Hollinger: Knicks’ Mikal Bridges trade, and why two players not in the draft loom over the draft

As we head into NBA Draft day, I can’t help thinking about two players who aren’t even in this draft, and how they cast a shadow over it.

The first and most obvious is Cooper Flagg, the unspoken catalyst for a pair of blockbuster deals on Tuesday night that sent Mikal Bridges and a 2026 second-round pick to the New York Knicks while simultaneously allowing the Brooklyn Nets to regain control of their 2025 and 2026 first-round picks.

I get that Bridges’ move to the VillanovaYork Knicks is the big story here, and I’ll get to it, but let’s talk about the other half for a minute. The Bridges trade essentially ensures the Nets will be awful heading into a loaded 2025 draft while they patiently look at their watches waiting for Ben Simmons’ contract to expire; nobody will be shocked if useful vets such as Dennis Schröder and Cam Johnson have new homes before long.

Big picture: The Nets are set up to have their own high draft pick in 2025, five incoming first-rounders from the Knicks trade, and an absolute boatload of cap space for next summer. Of all those, however, Flagg seems to be the biggest prize.

On Tuesday evening, before the trade broke, I was in the process of writing a sentence for this piece saying, “Flagg’s presence in the 2025 draft offers a possible weathervane for the strategic directions a few teams may take in the 2024 draft.”

Well, I guess so.

He might not be in Victor Wembanyama’s class, but the general consensus is that he is the next tier down, a guy who might really be worth tanking for. And it’s not just him: The 2025 class seems littered with solid-to-amazing consolation prizes. This is shaping up as the strongest draft class since the loaded 2018 group, so the incentive for teams to, um, “position” themselves could be quite strong.

That, in turn, could influence some more things we see in the coming five-day whirlwind, which the Bridges deal kicked off on Tuesday night. And I do mean “whirlwind.” I know it’s been quiet so far this week, but fasten your seatbelts. The two-day draft format only gives execs a little bit of breathing room because the year 2024 features the shortest span in the calendar cycle between the end of the draft and the alleged start of free agency on Sunday.

Plus, the draft, trades and free agency are joined at the hip in some ways, as they’re usually part of a unified offseason strategy. The Knicks and Nets offered a perfect example; the Knicks could make the Bridges deal partly because they saw how other free-agent dominoes were falling, while the Nets could make the Bridges trade only when they completed another draft pick trade.

With such a short turnaround, and the ability of teams to negotiate deals with their own free agents right now, and most of the deadlines for player and team options coming on Thursday and Friday, and the increased use of contract extensions as a transactional mechanism … I doubt my friends in this business will lack for material, let me put it that way.

So, back to Bridges. The Knicks will send to Brooklyn a 2025 Milwaukee Bucks pick that is top-four protected, their own unprotected firsts in 2025, 2027, 2029 and 2031, and a 2025 second-round pick, plus a pick swap in 2028. New York still has two firsts in the current draft (picks 24 and 25) as well as heavily protected future firsts from Washington and Detroit that may never convey.

GO DEEPER

Grading the Mikal Bridges trade: Knicks, Nets, Rockets all win?

And as ever, contracts matter. The key motivation for the Knicks to include so much draft capital in a trade for a non-All-Star was that Bridges makes $23.3 million and $25.5 million the next two seasons, extremely reasonable money for a plus starter who literally never misses games. He’s also eligible to sign an extension for up to three years and $113 million in six months, and one wonders if a wink-wink arrangement was baked into this deal, as well.

Because Bridges’ salary is reasonable, New York can still pay free-agent forward OG Anunoby and stay below the first apron, especially if it loses Isaiah Hartenstein in free agency, as now seems possible.

(Note: If the mechanism for the deal is trading Bojan Bogdanović alone, as initial reports indicated, the Knicks would be the second team to be hard-capped at the first apron for 2024-25 under the rules of the new CBA, joining Oklahoma City. However, if another small contract is included, such as that of DeQuan Jeffries or Mamadi Diakite, the Knicks would be hard-capped at the second apron, and would have more wiggle room to keep Anunoby and restricted free agent Precious Achiuwa.)

The biggest cost of this deal for the Knicks isn’t the picks themselves, but the opportunity cost if an A-list star becomes available and wants to come to Gotham. New York no longer has the draft capital left to be a player in that market. However, if Bridges extends and Anunoby re-ups, the Knicks are basically looking at a half-decade run with this group, and they’re all in their 20s. It’s not an awesome team, but it’s a very good one with a long window in a weak conference.

