New Orleans Pelicans 2020 NBA Draft: Exploring David Griffin’s History

Investing David Griffin’s History with the NBA Draft and what it means for the New Orleans Pelicans

I want to start this exploration before David Griffin’s time in Cleveland, with the beginning of his career working for the Phoenix Suns. Griffin spent 17 seasons in Phoenix working his way up from video room intern to Assistant General Manager. That time in Phoenix in many ways shapes the executive he is today.

In Griffin’s time with the “7 seconds or less” era Suns, he was working for a team that was aggressive in their pursuit of a championship. The Suns at that time built an impressive core with youngsters Shawn Marion and Amar’e Stoudemire at the helm. That core was ultimately completed with the team’s signing of point guard Steve Nash in the 2003 offseason.

With that core, Griffin as assistant GM and his boss, then General Manager Steve Kerr aggressively attempted to build a champion by routinely trading 1st round picks in win-now moves. These trades featured trading away picks that eventually became All-Star players Luol Deng, Rajon Rondo, and Serge Ibaka.

It wasn’t all bad though, during Griffin’s time with the Suns, they did make the sneaky draft night move to acquire Slovenian point guard Goran Dragic. In the end, Griffin’s time with the aggressive Suns front-office resulted in a lot of Western Conference Finals appearances but no championship success.

Once Griffin left to run the show for the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2014, his arrival coincided with the signing of LeBron James; giving the Cavaliers of a duo of number one overall picks in James and Kyrie Irving. With that tandem in place, Griffin dealt a lot of first-round picks away, but this time with a more calculated approach.

To build a title team in Cleveland, Griffin decided to move the first overall pick in Andrew Wiggins for All-Star Kevin Love, and trade more future firsts for depth pieces Timofey Mozgov and Channing Frye. This time his moves resulted in building a team around LeBron James strong enough to win an NBA Championship in 2016.

This history leads us to the New Orleans Pelicans, after trading away Anthony Davis and building a large chest of draft picks, it’s fair to wonder if Griffin is going to build through the draft or just trade those picks away too.

An interesting oddity happened last season when Griffin traded the 4th overall pick for picks 8 and 17 to select more players and that move has begun formulating a theory for me.