Another Western Shakeup + The Shifting Value of Picks

Reaction (both general and Jazz-focused) to both sides of the Westbrook-to-Houston deal. (Photo via espn.com)

Every time it feels like the basketball community might finally be wrapping its collective head around the power structure in the NBA’s Western Conference, something of tectonic proportions happens.

Mike Conley to the Jazz. The Lakers land Anthony David. Kawhi Leonard chooses the Clippers. And now, in the latest plot twist, MVPs Russell Westbrook and James Harden will be reunited in Houston. Every time we turn around, the landscape looks somewhat different at the top of the west.

Westbrook’s move to Houston is big news now and potentially historic in its ramifications. Recent MVPs — Russ won the award just two years ago — are hardly ever traded, and this particular swap puts two of the NBA’s most electric, if also polarizing, on-ball creators in the same backcourt. Westbrook and Harden are both incredibly high-usage players, accustomed to being the primary creation engine in their respective offenses. Westbrook is most dangerous when he gets going downhill, while Harden is a crafty and capable scorer from anywhere on the floor, including with a stepback jumper that has confounded modern defensive principles.

There’s enough diversity between how the two play that they can find opportunities to complement one another. For that matter, people raised the same concerns — “There’s only one basketball!” — when the Rockets acquired Chris Paul, another elite but ball-dominant creator, but Houston make it work. The Rockets averaged 59 wins in CP3’s two seasons there, and were widely considered the biggest threat to the west coast hegemony of the Golden State Warriors.

But the my-turn-your-turn dynamic between Paul and Harden obviously took its tol.. Reports surfaced after their second-round playoff exit that “turmoil” had crept into the Houston locker room. ESPN’s Tim MacMahon described “hard feelings” between and about the Beard-CP3 dynamic.

“It’s always a little contentious when you have two alpha dogs,” a Rockets source told MacMahon in that story.

In that sense, moving from the uber-competitive and hyper-sensitive Paul to the uber-competitive and hyper-sensitive Westbrook might not be the ideal resolution to Houston’s double-alpha dynamic. But the Rockets are hoping that Westbrook and Harden are chummy enough that they can channel their competitive energy outward instead of inward. The two were teammates in OKC early in their careers, and their friendship even predates that experience, to the late ’90s as the pair grew up together in an L.A.-area Boys and Girls Club.

Paul to Westbrook is a worthy gamble in terms of production, too. At 34, Paul has already started to see his playing style transition as he gets further from his prime. He missed 24 games last season, which limited his on-court impact. All told, he added 6.5 Wins Above Replacement. Westbrook added 15.1¹. In a vacuum, Westbrook is an upgrade according to the simplest form of win arithmetic. But the transition from CP3’s surgical style to the battering ram that is Westbrook will also require some adjustment.

Defense will be another area to watch. Both Rocket guards have a reputation for being inconsistent there. It’s not uncommon for a coach to “hide” a subpart defender on a less capable opponent, but when both of your backcourt players have trouble sticking to a guy, you run out of options to mask it. Every time out, one of Harden or Paul is going to have to guard a Steph Curry, a Damian Lillard… or a Donovan Mitchell. 

Speaking of Spida, the next logical question is: how does all of that affect the Jazz in their quest for a competitive breakthrough?

Houston undoubtedly still has to be considered part of the elite tier. They had the second-highest WCF odds for most of last season, and that was before putting two of the last three league MVPs side-by-side. Without accounting for style or fit, they just swapped an elite point guard for an MVP-caliber point guard. On a macro level, they got better.

But the new-look Jazz would be able to hang with the Brodie-Beard Rockets in a 7-game series. In fact, they’ve already had some success scheming for both Westbrook and Harden individually. They were able to limit Westbrook’s access to the rim in a 6-game series win last year, and in the past two postseasons they’ve been able to reduce Houston’s offensive efficiency by trying some different approaches against Harden. In fact, it was the now-departed Paul who was the scheme-buster in the 2018 Jazz-Rox series, dissecting the Jazz’s defensive approach with his near flawless midrange game².

And with Conely and Mitchell as dual backcourt creators, the Jazz also have the personnel to make Houston’s superstars have to work on the other end of the court, too.

In short, the Rockets’ move likely solidifies their stay in the same contention tier as the Jazz, but Utah has the strategies, smarts and personnel to be competitive every time out against Houston.

Rebuilding with picks

The other side of this trade is Oklahoma City’s abdication of their own status within the Western Conference power structure. The shift toward rebuilding was signaled as soon as they surrendered Paul George to the Clippers, became even more obvious with the Westbrook trade, and they’ll be in full-blown rebuild mode once they forward CP3 to a third team, as they are widly expected to do.

OKC resetting creates an interesting referendum on contender-building, since at one point the Thunder employed all of Kevin Durant, Westbrook and Harden — each of whom would eventually be crowned the league’s top performer. If a team can load up on that type of young talent and wind up with nothing to show for it outside a lone Finals appearance and a string of first-round exits, then everything we thought we know about constructing a juggernaut through the draft might need to be revisited.

But the Thunder will again reset, and have already been stockpile enough draft assets to make Sam Hinkie’s “Process” and Danny Ainge’s pick arsenal look meager by comparison. OKC currently owns NINE extra first-round picks over the next seven drafts, plus swap rights on another four. At some point, Adam Silver may just hand his NBA Draft podium over to Thunder GM Sam Presti.

