Fireworks for promised for the NBA Draft last Thursday. Loaded with assets and a wheeler-dealer general manager leading the charge, Thunder fans expected a lot of activity from their team. Instead, the end result was mostly a dud.
All-day, rumors swirled that Oklahoma City was the most active team in trade discussions. Some believed they were willing to offload franchise centerpiece Shai Gilgeous-Alexander for as little as an incremental advance in the draft order. Then, as the names were called in Brooklyn, nothing happened.
The first five picks went just about how most analysts predicted. Oklahoma State’s Cade Cunningham went to Detroit. The Rockets selected G-League product Jalen Green. Cleveland made noise about trading the third pick, but their ridiculous demands were not met, so they took Evan Mobley out of USC. Toronto surprised a few by selecting rumored OKC target Scottie Barnes at four, but then Orlando got things back on track by taking Gonzaga’s Jalen Suggs.
With all the marquee names off the board, the Thunder at six were the first team with a true mystery to go on the clock. Would they take UConn scoring machine James Bouknight, who had been linked to them? Would they swing for the fences with Jonathan Kuminga and his tantalizing potential? Or would they make everyone say, “Huh?”
They went with the last option and selected Australian teen heartthrob Josh Giddey. He was a name I included on my list of players to get familiar with in my draft preview last week (I described him as “the Australian Cade Cunningham”), but I added him expecting that he could be considered with the 16th or 18th pick OKC possessed. Needless to say, the pick was seen as a reach in the mid-lottery range.
There will be more on Giddey later, but the Thunder’s draft had just begun. As the rest of the lottery unfolded, especially as Bouknight and analytic darling Alperen Sengun tumbled out of the top-10, OKC fans kept expecting to get notification that the Thunder were going to make a trade to consolidate their other picks, or even use some future capital.