Trading all your picks is all the rage. How's it working out?

Early lessons from the Lakers, Clippers and Bucks.

Good morning. Let’s basketball.

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Isabella and the Pot of Basil; William Holman Hunt; 1867

And the latest team to send out a huge bounty of draft assets for an All-Star level player is … the Cleveland Cavaliers!

Cleveland sent Lauri Markkanen, Collin Sexton (on a sign-and-trade), 2022 first rounder Ochai Agbaji, THREE unprotected future firsts and TWO unprotected future pick swap options to the Utah Jazz for Donovan Mitchell. Utah as a basketball contender in the near term is now rubble. Cleveland, a play-in team who dealt with injury after injury down the stretch, is now a clear top-6 team in the East, assuming the injury bug stays mostly out of northeast Ohio.

There’s a lot to chew on with this trade, especially since it came as a relative surprise — not Mitchell being traded, but Mitchell being traded to Cleveland — and the Cavaliers are otherwise so interesting and alluring as a collection of productive prospects. We haven’t gnawed on the impacts and intricacies for a couple months already, like we had on the rumored Knicks deal for Mitchell or the Suns deal for Kevin Durant.

But what I’m most interested in right now is the continued trend of teams committing a large bounty of future draft picks in exchange for players of a certain caliber.

The Brooklyn Nets traded for the aging Kevin Garnett, the aging Paul Pierce and the slightly less aging Joe Johnson at the cost of their draft bucket is the classic example, but that’s about a decade old. Let’s look solely at the modern trend.

It starts with the Lakers trading for Anthony Davis in 2019. What happened then? They won a championship in Year 1 before Davis started having frequent injuries and the front office got exceptionally weird and ineffective. If the Lakers don’t win another title with the current core duo (A.D. and LeBron James) it will be a disappointment but it wouldn’t have meant that the trade wasn’t worth it. Brandon Ingram has gotten even better since the trade, but the Pels moved on from Lonzo Ball and Josh Hart, flipped their 2019 pick (De’Andre Hunter) for a collection of players that didn’t really work out¹, 2022 pick Dyson Daniels (we’ll see), a swap option in the next draft and an unprotected 2024 pick. The Pelicans and Lakers should finish close in the standings this season so the swap shouldn’t mean much. LeBron re-upped for two years, so I find it hard to believe the 2024 pick will be top five. (I believe the Pels have the option to defer that pick one year, so that’s worth watching.)

In short, the Lakers traded everything for a player and while the jury is still out, it worked as planned immediately by resulting in a championship.

That same summer, the L.A. Clippers traded a ton of draft capital for Paul George in a package deal to sign free agent Kawhi Leonard.