On the other side of the ledger, Brooklyn couldn’t possibly move forward with the Bridges deal without the other half of it: swapping future picks owed by the Suns to Brooklyn for those owed by the Nets to Houston. Yes, they traded draft picks so they could tank. The NBA is amazing.

This actually came at a considerable cost. People’s brains are spinning right now trying to process all this, but the Nets had two unprotected firsts from Dallas and Phoenix in 2029 that now are essentially controlled by the Rockets — Houston gets the better of the two automatically, and can swap for the other one with its own pick. Given the odds of Phoenix being awful by then, that’s a sweet haul.

The benefit for Brooklyn is that a 2025 pick swap given to Houston in the James Harden trade was removed, allowing the Nets to freely tank this season and have it benefit themselves rather than the Rockets. The Nets also got their own unprotected 2026 first back, again a key condition for bottoming out. Houston’s reward, in addition to that 2029 bounty, was an unprotected first from Phoenix in 2027 and a complicated pick swap in 2025 that can turn either their own pick or the Thunder’s into Phoenix’s pick if it benefits them.

So the Nets gave up two unprotected picks (2029, 2027) for one unprotected pick in return (2026), and gave up two swaps (2029, 2025) for one admittedly more valuable swap (2025). It was understandable business for the Nets because it gets them out of mediocre, chase-the-play-in limbo and sets them in a new direction; they’re in a much better place now than they were 24 hours ago.

Finally, just to be clear: Remember that there was no scenario where the Nets were making the Bridges trade without doing the Houston deal. That 2025 pick swap was never going to be as valuable to the Rockets as it now is to the Nets.

But my goodness, this was fantastic business for Houston.

So, yes, Cooper Flagg will loom over these proceedings, for at least a few other teams besides Brooklyn. (Hi, Wizards! Whatcha doing with Kyle Kuzma over there?)

But the other player I want to talk about is Nolan Traore, a French guard who is also not in this draft but is a likely lottery pick in 2025. I want to talk about him because I’ve been waiting for an aha moment from French League observers regarding the play of Traore versus the play of potential lottery picks Zaccharie Risacher and Tidjane Salaun in the same league, and it hasn’t happened.

Traore played nine fairly electrifying games in the French League at the end of the season for San Quentin, including two 25-point outings off the bench; he racked up an assist every 3.6 minutes with European scorers who don’t hand out dimes like Halloween candy the way they do in the NBA, and posted a PER of 15.7 despite not shooting particularly well.

Traore is also a year younger than Risacher and Salaun, and I wondered if anybody would see this performance and have a moment of clarity and think “Oh, THAT is what a high-lottery talent does to a mid-tier European League, even as an 18-year-old.” But as near as I can tell, it hasn’t happened.

And thus, we’re in the odd scenario where it seems Risacher might really be the top pick in the draft. Obviously, I’m going against consensus here, but like … what exactly is he, again? Should we maybe be a bit more concerned that he wasn’t more than a nice role player in France?

Risacher isn’t notably athletic (just a 25-inch no-step vertical at the combine), or notably strong, or unusually long (he measured with a relatively short wingspan for his height actually). He shot the ball better this year in the past, but nobody really thinks he’s a money shooter either. Neither is he some Luka-like high-IQ savant, not with 60 assists in 65 games.

Don’t get me wrong, I think he’ll have a career: I have him 13th on my board. He’s 6-8 and his shot isn’t broken, and he can move laterally and guard 2s and 3s. That almost automatically makes you something in today’s NBA. And, hey, maybe I’m just wildly wrong here and he has more untapped upside.

But when I see the Hawks contemplating him with the top pick, I can’t help but wonder … has a team ever used the top pick on wing depth before? What is the path to stardom here?

And the counterexample of Traore underscores it for me.

A few other stray thoughts as we get ready for draft night

The Josh Giddey–Alex Caruso trade between Oklahoma City and Chicago is official, which is interesting in that Oklahoma City could have waited to use the rest of its cap space and then executed the deal in July. That they didn’t is a possible tell that they aren’t sweating every dollar of what was at least $30 million in cap room, and thus that we shouldn’t be sitting around waiting for some big splash move with that space.

For the Thunder, Caruso doesn’t answer the primary failing that led to their playoff defeat against Dallas, but it’s a solid win nonetheless. Oklahoma City doubled down on its strength in the backcourt without surrendering any of the assets it might need for a bigger swing. (And heaven knows how many illegal screens the Thunder will draw this year between Caruso and Lu Dort.)

