The Athletic has live coverage of the 2024 NBA Draft.
Happy NBA Draft day, everybody. We made it. Now to take a step into the abyss.
Usually, draft night is kind of the start of (official) transaction season, when we see trades start happening and get a glimpse of how the puzzle pieces come together for the offseason. But this year, and every year hereafter unless team governors and NBPA officials decide to rip up this section of the collective bargaining agreement, things started popping off right after the conclusion of the NBA Finals. There have been a few splashy extensions and trades already.
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Wednesday night will surely be one of the most interesting nights of the NBA calendar. This draft seems unpredictable, starting right from the top. Sports gambling was legalized so sportsbooks could make money off anyone who wants to make a parlay on the top-two picks tonight.
There will be a lot to watch over the next two days, from what some teams of interest will do to new trends to watch for. Here are seven things to watch.
Memphis Grizzlies
How Memphis approaches this draft will be intriguing. After seasons of 56 and 51 wins, Memphis essentially got cornered into a reboot season after a 25-game suspension for Ja Morant and injuries to, well, pretty much everyone. Now, the potential Western Conference contender has the No. 9 pick after a 27-win season and an opportunity to rejuvenate its roster. Grizzlies general manager Zach Kleiman is aggressive in the draft — he made seven draft-night trades over the previous five years — and if the Grizzlies front office sees a player it likes, it’ll be interesting to see if Memphis makes a jump up for him.
The Grizzlies haven’t been shy in the past. While Memphis, ostensibly, should be pretty good when healthy, its roster is not without holes and is getting to be top-heavy with salaries as Desmond Bane’s extension kicks in next season. The Grizzlies could use a true center or a big wing since their last top-10 pick, Ziaire Williams, has yet to pan out. The West was extremely competitive this season and is expected to be even more brutal to get through next year. How will the Grizzlies not only try to catch up, but keep up?
Chicago Bulls
A lot has been made of the Bulls’ inactivity over the last three years. When they dealt Alex Caruso to the Oklahoma City Thunder for Josh Giddey, it was their first trade involving players on both sides since a three-team deal with Lauri Markkanen in August 2021. Bulls executive vice president of basketball operations Artūras Karnišovas had given his roster a lot of time to simmer and they gave him 40- and 39- win seasons in return. If the Bulls are finally ready to answer a call for action, the question is what they might be seeking.
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The Caruso trade was interesting. As others reported, Chicago had turned down offers for Caruso before this deadline that involved future picks. They turned down an offer of two first-round picks and Tyus Jones from the Grizzlies for Caruso and Coby White at the 2023 trade deadline, according to multiple league sources. It’s hard to draw a thorough conclusion of just how opulent all those trade offers were because not all first-round picks are the same, and it’s unclear if and what kind of protections there were on the picks they were offered.
The Bulls still have Zach LaVine on the roster. DeMar DeRozan is set to be a free agent. Does Chicago want to blow it up and get in position for a much better 2025 draft, or are they moving pieces around for a retool this upcoming season? Do they want young players like Giddey instead of picks? They have the No. 11 pick Wednesday night in a class where beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Hanging over all this is that Chicago’s 2025 first-round pick belongs to the San Antonio Spurs unless it lands in the top 10, so the Bulls do have some incentive to try to keep their pick next year and avoid being too mediocre. If not conveyed in 2025, the pick would be protected through the top eight picks 2026 and 2027. If still not conveyed, it would then become a second-rounder in 2028.
Philadelphia 76ers
An ocean of cap space. A few first-round picks. A newer CBA that everyone is trying to gauge. That sounds like a perfect recipe for Daryl Morey to cook something up. The Sixers will be one of the most intriguing teams this offseason and maybe we get the first hint of what they’re up to Wednesday night as the free-agent market ramps up. Philadelphia owns the No. 16 pick. If Morey keeps that pick, it will be his highest draft choice since 2012, when he chose Jeremy Lamb 12th (and then traded a few months later) and Royce White 16th as part of the Houston Rockets’ three first-round picks. Right now, Philadelphia’s roster is basically Joel Embiid, Tyrese Maxey and an empty cap sheet. There are so many ways the Sixers can go. Morey’s north star has always been trying to acquire as much high-end talent as possible, salary size and second apron be damned. So what will he do?
How poor this draft class is
We’ll skip rehashing it (though if any of these guys become a star they really can fall back on the old trope of how nobody believed in them). The common belief seems to be that the players expected to go highest in the draft aren’t as good as most years, but there can be some gems found later in the first round. Let’s say that this is all true. There’s still a lot to unpack.
