Queen's Gambit: Inside The Pelicans' Draft Night

A swing for the fences? Catastrophic gambles? What is going on?

Draft night was an experience I’d never forget. As the only media member from New Orleans, I was looking forward to ushering in a new era of Pelicans basketball by watching the draft selection live in Brooklyn. When Adam Silver sauntered to the podium and declared the Pelicans were selecting Jeremiah Fears with the seventh overall pick, I hurried to get down to the bowels of Barclays Center so I wouldn’t miss a chance to interview Fears. I figured while the interview was conducted, we’d get the result of pick 23 as well— which the Pelicans had traded for the previous week. Little did I know what was about to transpire.

It was actually during the interview with Fears when I got the notification.

UNPROTECTED????

There had to be a mistake. Surely this was one of Shams’ famous typos and he would delete the tweet and issue a correction. Nope. Unprotected. I had only a moment to collect myself before I got the opportunity to break the news to Fears himself.

From that moment on, text after text rolled in from league execs, agents, and friends. The friends were simply conducting a wellness check. The execs and agents? They were less friendly.

”That is the worst draft trade I have seen in over a decade,” one Eastern Conference executive lamented.

“They should all be fired next year when that becomes a top 5 pick,” relayed another.

One after another— it was a ruthless bombardment. ”Are they not aware of how good that pick is gonna be?” This line of questioning from one high level executive left me searching for answers across the next few days. Here is what I was able to dig up.

The League Does Not Respect Pelicans’ Decision Makers

The league wide skepticism on the Pelicans started when Joe Dumars was named the head of basketball operations and only grew when Troy Weaver was brought into the fold. When the Pelicans traveled up to Chicago for the NBA Draft Combine a month prior, the league had already placed a target on their back.

”Man they were killing them up there,” one agent told me, referring to rival front offices. “They think they (the Pelicans) got F—in idiots in charge. It got so bad, I just felt sorry.” Teams were already jockeying for the privilege to conduct the first trade with the Pelicans as more than one executive jokingly expressed to me that the Pelicans are going to be their first call.

It was the Indiana Pacers that ended up gaining the privilege of being first. When the Pelicans traded the lightly protected 2026 pick from the Pacers for the rights to pick 23 in this draft, rival executives raised their eyebrows. What was the rush to conduct this move while the Pacers were still in the finals? Just hours after Shams broke the trade, the Pacers announced Haliburton has been diagnosed with a calf strain. The optics pointed to a team that had been duped.

Haliburton would go on to tear his Achilles tendon just a few days later, lending credibility to criticisms being levied by rival teams regarding the Pelicans’ decision making. The trade should have been executed after the finals. There was no reason the same deal would not have been on the table. The miscalculation was not a grave one, but it was one big enough to reinforce the priors for other teams— the Pelicans are a mark and do not understand risk.

Sure enough, the league’s collective belief on the Pelicans’ lack of risk assessment would be proven true. The Pelicans would trade the unprotected 2026 draft pick which was the better of their own and Milwaukee to move up 10 spots in the draft— to draft a player Troy Weaver was fixated on in Derik Queen. In totality, the Pelicans traded away three shots at top 10 pick for the 13th overall pick. All three shots featured a team with a starting point guard who had suffered a torn Achilles.

One league executive would tell me their internal models valued the traded pick as having the second highest probability for becoming number one overall next season. Suffice to say— the league was stunned, and so was Atlanta.

The Hawks could not believe their good fortune. While the Pelicans would spend the next 24 hours facing enormous backlash for their reckless decision making, Hawks executives weren’t shy about sharing the details behind deal’s lopsided structure with rival teams.

One Eastern executive with knowledge of how the conversation went from Atlanta’s perspective described a perplexing scene. When one Pelicans executive made the call to Atlanta, the Hawks couldn’t believe what was actually being offered. Atlanta asked for clarification multiple times to confirm the unprotected pick was indeed part of the deal. It got to the point where Hawks General Manager, Onsi Saleh, called Joe Dumars directly to confirm for himself. The Hawks waited nervously for Dumars to confirm, hoping he would not realize what was going on and walk the trade back. But the Pelicans persisted and the Hawks got their steal.

Where Is Joe Dumars?

