Kings and Sixers Trade: What It Means for the NBA Draft
The weeks before the draft bring a lot of chatter from NBA front offices about what they plan to do come draft day. Usually, you can count on this talk being accurate about as much as you can count on Charles Barkley not doing any more commercials.
So when some genuine action takes place, as in the trade that occurred today between the Sacramento Kings and the Philadelphia 76ers, you need to look for what it means about a team's genuine intentions.
The Kings traded small forward Andres Nocioni and center Spencer Hawes to the Sixers for center Samuel Dalembert.
On the surface, the deal looks like a trade off of undesirable contracts and little more. But a closer look gives some insight about what each team is thinking in terms of who they might pick in the upcoming draft.
Before the deal, most of the experts had the Sixers taking Evan Turner and pairing him with Andre Iguadola to fill the wing positions in the starting lineup. After the deal, the Sixers now seem very thin in the frontcourt and pretty stacked on the wing. Drafting Turner doesn't make quite as much sense as it did at the start of the day.
Although I like the upside of Hawes, I think he's still a couple years away from being a servicable center in the league. Add that to the fact that Elton Brand hasn't been his old self since coming back from injury, and you start to see the logic of drafting Derrick Favors with the second pick instead of Turner.
As for the Kings, they just had what has been widely reported to be a fantastic workout with Demarcus Cousins. If he's there, all the signs seemed to be pointing to the Kings taking him. But how well would he play alongside the newly acquired Dalembert? Not well, and that could have them looking elsewhere come draft day.
Who would they take instead? One has to assume Wes Johnson would be high on that list, as would Al-Faroq Aminu. Both would give the Kings a legitimate scoring option at the three and provide greater balance to what is a roster in transition.
Then again, maybe they were just that desperate to unload the Nocioni contract, who still has three years and $21 million coming his way. Dalembert will be a free agent after the 2010-11 season, so they could part ways with him at that point and enjoy a great deal of cap space.
But do the Kings really need cap space? I don't see them as a highly desirable destination for many marquee free agents. If they are going to succeed, they need to build their roster through trades and the draft, the way they did a decade ago.
The truth will come up in a week, but if I were a betting man, I'd wager that there's a lot more to take away from the statement made by today's draft than by the "whispers" you'll read about on the web. Actions do speak louder than words, after all.