Draft assets are still the smartest way for a franchise at the end of the road to reset with the future in mind, primarily because they give you multiple swings at the piñata in terms of finding the next generation of franchise talent.

But beware — the value of first-round picks is about to shift in a major way, for two main reasons.

First, shorter contracts mean that even if you strike gold with your pick, that doesn’t guarantee you’ll have that player long enough to watch him grow into a title-winning force. Rookie contracts run four seasons, and if an outside suitor foces you to match a second contract, it can be as short as three seasons. So you really only control his destiny for seven seasons, unless he really buys in. For a player drafted at 19, that means he could be out of your grasp by 26. If the NBA eliminates the one-year-out-of-high-school rule, some players will be wriggling free of the teams that drafted them by 25. Few players win a title as their team’s best player that early.

The NBA has tried to legislate a solution to this by giving incumbent teams an advantage in keeping their young stars, but so far it hasn’t worked. Some have scoffed at the extra cash and instead opted to choose their own destiny, even at the cost of tens of millions of dollars. Others have taken the cash up front, and then demanded a trade away from the team after the ink dried on the contract — like Davis did.

You’d still rather have the ability to draft young studs than not, but it’s worth mentioning that the contractual environment is making it harder to see those same dudes rise to megastar status.

But there’s a second factor that not enough people are talking about in terms of how the economics around first-rounders is changing.

When they were negotiating the last collective bargaining agreement, players and team owners recognized that there was a growing gap between salaries at the top of the league and the exception money used to sign role players — including the scale for rookie contracts. They negotiated into their new agreement a phased plan to increase the compensation for first-round picks, and this upcoming season is the first year that the change is fully phased in. This has resulted in some pretty large numbers being attached to the futures of many rookies.

Top overall pick Zion Williamson will be making an eight-figure salary by his second season — something that was previously unheard of on scale contracts. These cheaper deals used to be considered an important staple because if you drafted right, you had a good player locked in at a lower price, helping you to balance your team salarly sheet.

Now, if anything, more young players will get a hefty payday before they’re really able to contribute consistently to winning. Late firsts will still be relative bargains at between $1.3 and 3 million to start, but for early and even mid first rounders, the accelerated pay structure means they’ll be making what essentially amounts to mid-level exception money. The top sixteen picks in this year’s draft will make somewhere between two and four times the amount that teams have to pay to sign veterans to one-year contracts. FOUR TIMES! Option years are also getting more expensive: 17 players drafted last month will have fourth-year team options of $5M or higher, and the decision to opt in on a player at $5M is a completely different calculus than deciding whether to opt in at $2M.

Picks used to be extremely value specifically because they result in players whose on-court value can eclipse their cost. Going forward, the inverse may be true. Teams might have to pay a player a hefty salary before they’re really contributing to wins.

The accelerated pay schedule also applies to fifth-year qualifying offers. In order to keep matching rights on recent first-rounders, teams have to submit a QO for a fully guaranteed one-year contract at a set amount. The risk in doing that is that the player can hurry and claim the QO, play out the one-year contract and then be an unrestricted free agent, but draftees have rarely done that because the QO figures were low enough to be less enticing than accepting a longer-term offer from their teams or scouring the market for an offer sheet.

Not anymore. Williamson’s QO for the 2023-24 season will be a whopping $17.6M. Ja Morant’s will be $15.8M. Even the last pick in the draft, Kevin Porter Jr., will be handed a $5.8M standing offer in the summer of 2023, if the Cavs decide they want matching rights.

At those amounts, two things are going to happen a lot more frequently than they used to. First, more good players are going to take the QO. If a good player can put an eight-figure amount in the bank automatically and then have total liberty the following offseason, that’s going to be a lot more tempting than it is with today’s lower QO amounts. Second, for middling or still-developing prospects, we’re going to see teams forced to not issue a QO at all, and players in whom they have already invested for four years are going to get away because of the fear that they’ll sign a one-year deal at a figure that outpaces their current contribution level.

And, if more players are taking the QO or not getting one at all, then now teams only control their draftees’ futures for 4-5 seasons instead, exacerbating the timeline problem presented above.

This will present a significant change in how teams use first-round picks. You still need them to mine for talent, but those contracts can no longer be used as low-cost investments in a player who is still learning the pro game.

Again, what’s the Jazz angle here? For starters, that’s probably part of why the Jazz were OK moving a pick to land Conley. Nobody in their range of this particular draft class excited them terribly anyway, and since this was the first year with the fully scaled-in pay increases for draft picks, it didn’t make sense to shell out more money for a prospect they liked less.

Indirectly, this information probably casts some interesting light on how OKC — a divisional competitor of the Jazz — is rebuilding. Even if Presti hits paydirt on one of his 13 extra draft assets, hanging onto that player will be costlier, and a long-term commitment much harder to secure.

The implications of this to team-building in a general sense are going to be significant, in ways we probably won’t even understand until the new pay structure has lived for a couple of season within the broader team salary construct. It used to be a foregone conclusion that holding onto scale contracts was smart for all but the most pronounced draft flameouts. Now, the higher costs and shorter timeframes are going to shift the way teams perceive the value of first-rounders, sooner or later.