It’s draft night, but some key trades and miscommunications are stealing the spotlight from the 2020 prospects.
What We Know:
- One of the first trades made this offseason was Dennis Schroder for Danny Green, which you can read up on in our Day 1 coverage. Well, Danny Green is on the move again. The Oklahoma City Thunder are trading Danny Green and Terrance Ferguson to the Philadelphia 76ers for Al Horford, Vasilije Micic, and two draft picks: the 34th pick in tonight’s draft and a 2025 pick. This seems like a win-win trade. OKC general manager Sam Presti is adding more draft picks to his treasure chest and the 76ers are moving off of Al Horford’s albatross contract and getting a championship-level role player in return.
- It was initially reported that the Milwaukee Bucks and Sacramento Kings had agreed on a sign-and-trade for Bogdan Bogdanovic, but the deals have now been called off according to The Athletic’s Sam Amick and ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski. Apparently, Bogdanovic never agreed to join the Bucks, which completely upended the sign-and-trade. Bogdanovic would have seriously helped Milwaukee’s championship chances and if this deal falls through, it could have serious ramifications for the Giannis Antetokounmpo situation. Bogdanovic will now enter restricted free agency. All in all, this is a laughable miscommunication for both teams to not have gotten the deal approved by Bogdanovic first, especially for the Kings who are no strangers to front office mistakes.
- The Houston Rockets continue to make moves during this offseason. It was just the other day that they traded Robert Covington to acquire Trevor Ariza, and they’re now shipping Ariza off to Detroit. This deal will send Ariza and the 16th overall pick in the 2020 draft to the Detroit Pistons and bring back a future first-round pick. This trade frees up cap room for the Rockets to use their mid-level exception in free agency. The Rockets are also purchasing a Detroit 2021 second-round pick for $4.6 million.
- In some NBA schedule news, the league has announced the format for the 2020-2021 season. The NBA will release the season schedule in two halves, with the first half being from December 22 to March 4. There will be a five-day All-Star break from March 5-10 in between the two halves and the rest of the regular season will play out until May 16. Each team will play the teams within their conference three times (42 games) and they will play each team from the opposing conference twice (30 games) for a total of 72 games.
- The most interesting part of the format is that there will be a play-in tournament for the 7th and 8th seed in each conference. The NBA introduced a play-in game for the 2019-2020 season for the 8th seed, and this new format will expand upon that. The race for the 8th seed in the Western Conference this year was incredibly exciting and seen as a huge success. The league’s board of governors unanimously approved the addition.
The NBA playoffs will be held from May 22 to July 22, ending just in time for USA basketball to participate in the 2021 Olympics.
