What this trade means for the New Orleans Pelicans
As mentioned before, the New Orleans Pelicans had been looking for ways to move on from some of their veteran players on large-scale contracts, which is why they were willing to include some valuable draft assets in this deal. New Orleans was willing to move on from the No. 10 pick in this year’s draft in order to move the contracts of Bledsoe/Adams and they were also forced to move the Los Angeles Lakers’ 2022 first-round pick, a pick they acquired from the Anthony Davis trade in 2019.
Having this 10th pick in the draft would have been important for the Pelicans to add another young, high-level talent to their roster, but this organization clearly wants to win now and are willing to sacrifice some young talents to be able to do so. They moved down seven spots to No. 17 overall, still giving them the ability to draft a young talent to their squad, but this trade is very important for the Pelicans because they now have some much needed cap space.
Prior to this trade, the Pelicans were sitting about $17.5M under the salary cap for the 2021-22 season, but this was not factoring in the free agency of Lonzo Ball and Josh Hart. Now, by moving both Eric Bledsoe and Steven Adams, even though they bring in Jonas Valanciunas, New Orleans now has the ability to free up $36M in cap space, or $25M in cap space should they look to bring back Josh Hart, according to ESPN’s Bobby Marks.
This cap space is very important to New Orleans because of the fact that they are looking to bring in a big name to pair with Zion Williamson and Brandon Ingram this offseason. Their target is Kyle Lowry, who has spent the last 9 seasons in Toronto with the Raptors.
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Lowry is an unrestricted free agent this offseason and Marc Stein of The New York Times reported last week that the Pelicans had “entered the race” to pursue the 6x All-Star guard, but they needed available cap space to do so. Now, with Bledsoe and Adams off their roster, the Pelicans have the money they need to aggressively pursue Lowry without having to do a sign-and-trade for him.
As for the draft, the Pelicans own the No. 17 pick now and still own four second-round picks at No. 35, 43, 51 and 53 overall. In the middle of the first-round now and no longer in the lottery, the Pelicans have plenty of options in terms of moving around in the draft and could potentially entertain the idea of moving back by packaging this 17th overall selection with several second-round picks, but a team picking higher than them likely will not want to acquire a handful of second-round picks.
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The possibility of moving down seems more likely for New Orleans, especially if a player they wanted is not on the board with this No. 17 pick. Maybe they will stay at 17 in the draft and potentially look to package some of their second-round picks together in order to move up and gain another first-round pick between the No. 25-30 selections.
The options for New Orleans in this year’s draft are very vast and they will likely be very busy in terms of not only trying to add talent now, but for future year’s during Thursday’s draft. It is highly unlikely that they hold onto all four second-round picks that they own and they could very well look to sell one of these picks for more potential cap space.
