On July 6, 2024, the New Orleans Pelicans shocked the NBA world by making a massive trade towards the end of the summer's free agency proceedings. Just when the league and its followers thought that most of the player movement had wrapped up, they went out and acquired Dejounte Murray from the Atlanta Hawks in return for a package featuring Dyson Daniels, E.J. Liddell, Larry Nance Jr., Cody Zeller, and two future first-round picks.
It's hard for the Pelicans and their faithful to not look back on that deal with some level of disdain. After all, Dyson Daniels is having a "breakout" season in an expanded role with the Hawks, even if his third-year rise is a bit overstated. Daniels has been the best player involved in the trade by default so far.
It's difficult to truly gauge this deal properly considering that Dejounte Murray has only played in 31 games with New Orleans. He fractured his left hand in the season opener, struggled to regain his form and efficiency after returning, and then unfortunately went down with a torn Achilles that will sideline him for the remainder of the year. It'd be unfair to judge the Pelicans' side of the trade before Murray has a chance to have a real impact for New Orleans, but there's already one aspect of the deal that they should be deeply regretting.
The Pelicans will regret sending the Hawks the Lakers' 2025 first-round pick
No matter what happens moving forward, the Pelicans won't have to worry about the Dejoute Murray trade looking like the worst deal of the year. That mantle will almost certainly reside with the Dallas Mavericks and their President of Basketball Operations Nico Harrison for the rest of NBA history, in acknowledgement of their blockbuster move that sent 25-year-old perennial MVP candidate and last year's Western Conference Finals MVP Luka Doncic to the Los Angeles Lakers in exchange for Anthony Davis and a few other parts.
Harrison became infamous overnight for his daring decision, earning the derision of fans all over the world. He became so hated in his own city of Dallas that he's had to beef up security at the Mavericks' games and has even had audience members ejected for stuff like mouthing "fire Nico" while on the jumbotron. He's probably not very well liked in Slovenia either, or in any NBA city that has fans who might've wanted the opportunity to make an offer for Luka Doncic.
There's another party that Nico Harrison might've given the short end of the stick to though, one that hasn't been discussed much: the Pelicans. As part of the Dejounte Murray trade, New Orleans sent Atlanta the Lakers' unprotected 2025 first-round pick. When the deal went down, Executive Vice President David Griffin and the rest of the Pelicans' brass were probably assuming that they were sending the Hawks a pick in the late teens at best. When it's all said and done though, they may have gifted Atlanta a valuable lottery pick, one that could've given the Pelicans' another roll of the dice for Cooper Flagg.
The Lakers may be currently seated in the fifth seed in the Western Conference, but they're just three games ahead of the seventh-seed Minnesota Timberwolves and just seven games up on the 11th-seed Phoenix Suns. The margins in the West this season are paper-thin.
Trading for a player of Luka's caliber could theoretically only help the Lakers' playoff chances, but, in reality, LA would've been better off keeping Anthony Davis if this season was all that mattered. Thankfully for them, that's not the case. The Lakers made this deal to give themselves another decade or more with one of the game's top talents in Doncic, this season be damned.
That's why it didn't matter that much that LA left themselves without a starting center after making the Davis-Doncic swap. In their defense, the Lakers did try to address that hole by trading for Mark Williams, but the deal ultimately fell through due to Charlotte Hornets' failure to properly disclose their center's health concerns.
Now, the Lakers are left with Jaxson Hayes as their starting center and a roster that was built around LeBron James and Anthony Davis, not LeBron and Luka. And the Atlanta Hawks own the rights to their first-round pick this summer, not the Pelicans.
LA could certainly still pull through and make the playoffs. After all, they have two of the greatest players in NBA history on the same team. But, as they made the Luka trade for the future, they could also plummet in the standings for the remainder of the year without much worry or backlash, gifting the Hawks an extra lottery pick — one that used to belong to the Pelicans. In the past three draft lotteries, we've seen at least one notable jump, including Atlanta jumping from 10th to first last year. Had New Orleans known that the Davis-Doncic trade was going to happen, they would have wanted to hold onto the Lakers' 2025 first-round pick. We'll see just how much they end up regretting that part of the Dejounte Murray deal come the 2025 NBA Draft lottery.