Pacers pull off draft-pick trade with West team

The Spurs have agreed to trade the No. 38 overall pick in this year’s draft to the Pacers in exchange for a future second-round pick and cash, reports Shams Charania of ESPN.

The pick headed to San Antonio is the Kings’ 2030 second-rounder, according to Jake Fischer of The Stein Line.

While the deal is the first reported first draft-night trade, it technically won’t even affect Wednesday’s results, since the Pacers won’t make their newly acquired No. 38 pick until Thursday.

San Antonio still holds a pair of lottery picks at No. 2 and No. 14, but Indiana previously traded away its own first-rounder and only controlled the No. 54 overall pick, so this will give the team a second 2025 selection.

The fact that the Pacers are agreeing to this trade now instead of waiting to see who’s on the board suggests that they’re not necessarily targeting a specific player at that spot.

For a team flirting with the luxury-tax line, the ability to select a player at No. 38 and sign him to a rookie-minimum contract could be valuable, since that player’s cap hit ($1.27M) would be $1M less than the cap charge for a player on a veteran-minimum deal ($2.3M). It’s also worth noting, as Bobby Marks of ESPN notes, that the No. 23 pick Indiana traded away last week would’ve carried a cap hit of roughly $3.2M.

As Keith Smith of Spotrac notes, sending out cash will hard-cap the Pacers at the second tax apron for the 2025-26 league year.