The Thunder and the Kings completed an early-season trade that surprised most observers. Oklahoma City acquired second-year player Nique Clifford from Sacramento in exchange for two second-round picks, as first reported by ESPN’s Shams Charania.
The trade is strange from the Kings’ side, and we’ll get to it. As far as the Spurs are concerned, however, the biggest impact comes from the Thunder once again getting cost-controlled, young talent for middling draft assets to bolster their depth in the present and the near future. Let’s start there.
Clifford won’t likely make a big difference this year, but the trade puts OKC in a better overall position
First things first: Clifford is not Jared McCain. All they have in common is that they were both second-year players whose previous teams gave up on them, and they were both traded to Oklahoma City for two second-rounders. The main difference between the two is that McCain was so impressive to start his first season in Philadelphia that he was the frontrunner for Rookie of the Year for a while, before getting hurt. Clifford, who entered the league at 23 years of age, had an acceptable but unimpressive first season for a horrible Kings team. The McCain trade was a bigger deal than this one at the time, and McCain’s impact will likely be bigger than Clifford’s in the future.
With that out of the way, it’s still a good move for Oklahoma City, as they needed depth at the wing after losing Jalen Williams and likely Cason Wallace for the rest of the season. Clifford is 6’5 with a 6’8 wingspan, a jack-of-all-trades player who can fill in the gaps in lineups. He’s someone who, in theory, can contribute in many different ways, which is always helpful for good teams that already have elite scorers and creators in place and can use guys who won’t demand too many touches. There’s a really good chance he thrives as a secondary or tertiary creator in Oklahoma City while providing solid defense. Considering what it took to get him, he’s not a bad stopgap.
The real impact this trade could have, however, is on the future affordability of an increasingly expensive Thunder roster. Clifford is almost certainly not good enough to give OKC even half of the production of either of their starting wings who are out with injury, but he could be a solid depth piece going forward. He’s in the second year of a very cheap rookie deal, so Sam Presti could get almost three years of production out of him on a cost-controlled contract, which means that when everyone returns, the Thunder could have both top talent and depth, which is becoming increasingly hard to do in the apron era.
By essentially re-drafting guys using second-round picks, OKC is building a pipeline of young talent to replace their own misses in talent evaluation and veterans who become too expensive.
That’s bad news for every Western Conference team, including the Spurs.
The new lottery rules might be behind the Kings’ decision to make the trade
Both analysts and people on social media are mocking the Kings for trading a first-rounder to OKC to select Clifford in the 2025 draft only to, just after a season and change, trade him to the Thunder for two seconds. It’s a funny sequence of events from a poorly run franchise, so the jokes are understandable, but, in reality, it isn’t as bad as it might seem at first glance.
First, the first-round pick the Kings traded to get Clifford was the Spurs’ 2027 pick that they got in the De’Aaron Fox trade. The pick will likely be in the late 20s. Moving that asset for a pick of similar value (Clifford was selected 24th overall) was not necessarily a terrible idea by the Kings at the time, since they clearly liked Nique then. And cutting your losses if you think you made a mistake drafting someone is better than falling for the sunk-cost fallacy and holding on even after you’ve concluded the player just isn’t good. Sacramento actually had to send out a second-round pick to shed former lottery pick Devin Carter Jr.’s salary, so they were probably trying to avoid doing the same with Clifford, who was out of the rotation.
But there might be an explanation for the trade that doesn’t involve Sacramento thinking Clifford is a bust: the new lottery rules put the Kings in a bad position, and the move was a way to salvage something.
Starting next draft, the teams with the bottom three records will be in the relegation zone and will actually get worse odds of getting the top pick than a non-playoff team with a better record. The entire point of the change was to make sure coaches didn’t just sit their veterans with fake injuries to tank as hard as they could while trotting out lineups featuring players who didn’t belong in the NBA. It’s entirely possible that the Kings felt like they needed to put guys on the floor who could lift them to at least the fourth-worst record, and thought Clifford was not one of them. Not yet, at least. At that point, trading him before he loses all value after being buried on the bench makes sense.
The Kings’ reputation is so bad that explaining the move this way might seem too charitable, especially since even while playing their veterans, they are 1-8 and are a likely bottom-three team. Whether this specific move by this specific franchise is smart remains to be seen, but it wouldn’t be shocking to see more mediocre-to-bad teams with young players that need developmental minutes that just aren’t there moving on quickly while trying to get some value back.
If that’s the case, contenders should be on the lookout for re-drafting opportunities, and Brian Wright should be ready to pounce if someone he likes becomes available.
