Lowe: How many picks?! What to make of this monster Knicks-Nets megatrade for Mikal Bridges

These audacious trades keep happening — teams trading three, four, five first-round picks for one player, the latest being the New York Knicks finally cashing in their diligently acquired stockpile in exchange for a 27-year-old crosstown rival who has made precisely zero All-Star games in (yup) Villanova University champion alumnus Mikal Bridges.

We didn’t use to see these kinds of almost-all-in megadeals. In July 2022, after pick-heavy deals for Dejounte Murray (a onetime All-Star, and an injury replacement at that) and Rudy Gobert, research from both Basketball Reference and ESPN’s Kevin Pelton found there had been seven trades in the preceding decade involving one team dealing away at least three future first-round picks — and that those seven accounted for one more such trade than had occurred in the entirety of NBA history from the ABA-NBA merger through 2012.

There have, remarkably, been four more in the two years since: the Phoenix Suns deal for Kevin Durant; the Cleveland Cavaliers acquisition of Donovan Mitchell; the Indiana Pacers nabbing Pascal Siakam; and the Knicks swapping five first-round picks — their own unprotected picks in 2025, 2027, 2029, and 2031, plus a protected 2025 first-rounder from the Milwaukee Bucks — for Bridges, according to ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski.

That is obviously a ton for Bridges, an overpay if you consider the trade in a vacuum — which is not quite the right way to consider it. The Knicks gave up as many first-round picks for Bridges as the Wolves did for Gobert. They gave the Nets one more pick than Brooklyn received from Phoenix for Durant. It is, if you really go apples to oranges, wildly more than the Boston Celtics gave up for Jrue Holiday, Derrick White, or Kristaps Porzingis.

The history of these all-in trades suggests teams underestimate the downside risk of the later outbound picks, and that the deals don’t pay off as often as you’d expect if the stated goal is a championship or even a Finals appearance. That is the reasonable goal now for the Knicks, presuming they re-sign OG Anunoby — which remains their plan, sources told ESPN. (If they fail, the entire perception of this trade changes.)

The Knicks should be very good in 2025 and 2027 — the first two years in which they now have to drive picks across the Brooklyn Bridge. Anyone claiming to know what the NBA looks like in 2029 and 2031 is trying to sell you, umm, a bridge.

New York has now foregone its cleanest paths toward acquiring higher-wattage superstars who might one day become available. This front office has tentacles everywhere. You have to defer to their intel. They might have reason to believe Giannis Antetokounmpo will not become available via trade in the medium-term future. The same might be true of Joel Embiid, a long-rumored Knicks dream target who is 30 with an increasingly scary injury history. (Bridges never misses games.) The Wolves hope to hang onto Karl-Anthony Towns despite tax concerns, sources said, and he might not be the best fit in New York anyway given his massive contract and so-so defense. Jaylen Brown? Yeah, I think Boston is good, thanks.

A financial crunch was coming in short order regardless — one that might have limited New York’s ability to make moves like this.

The Knicks couldn’t wait forever. Their team made it so by becoming so good, so fast as to speed up New York’s timetable in the league’s weaker conference. The Knicks also have some margin for error if this trade fails. They own extra first-rounders from the Detroit Pistons and Washington Wizards and (for now) several tradable salaries. It’s hard to see them regathering enough ballast to chase another star in the next five years, but they have some optionality.

A lot of those past megatrades hover over this one. The first such deal in that decade-long sample was the original sin of the Mikhail Prokhorov era: Brooklyn trading a bundle of unprotected picks and swaps to Boston for Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett. Those Nets were quite good for a bit, then old and bad — with no control over their own picks, and thus no ability to tank.

They could have spent their way toward mediocrity, at least avoiding the humiliation of gifting Boston multiple top-five picks. When the Nets hired Sean Marks as general manager, he and the franchise decided to go the other way: treat the traded picks as a sunk cost, and act like a traditional rebuilding team — despite the potential embarrassment.

For three years, they worked the fringes and somehow cobbled a plucky low-end playoff team. Durant and Kyrie Irving watched that, and spurned the Knicks to sign with Brooklyn. Suddenly, the Nets were a superteam. It was a transactional miracle.