While drafting high is the most likely way to select a future NBA All-Star, it’s no sure thing. All-Stars come from everywhere. Over the last 20 drafts, 32 different draft slots have produced at least one All-Star player. Six slots in the first round have yet to produce one, and one in the lottery. The No. 8 pick seems to be haunted; sorry, Spurs.
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So what would constitute an outlier year? Let’s ignore the last three drafts. It’s still kind of too early to tell with those players. From 2000 to 2020, no draft produced fewer than three All-Stars. That would be the shaky 2000 draft (Kenyon Martin, Jamaal Magloire and Michael Redd), the infamous 2013 draft (Victor Oladipo, Giannis Antetokounmpo and Rudy Gobert), but also the 2019 draft (Zion Williams, Ja Morant and Darius Garland).
The average draft in those years produced 5.24 All-Stars. Five All-Star players is the median outcome, too. The 2008 and 2011 drafts gave us seven All-Stars. The historic 2003 draft had nine.
What is the new value of first-round picks?
Don’t know if you’ve heard yet but this is going to be Hot CBA Summer. Some of the fun new constraints of the CBA are going to kick in on July 1 (and some have already begun) and we’ll start to see how the league’s updated governing document will impact teams. Publicly, decision-makers have become wary, even fearful, of the second apron. It’s oppressive for team-building, and the new CBA will also implement new tax rates, though not until the 2025-26 season, so it will also be expensive for team governors.
This could put a premium on young, cost-controlled players who can outplay their contracts. One way to get those is to draft them. Lakers president of basketball operations Rob Pelinka had a paean to player development while he introduced JJ Redick as the franchise’s new head coach, and that’s a franchise whose entire ethos has been about luring stars to Los Angeles. So could this change the value of first-round picks? Will teams who are approaching either apron, or think they will be in future years, be more reluctant to trade theirs away, knowing it cuts into their financial flexibility and takes out a pathway to those cheap young players? Teams above the second apron on the last day of the regular season will also have their first-round pick seven years out be frozen, so they won’t be able to deal it next offseason. So that will take away one potential draft asset those teams can use in a trade. This might be the imperfect draft to figure out this new landscape since it’s not seen as having the most talent, but we’ll see.
What will be the effect of the second round going solo on Thursday?
Woe is the viewer who watches the NBA Draft all night, slogging through 30 picks, just so they can get NBA commissioner Adam Silver off their TV and finally see deputy commissioner Mark Tatum. This time, they’ll have to deal with the broadcast ending early and wait a whole day for Round 2 on Thursday afternoon at 4 p.m. ET. Imagine the disappointment. At least Tatum will still announce the second-round picks. But the NBA can’t even put this new made-for-TV spectacle in primetime since the Joe Biden-Donald Trump debate is going to upstage them and plopped itself into primetime.
There are actual substantive questions about this new schedule. Will this make it more likely that the Toronto Raptors, owners of pick No. 31, trade their pick? “We’re preparing for the phones being busy,” Raptors assistant GM Dan Tolzman said Tuesday. Did they, or any other teams picking high in the second round, consult with any NFL teams about how to handle a two-day draft? Will this give teams more of a chance to squeeze players on contracts in the second round? Some agents believe the new format should benefit teams and give them more time to find a player who can fit into the contract they want to give. The second round was already a mad scramble of teams basically contract-shopping their picks for a player willing to take one. Now they could get hours to do it, instead of minutes. What will the trickle-down effect be on who goes where, or if they get drafted at all?
Who can and cannot buy picks
Under the new CBA, if a team is over the second apron, it cannot send cash to another team in a trade. If a team is not over the second apron, but it sends cash in exchange for a draft pick, it would hard-cap itself at the second apron for the 2024-25 season. (It would not be able to spend above that threshold.)
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That’s one new wrinkle to keep in mind during the draft. When this CBA went into effect last summer, a few front-office members noted that the majority of trades could end up hard-capping one team or another as a result. The estimates on just how often this would happen were varied; as low as two-thirds of trades to 95 percent of all trades, but still high. So it will be worth wading through each trade now to figure out the cap ramifications for each team in the transaction.
This will surely create new restrictions for certain teams, but it will also create restraints. Hard-cap yourself at a certain apron level and whoops, maybe you don’t have the money to re-sign a player or meet him at his preferred number anymore. There are crazier ways to gain some leverage.
(Top photo of DeMar DeRozan and Zach LaVine: Michael Reaves / Getty Images)