The timing mattered, too: Giddey was going to be a restricted free agent next summer, and it became increasingly obvious the Thunder couldn’t be the team to pay him. They still have to pay Caruso a year from now, but he fits this roster much better.

As for the Bulls … I have mixed feelings. In some ways, this was strategically superior to trading Caruso for a draft pick, in that Giddey is a real, actual player and is only 21, or about two years younger than half the dudes in this draft (more on that in a minute). In all seriousness, the odds of the Bulls getting a player as good as Giddey with the pick(s) they’d likely get for Caruso weren’t great.

The drawback is that they still have to pay Giddey, who is due for an extension this fall. Given that the Bulls have the sunk cost of Caruso, and that Giddey’s agent knows this, you’d expect that extension to come in on the high side. I know some Bulls fans are going to howl if this ends up at four years and $100 million or something, but in today’s market that’s just not wild money for an upside starter.

The more significant issue is … um … can anyone here shoot?  The Bulls were 29th in 3-point frequency and 20th in accuracy last season. Caruso was one of their most frequent 3-point shooters and made 40.8 percent. Meanwhile, Chicago’s most prolific 3-point shooter, Zach LaVine, is on the trade block. If the Bulls’ game plan is to trade LaVine, bring back DeMar DeRozan and Patrick Williams next to (um, I guess) Nikola Vucevic, who other than Coby White are opponents worried about behind the arc?

This trade only exacerbates the problem. While Giddey has many strengths (ballhandling, passing, bravely resisting the murderous Harkonnens), shooting ain’t one of them. His inability to stretch the floor is what ultimately led to his poor fit in Oklahoma City.

There are ways to make this work better in Chicago, starting with Giddey should have the ball in his hands more. But Chicago has to rethink the rest of the lineup to really make this work; the Bulls can’t just run it back with the same guys and Giddey replacing Caruso, and just hope to tough-2 their way back into the play-in.

Really, they should be doing what the Nets are doing, but they continue to chase the middle. With Caruso gone, even that may be a challenge. I’m wondering how fully they might reset the roster around a Giddey-White core.

Now for the short-attention-span theater part of my pre-draft thoughts

The most fascinating thing I’m watching in the draft is what happens with all the old guys. Between the extra COVID-19 year and the NIL money keeping more guys in school longer, we’ve never seen anything like this in terms of 23- and even 24-year-old “prospects” going through the draft process.

Several of them — notably Dalton Knecht, Tristan da Silva, Tyler Kolek and Baylor Scheierman — are projected to go in the first round, and several others (such as Terrence Shannon, Jr., Enrique Freeman and Pelle Larsson) have a good chance to go early in the second.

I’m really curious how many decision-makers pull the trigger on these players, where they’re taken and how they develop. Historically, the over-22 player sector has pretty massively underperformed its draft position; there are exceptions, of course, but GMs in the lottery will be facing quite a choice weighing somebody like Knecht against players nearly half a decade younger.

One line of thought I really want to underscore, though: There has been far too easy an embrace of the idea that “he’s older, so he can help us right away.” That might be true if it weren’t for the fact that nearly all the best players leave for the NBA long before they hit age 22 or 23. In reality, the far more compelling line of thought is, “He’s older, so there’s a solid chance he might not help us ever.” In any serious analysis of past drafts, age is just a pretty huge negative indicator.

This class has some differences, again, because NIL money kept more talented players in school. But it’s still buyer beware, and I’m really interested to see what happens with these players in the next 48 hours and how their careers track from there.

One wrinkle you might not hear much about, but you might hear a LOT about in the next 48 hours: opt-in and extend. It’s a potentially big factor for some players who are still figuring out their next landing spot, most notably Paul George.

Of course, he can opt out of the $48.8 million he’s owed by the Clippers for 2024-25 and become an unrestricted free agent … but opting in can open up a bevy of otherwise closed-off trade destinations. It’s a hectic mess because it has to be negotiated relatively quickly and there are a lot of rules along the way, and with so few elite free agents in the first place it possibly won’t be a factor this year. But I’m just saying … watch out for it, especially if things with George and the Clippers go sideways.

I’m not doing a mock draft this year, because I just didn’t have time to get enough information to give you much beyond me throwing darts, especially with so many trade scenarios sitting out there to mess up the board. But if I had to pick a couple of these: It wouldn’t shock me to see Isaiah Collier end up in Toronto, or DaRon Holmes II in Denver, or Oso Ighodaro to Minnesota at 37, or Bronny James to the Lakers at 55 (duh). Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

(Top photo of Cooper Flagg: Maria Lysaker / USA Today)