The Nets in Tuesday’s earthquake decided that replicating that miracle was too long a long shot. If they were going to trade Bridges — if they were going to tank ahead of the Cooper Flagg draft — they needed to regain control of at least their 2025 first-round pick from the Houston Rockets, who had commandeered it in the 2021 deal that sent James Harden to Brooklyn. They accomplished that in a complicated swap-centric second deal in which the Nets gave Houston control of four separate draft assets — including three future Phoenix Suns picks — in order to regain control of both their 2025 and 2026 first-rounders. The deals are connected; the Bridges trade does not happen without this one.

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Woj details how the Mikal Bridges trade to the Knicks came to be

Adrian Wojnarowski weighs in on the Knicks’ decision to acquire Mikal Bridges from the Brooklyn Nets.

Houston retained the right to swap first-round picks with Brooklyn in 2027; if Brooklyn’s now-launched rebuild doesn’t turn fast, the Rockets may have a shot at a nice Nets pick in that year.

It’s a really interesting wager by the Rockets — one based partly on the new-ish flattened lottery odds. If the Nets land at No. 1 and draft Flagg, there will be some regret in Houston. But there is now only a 14% chance of that at best for Brooklyn. Houston is betting on that other 85% — and on plucking extra bets against the Suns. If Phoenix ever needs to pivot and wants to regain control of its picks, Houston will be waiting on the other line.

The overall transaction is a home run for the Nets, who have now turned Durant into nine first-round picks and a few other draft assets — with Cameron Johnson (and Dorian Finney-Smith) still on hand as trade pieces. They had to trade Bridges now. No second star was coming; that will likely become much clearer in the coming days.

They received huge offers for Bridges upon acquiring him at the 2023 trade deadline. Some teams in the Bridges derby then would still have been interested today, but at slightly lower prices, sources said. Bridges in Feb. 2023 was in the first year of a bargain four-year, $90 million extension. Today, he is halfway through that deal. Potential suitors were worried they would not be able to sign Bridges to an extension because of rules limiting the starting salary in such a deal.

Still, three first-round picks were the likely floor for any Bridges deal. The Knicks trumped that, and then some. Brooklyn had to find a way to take that offer. Various first- and second-apron rules could have increasingly limited the pool of potential Bridges trades.

When I asked front office executives in the summer of 2022 why teams seemed more willing to trade almost all their future first-round capital, several mentioned the perception that the league was more open than ever at the very top. Four straight NBA champions had failed to repeat, or even come close. Meanwhile, the flattened lottery odds had made tanking less profitable; you could finish with the worst record and pick at No. 5. Taken together, those changes seemed to scream: Go for it now, and don’t worry so much about the picks later.

The Knicks are sure as hell going for it now, and how much you like this ultra-aggressive deal for Bridges depends on how real you thought the Knicks were once they acquired Anunoby on Dec. 30. The sample size is not huge. They immediately ripped off a 12-2 run before both Anunoby and Julius Randle — yup, still here! — suffered injuries in late January. Randle never returned. Anunoby did, and New York kept on winning — posting a dominant record and scoring margin whenever both he and Jalen Brunson were available.

That continued into the postseason until injuries — including Anunoby’s hamstring injury — decimated them in the second round against the Indiana Pacers.

It looked pretty damn real to me. I am on record on both the Lowe Post podcast and various ESPN television segments over the past three months arguing the fully healthy Knicks were the East’s second-best team and would have posted the greatest challenge to Boston — a tougher fight than last season’s healthy versions of the Milwaukee Bucks and Philadelphia 76ers might have put up.

That’s impossible to know, of course. We didn’t see the fully healthy version of any of those three teams in the playoffs. As great as Brunson was last season, the Knicks would not have had the best player in any series against Milwaukee or Philly — and probably not against Boston, either. Even at full health, Boston would have been favorites over New York in a series. Bridges narrows the gap.

All three teams will look different and maybe better next April. Philadelphia will find some way to add talent this week via its bounty of cap space. The Bucks get another year of seasoning with the Damian Lillard/Antetokounmpo/Khris Middleton trio under head coach Doc Rivers — plus an offseason to tweak around the edges.

