-for-Tatum (and Romeo Langford! Lest we forget) trade is the exception rather than the rule.

If a team calls you to move up in the Top 24, they probably know something that you don’t.

While draft history in the NFL tells you that the team that trades up always overpays, in the NBA the team that traded up got the best player in the trade eight times out of nine, at least within the Top 24. 

Considering Markelle’s injuries affecting his expected development at the NBA level, could it have been 9-for-9 instead? Personally, I don’t think so. Despite the fact that I loved Fultz as a prospect coming out of college, looking back I realize that Tatum had all the makings of becoming the best player in the draft as a big wing who could create his own shot, get to the rim, and defend—in spite of the efficiency concerns around him when he was coming out of Duke.

Teams who trade down are getting smarter (around the 20th pick).

Results have continued to be mostly positive for teams trading up in the Top 18. Alperen Sengun (16th overall in 2021) and Jalen Duren (13th overall in 2022) are looking like massive wins for their respective teams, while for Cason Wallace (10th overall in 2023) and Ousmane Dieng (10th overall in 2022), it’s really too early to tell.

Things definitely get complicated after that. Teams traded up for Kai Jones (19th overall in 2021), Keon Johnson (21st overall in 2021), and Leandro Bolmaro (23rd overall in 2020): three players who would end up being waived during their rookie contracts. Are teams getting smarter about trading down or are teams becoming too reckless around the 20th pick mark? The answer might depend on you being a glass half-full or half-empty type of person.

There’s one more trade that we haven’t mentioned, and it’s even messier: Memphis trading up with Minnesota for Jake LaRavia while giving up two firsts that would be used to select Walker Kessler and TyTy Washington.

Kessler is, at this point, the clear best player in the trade. However, Memphis did obtain an additional second round pick that they used to draft GG Jackson. As good as Kessler has been for Utah, I think this one goes in the “too early to tell” group, especially as Jackson continues to show flashes during his rookie season.

Trading in the middle of the draft is a coin flip

After the 24th pick, trading in the draft offers less certainty for teams on both sides of the negotiating table. The hit rate (i.e. ending up with the best player in the trade) for teams who traded up or in drops from 88.9% in the Top 24 to 47.3% between the 25th and 42nd selections.

Despite the uncertainty around trading for picks in this range, this is the busiest region of the draft, with half of the draft trades involving picks going to both teams happening between the 25th and 42nd overall selections.

The reason is simple: if a team sees a prospect who they had high on their board sliding, they will try to get him before another team does. Sometimes teams will value that third and fourth year team option in Rookie Scale Contracts, and they will move up to the first round to secure them. Other times, they will wait until they fall to the second round, where moving up is perceived to be a cheaper affair.

Some teams, however, have paid a premium and included first round picks to trade into this section of the draft.

How have those trades gone for the teams who traded up?

It has been rough.

Trading future firsts for late firsts/early seconds never works.

The table above speaks for itself, as it displays three of the worst, most indefensible draft night trades of all time. The only mitigating factor to be found in this group is in the Anzejs Pasecniks trade, as Philadelphia would recoup that pick later on by trading Markelle Fultz to Orlando and would end up using that pick to draft Tyrese Maxey.

Only one of the cases listed involves a team trading a first round pick for multiple seconds, but it’s awful enough to make a rule about it.

Trading firsts for multiple seconds should be a fireable offense at this point.

In the 2016 draft, Memphis traded a 2019 lottery-protected first round pick that they had previously acquired from the Los Angeles Clippers to the Boston Celtics in exchange for the draft rights to Deyonta Davis and Rade Zagorac. The latter never played an NBA minute. The former averaged just 12 minutes per game across two seasons for the Grizzlies before being traded to Sacramento and was waived shortly afterward. The Clippers pick would end up being used to select Matisse Thybulle.

It seems like it should be common knowledge to avoid any type of trade where you’re giving up a first round pick and getting only second round picks in return; however, it’s happened twice since the aforementioned trade, and the results have been similarly awful.

After pick #45, trade down and you will lose. Trade out, and you might win.

When looking at the nine names selected by teams who traded up or into the draft after the 45th overall pick, there are a couple of clear standouts; by the LEBRON metric, Dillon Brooks was the best player in the group. Ironically, he wasn’t even the best player in the trade, as the then future second round pick used to acquire his draft selection was utilized to draft De’Anthony Melton, who LEBRON grades as a player with a better peak so far in his career.

