The Chicago Bulls traded their No. 38 pick in this year's draft to the Golden State Warriors for $3.5 million. The Warriors used that pick to draft Jordan Bell, who's turning out to be quite a steal.
General manager Gar Forman's rationale had previously been that they just didn't think anyone on their draft board was worth taking at that slot.
But as Cody Westerlund of CBS Chicago reports, vice president of basketball operations John Paxson says there was another reason why they made that move, and it was financially motivated.
“We had our board up there, and we were sitting there with Jerry and Mike (Reinsdorf) and we said, ‘Here’s five players in the second round that we really value,'” Paxson said in an interview on the Mully and Hanley Show on 670 The Score.
“And when we got to that pick, those five players were gone. And you know, sometimes when you’re dealing in a situation with where you are looking ahead to the future, you have to build up some equity with decisions that you make. You look back to when we did start this rebuild, the first rebuild in 2003, one of the things Jerry did a year into the rebuild was let us use $3 million to buy the Phoenix pick where we got Luol Deng. And so at that point, Jerry at the time stepped up.”
Reinsdorf, the Bulls' owner, is one of the more notoriously stingy owners in the league and refuses to pay the luxury tax despite the Bulls being consistently one of the most profitable franchises in the league.
Forman and Paxson had a somewhat sound rationale of just trading away the pick to save money to use for another time since the players they handpicked were no longer around. It's not necessarily the ideal way a rebuilding team like the Bulls should go about their business in order to get better again, but given their ownership situation, it seemed like a defensible move.
The question now is whether GarPax can last long enough in the job to cash in the equity they built by trading that pick away this year.
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