June 29, 2017

Marco Belinelli
SG, 6’5, 210lbs, 31 years old, 10 years of experience

The recipient of nearly 1,800 minutes, Belinelli shot pretty well from outside after an anomalous poor season the year prior. He is only as good as the team around him and needs setting up, not one for doing much of his own volition, especially defensively. But in being an effective catch-and-shoot player, Belinelli pretty much stood alone from the wing position for the Hornets. He hasn’t a huge amount of company on the Hawks, either, although the wing rotation has a lot of options if not much shooting. Belinelli has one more year under contract, and should be considered available to trade even with that short-term usefulness, be-cause he is a viable trade asset on a team with few.

Player Plan: One year at $6,606,000 remaining. As evidenced by the trade that brought him to Atlanta, he is not exactly a highly prized piece, for he was merely filler In that deal; that said, if there is some value to be found somewhere, take it.

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March 2, 2017

At the 2016 NBA Draft, a few trades occurred, and some others were agreed upon that for salary cap purposes only were fully finalised two weeks later. This is all normal.

Quite a few of these trades involved draft picks, picks for both that year and the future, and quite a few of those draft picks were first rounders. This is also normal.

The perceived value of them, however, was abnormally inconsistent.

#12 pick Taurean Prince was traded by the Utah Jazz in a three team deal that netted them George Hill straight up.

#13 pick Georgios Papagiannis was combined by the Phoenix Suns with #28 pick Skal Labissiere and 2014 #27 pick Bogdan Bogdanovic, then shipped to the Sacramento Kings for #8 pick Marquese Chriss.

#20 pick Caris LeVert was traded by the Indiana Pacers, along with a future second round pick (protected 45th through 60th from 2017 to 2022 and only thereafter unprotected, thereby almost certainly ensuring the pick will be a high second rounder), to the Brooklyn Nets in exchange for Thaddeus Young.

#21 pick Malachi Richardson was traded by the Charlotte Hornets to the Sacramento Kings in exchange for Marco Belinelli.

And finally, #31 pick Devonta Davis and #38 Rade Zagorac pick were combined by the Boston Celtics and sent to the Memphis Grizzlies in exchange for a 2019 first round pick, protected through the first eight picks.

In summation, the #12 pick had seemingly enough value to obtain a very high quality starting point guard in the prime of his career, while the pick immediately after it had to be packaged with two other first rounders just to move up five spots in a weak draft. Similarly, while admittedly packaged with a likely decent second rounder, the #20 pick was deemed sufficiently good to get Young, a valuable and versatile contributor in the prime of his career with at least two years to run on his contract, whereas the pick below it yielded only Belinelli, a journeyman backup shooting guard on an expiring contract who, while fine, is demonstrably less effective than Young as an NBA player, and who was coming off of the worst season he has had since his rookie campaign. [...] It is of course accepted that not all picks are created equal. That much is obvious. Draft spots and talent levels of draft classes vary wildly, and thus so does the variance in their values. But when one team trades a first rounder for 82 games of Marco Belinelli, and another team will not part with picks for mid-20s All-Stars, that variance is increasingly hard to fathom.

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