With Bridges, the Knicks are betting on top-end depth and wings galore, emulating Boston in both ways. Bridges is one of the NBA’s premiere two-way support players. Don’t worry too much about his lagging efficiency as the No. 1 option on an overmatched and lifeless Nets team last season. He won’t be asked to do that in New York. The fact that he can in a pinch — that he did it well in his first few months as a Net in 2023-24 — bodes well for New York’s offense when Brunson is on the bench, and for the Knicks’ potential leeway in dealing Randle at some point if their combined salaries become too onerous.

Presuming they re-sign Anunoby, the Knicks will start Anunoby and Bridges together — instantly forming maybe the single best defensive wing tandem in the NBA. Both are good 3-point shooters, Anunoby especially so from the corners. Brunson and whoever is leftover between Mitchell Robinson and Isaiah Hartenstein will start too. (Hartenstein is a free agent, and the Knicks are bracing for a robust market for him, sources said.)

The fifth starter would presumably be Randle, shifting Donte DiVincenzo and Josh Hart into bench roles alongside Miles McBride, whatever backup center emerges (Precious Achiuwa is a restricted free agent), and whoever else earns head coach Tom Thibodeau’s trust. The Knicks own the No. 24 and No. 25 picks tonight, and it now behooves them to make the most of those selections — to turn them into cost-controlled rotation players, or future picks that give them more chances at finding such players.

Bridges might be potent enough as a secondary option to open up the theoretical dream of Randle as a bruising sixth man. Given Randle’s stature as an All-Star and two-time All-NBA player, that is likely untenable. And that’s fine. Thibodeau can stagger minutes strictly enough to mimic this arrangement, and the Knicks missed Randle’s inside-out shot creation alongside Brunson in the playoffs.

Executives in 2022 proffered two more connected explanations for the surge in all-in, pick-heavy deals: the notion that championship windows were shorter in the player empowerment era — that you had to strike when you had the fleeting chance — and that teams who risked such trades could pivot later and deal their own star player to some other hungry would-be contender for an incoming bounty of replacement picks.

The Nets have in some ways proven that latter theory correct. Their move for Harden went bust, and they recouped valuable draft equity by flipping him to Philadelphia. They didn’t trade any first-round picks to acquire Durant, but they re-flipped him for a bundle when their would-be superteam was dying. The twist here is the Rockets deal. The Nets didn’t just recoup any picks. They recouped some of their own picks.

Can we pause for a second and admire the glorious wreckage of one of the craziest decades any franchise has experienced in the history of American pro sports? In 12 years, the Nets: relocated; chased contention by trading their future (Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum!) for Pierce and Garnett; flopped and got very bad; rebuilt slowly, culminating in a 42-win season and a first-round loss in 2018-19; formed a superstar trio the next two calendar years; hired Steve Nash as head coach out of nowhere; traded all three over the next two years; and now have gone all the way back to traditional tanking. They even killed their own mascot — Brooklyn Knight. My god. It’s no wonder whatever Brooklyn fans actually exist just walk around in a constant state of confusion.

New York correctly recognized short windows on every front. This team can win big now. There is and was no guarantee they will be able to win quite as big in three or four years. By then, Randle, Brunson and Robinson were already slated to be on heftier new contracts — and older. Bridges and Anunoby now join them in both senses. The Knicks are loaded rich and the cap and apron should leap by the maximum-allowed 10% in each of the next few seasons, but keeping this all together is going to be tricky — and was always going to be tricky. The Knicks will forfeit some transactional maneuverability if and when they cross the second apron.

It’s a risk, and an overpay in cold terms — but one that’s worth it if you believe in the Knicks pre-Bridges infrastructure and trust their evaluation of what other options might have been available now or in the next few transaction cycles.

Championships and Finals appearances are never guaranteed. They are almost always unlikely outcomes, even for the very best teams. All you can do is try to build a team that, if things break right, has an honest shot at getting that far. Bridges can be the final piece to a New York team with that level of upside — and some maneuverability going forward.