The Oklahoma City Thunder were one quarter away from winning their first-round playoff matchup against the Houston Rockets this past season. Despite that, they are one of the few teams widely known as a rebuilding team.
OKC has a ton of assets from trades they made with the Los Angeles Clippers for Paul George; and the Houston Rockets for Russell Westbrook. For any rebuilding team, the biggest question is always when do they cash in all those assets to obtain their next star player.
This brings us to LaMelo Ball.
On the daily Locked On Thunder podcast, Host Rylan Stiles discussed the rumor that the Thunder want to trade up in the draft to take LaMelo Ball but there's one thing that could stop OKC.
Rylan Stiles: How do you get from pick 25 to number one? If there's not really a clear package of just stockpiling all of your future draft assets into Minnesota and giving it to Minnesota to get LaMelo Ball and you especially do not want to give up the 2021 pick? How do you get there? It makes me think that maybe there's a deal in place already, an under-the-table handshake agreement. Oklahoma City knows they're somehow going to acquire a top 10 pick whether that's number eight, with the Knicks or whoever it's with, basically, they know right now, under this scenario, that they're not picking it 25 they're actually picking at pick eight. So now you don't need to make up ground from 25 to number one, you just need to move up seven spots.
Then that becomes even more obtainable for the Thunder. To me, that seems like the only way to do this because personally, I'm not giving up future picks. I'm not giving up picks in these in these next two draft classes that I think again have historic generational talents. I'm not throwing away my shot at Cade Cunningham and I'm in no way, throwing away my shot at Cade Cunningham by trading future draft assets right now. It reminds me of a lot of the trade packages we've seen over the last few weeks, mainly when Thunder fans wanted Buddy Hield. I'll use the same analogy, you can go all-in for Buddy Hield or you can call in for LaMelo Ball. However, do you want to do that? Do you really want to go purchase the iPhone 11 today, when the iPhone 12 comes out next month? Do you really want to do that because something better than LaMelo Ball is coming down the pipeline. So you better be sure that LaMelo Ball is the one you want.
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