Everything that has transpired since the Pelicans traded with the Pacers has left rival executives questioning if Joe Dumars is taking an active role in the Pelicans decision making process. As the Pelicans would go on to acquire Jordan Poole, Saddiq Bey, Derik Queen, Micah Peavy, and Hunter Dickinson— a very clear through line to Troy Weaver would emerge. Every single player is one Weaver spent a great deal of time with personally or scouted in close proximity to the DMV geographical area.

”This has Troy written all over it, is Joe even in charge?” asked one executive incredulously after the Dickinson signing was announced. These are tough optics for a franchise struggling to find legitimacy. Weaver, who by all accounts is an incredible talent evaluator, carries a reputation for poor asset management. His time in Detroit was marked by incredible draft hits, but also a remarkably poor handling of draft capital and cap space. Towards the end of Weaver’s tenure in Detroit, another executive told me teams would call the Pistons regularly to see if they could secure a favorable deal.

”Everyone was looking at Detroit saying ‘Detroit can help us out right?’, then calling them and seeing if they can trick em into some BS.”

This all culminated in Detroit winning 14 games in Weaver’s final season and featured a 28 game losing streak.

My Take

There is a lot to take in here so I want to make sure I hit all the relevant angles.

Regarding the trade firstly. Let’s not mince words— the Pelicans just jumped out of a moving plane without a parachute. There should have been top 4 protection at bare minimum. But what’s done is done. This is now perhaps the biggest gamble on Zion Williamson to date.

The Pelicans are effectively saying they will be a good basketball team— which is only possible if Williamson is healthy and in shape for the whole season. There has been no evidence that the Pelicans are capable of withstanding prolonged absences from Williamson, and their recent moves have not done anything to correct this either.

Additionally, this is a bet on Derik Queen. Conceptually— I am perfectly okay with throwing a dart on Queen. I wrote about it earlier, but he’s kicked everyone’s ass at every level. There are truly some freaky right tail outcomes with Queen which point to All-NBA level upside. If the Pelicans truly valued him as a top 5 player in this draft, then it’s easy to look at the trade as the Pelicans trading 23 and a future pick for the 5th pick. Of course that is not what happened, but the cost is far more justifiable if you squint through that lens.

Look, I do think a lot of the online discourse has completely overlooked the idea of snagging Fears and Queen together. It seems evident the Pelicans had a top 5 valuation on both these players. And why not? Very few players in their class possess the level of upside and advantage creation Fears and Queen do. So while Pelicans are very much counting on these players hitting, they are also going for it next season. Which by definition makes it difficult to acquire a top 5 level pick in the next draft. Through convoluted, but understandable logic, the Pelicans made a play on two top 5 players, but took out an advance on the second one.

Sure, it’s improbable that the Pelicans will make the playoffs at this junction, and maybe the lottery gods will be cruel. Yet I cannot ignore there is a meaningful, albeit totally reckless, attempt at swinging on the faith of your own internal evaluations. If these picks hit, Weaver and Dumars will be heralded for their foresight and belief.

In a weird way, I compare this move to when Dell Demps traded the 6th overall pick and a future first for Jrue Holiday. The future first ended up turning into Dario Saric. Neither Nerlens Noel nor Saric ended up doing anything of note in Philadelphia, but Jrue went on to be a cherished player in New Orleans while also returning outstanding value in his eventual trade. The larger point here is that if Fears and Queen hit, no one in New Orleans will care about what comes out of the future picks they traded. The Pelicans now need to provide every developmental tool possible to both players to ensure they succeed.

Lastly, I want to touch on the Joe Dumars and Troy Weaver dynamic. Look, I haven’t talked to either of these men or anyone on the Pelicans who actually knows how the decisions came to fruition. Is Weaver acting with unchecked autonomy, or is Dumars quietly endorsing these moves? Either way, the external optics are damning.

Dumars, a respected executive with championship pedigree, cannot afford to be perceived as a passive figurehead while Weaver makes franchise-altering bets. If this is truly Dumars’ team, he needs to put his own stamp on it— whether that means reining in Weaver’s risk appetite or making a defining move that reflects his philosophy. Right now, it’s Weaver’s fingerprints all over this roster, for better or worse. If this experiment fails, Dumars will shoulder the blame just as much as his lieutenant.

Editor’s note: Updated the recounting of the draft negotiations with newly received information that conflicts previous reports.