Five of the nine picks made by teams who traded up or into the draft in this range (55.6%) went the same route, with the team who traded down ending up with the best player in the trade. However, when you split those numbers between the teams who traded down in the same draft versus teams who traded out for second round picks in future drafts, the picture becomes clearer. The hit rate for teams trading down is 1-in-3; the hit rate for teams taking future second round picks is 4-in-6.

---

The type of draft night trade that is yet to be discussed is teams trading in and out of the draft for cash considerations.

Using the LEBRON stat to, once again, provide us with an outlook of who were the players with the best peaks among this group, two names who have gone through very different career arcs immediately stand out.

Jordan Bell made an impact in his rookie year as a rim runner and shot blocker for the most stacked NBA team of all time. His minutes, efficiency, and productivity would diminish in his sophomore season. Not too long after that, he would fizzle out of the league after brief stints in multiple teams. Jordan Clarkson, on the other hand, is still going strong after ten years in the league. He also established himself as a rookie, being a perimeter scoring option for some god-awful mid-2010s Laker squads and he would reprise his role in later runs with the Cavaliers and his current team, the Utah Jazz.

There are better, safer ways to spend your money.

The picks to draft Bell and Clarkson were acquired for an average of $3.33 million adjusted for inflation. Now, I’ve never been around an NBA front office, but I assume that getting an owner of any company to spend money is not an easy task unless you can convince them that they will recoup that investment. Next June, be honest with the owner or with whoever he designated to look after the bottom line. Recent history tells us that spending money on buying a draft pick is an investment with an 86.7% chance (13 in 15) of not being worth its price.

In the remaining 13.3% of the cases where it does pan out to some degree, you can look at Bell and Clarkson: impactful role players who will establish themselves early in their careers but might or might not go downhill once they leave their original teams for less green pastures. If that is worth an average of $3.33 million, that is up to whoever picks up the cheque at the end of the night.

It’s also worth mentioning that the aforementioned 13.3% hit rate for draft picks who were sold for cash might improve by the time we have enough years to evaluate Trayce Jackson-Davis. The Warriors forward is enjoying an impressive rookie season after the team selected him with the 57th overall pick in the 2023 draft, which they bought from the Washington Wizards by an undisclosed amount.

Set up a target price for your pick

By now you’re probably convinced that buying picks is not worth it. If that makes you more inclined to sell your picks for cash, you need to know how you can set up a target price.

Let’s consider teams that use cash considerations not as a trade-in but as a trade-up from a fictional pick #61. In that case, teams have spent, adjusted for June 2023 inflation, $27.7 million to move up a grand total of 134 draft spots.

Considering that the least amount of money that a second round pick has been sold in this period was for $580,000, you could take that amount as the absolute floor a pick would go and then calculate how much teams have spent over that floor. Teams have spent $19.5 million to move up a grand total of 134 spots. That’s an average of $145,853 per draft spot.

If you want to translate that data into an equation to know how much a second round pick should go for, you could do: $580,000 + ((60 - Pick #) * $145,853)

This means taking the floor amount ($580,000) and adding the product of the average amount per draft spot ($145,853) and the number of draft spots that you’re fictionally “moving up” from the 60th overall pick.

It’s not perfect, sure, but if you put this equation into a scatter plot of all the picks traded by cash considerations and draw a blue line representing this equation, you’ll find that it’s pretty close to the trend line (in purple).

As a seller, your aim is to get those dots as far up and away from the blue line as you can. Much like the two green dots, representing Kay Felder and Miye Oni, two players who would go on to play a little over a thousand minutes combined for the teams that drafted them, after the Cavs and the Jazz spent a combined $5.42 million acquiring the picks to draft them.

Learning From the Past

This dataset can be utilized to evaluate other aspects that might impact the success or failure of a trade. I might do a future piece where I go over the “win/loss” record for each team when it comes to draft trades, as well as the hit rate by position, skills and age at draft night.

There’s also the “perfect world” approach to evaluating trades. In this piece I went over the real value of players going each way, but there’s also the aspect of the potential value of trading down. Example: we look at the Luka Doncic trade as an absolute win for the Mavericks, but we would definitely look at it differently if instead of Trae Young and Cam Reddish, the Hawks got Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Nic Claxton—the players that LEBRON considers as the best potential selections at those draft spots.

The point is that there’s always something to be learned from recent history. As small as this 50+ trade sample might seem to be, the hits and mistakes in the dataset should be enough to give teams more information about the decisions they can make with their draft picks, the value of the draft picks they possess, and the value of the ones they are trying to obtain.