Two days after restructuring their front office leadership, the Nuggets are entering the NBA draft without a pick.
Blame Aaron Gordon. He was the crowning jewel of an eventual championship-winning core, but acquiring him from Orlando four years ago cost the Denver its 2025 first-rounder.
Probably worth it.
But it sets the stage for a boring Wednesday night at Ball Arena, in all likelihood. The Nuggets also said sayonara to their 2025 second-round pick in an expensive salary-shaving trade last summer, making them the only team in the league without a selection this week. The first round is Wednesday (6 p.m. MT, ESPN), exactly 30 hours after Ben Tenzer and Jon Wallace were introduced as unofficial co-general managers. The second round is Thursday, same time, same network.
“We have a great group of front office people that have been working around the clock before Jon started,” said Tenzer, who was Denver’s interim GM before being named executive VP of basketball operations. “So we feel very comfortable with the draft, and we’re always going to be aggressive looking at getting a good player.”
Last year, former general manager Calvin Booth identified a prospect he was hellbent to obtain and traded up six spots for him. That move emptied the cupboard, burning another three second-round picks. What would it take for Denver’s new management to try something similar?
Trading into the draft from entirely outside of it would be an even more dramatic gambit than what Booth did for DaRon Holmes II. The Nuggets’ only future pick eligible to be traded on draft night is their 2031 first-rounder.
To spend that lone resource on another young and unproven player, especially outside of the lottery (top 14), would be a massively risky allocation — not to mention a rebuke of Josh Kroenke’s decision to fire Booth. The ex-general manager made it his annual strategy to sacrifice future draft capital for immediate late first-round talent, such as Holmes, Julian Strawther and Peyton Watson.
It would be noticeably ironic for Tenzer and Wallace to begin their tenure with a similar maneuver, even if it turned out to be successful.
The more plausible draft-entry strategy for them would be to offer future pick-swap rights or one of their current players. After multiple years of development invested in most of Booth’s draftees, that type of deal would also be risky in its own right. What guarantees that a new player selected in the 20s will immediately be better than Strawther, who recently supplied the performance of his life in a playoff elimination game?
Whether or not Tenzer and Wallace want to acquire a pick, they will likely spend Wednesday and Thursday canvassing for opportunities to get involved in salary-for-salary trades, perhaps even as a third party. The draft is widely anticipated to be the epicenter of transaction season for many teams around the league this year, with some front offices desperate to avoid the competitive ramifications of the luxury tax aprons, and others eager to tinker with their depth charts.
If the Nuggets want to accomplish the latter or simply clear out Dario Saric’s remaining $5.4 million to add space, they might be enabled by the sheer activity of the market. Already in the days leading up to the draft, player movement has been frequent. Saric’s contract could be useful as a salary-matching device if two teams are hoping to complete a trade but aren’t allowed to do so without help. Convenient transactions could materialize.
But that’s the reality of the Nuggets’ situation this week — not much to do other than place a few phone calls, cross their collective fingers and, by the time it’s over, probably twiddle their thumbs.
“Right now it’s just being patient, kind of checking out the landscape, seeing what’s there, what could come our way,” Wallace said Tuesday. “… We’ll do our due diligence to kind of be ahead of the curve and be prepared for whatever might shake itself out.”
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