Joe Dumars ignored huge upside in Pelicans' traded picks

Pelicans insider Shamit Dua reported that the Hawks front office was shocked when New Orleans offered Atlanta an unprotected 2026 first-round pick — the better of the picks from the Milwaukee Bucks and the Pelicans — to move up from No. 23 to No. 13. The Hawks jumped on the deal and now own one of the more valuable picks in next year's draft.

The Pelicans paid a high price to get No. 23 in the first place. The Indiana Pacers swapped that pick to New Orleans to get their own 2026 first-rounder back, and did it five games into the NBA Finals. When Tyrese Haliburton tore his Achilles tendon four days later, that 2026 pick choice became incredibly more valuable. There was no reason for general manager Troy Weaver to make that deal before the Finals were over, except that the duo of Weaver and team president Dumars acted recklessly.

While landing big man Derik Queen could pay off with a nice cost-controlled player, it's unbelievable that the Pelicans didn't at least put protection on the pick they sent to the Hawks. Haliburton had already been hobbled by injury in the Finals, so why not wait a few days?

The result is that the Pelicans surrendered picks involving three teams whose starting point guard suffered Achilles tears — Haliburton, the Bucks' Damian Lillard and their own Dejounte Murray. That's three teams that could easily end up in the lottery next season, including the Pelicans themselves.

Weaver had a less-than-stellar showing in his last stint as a team executive, while the tail end of Dumars' tenure with the Detroit Pistons got ugly, capped by the disastrous Josh Smith signing, where the forward got $54M for four years and was waived early in Year 2 of the deal.

It's odd that an NBA team would look at the last 17 years of Detroit Pistons basketball, a stretch where they didn't win a single playoff game from 2008-25, and decide to hand over decision-making to the two men most responsible for the extended mediocrity. They're taking big swings, and that approach leads to a lot of strikeouts.

The upside is that teams should be very willing to make trades with the Pelicans. Dua wrote that, at the end of Weaver's time with the Pistons, "teams would call the Pistons regularly to see if they could secure a favorable deal."

Weaver's time with the Pelicans has just started, and the Pacers and Hawks have already secured sweet deals from him. It's not an encouraging start to the Weaver-Dumars era.