NBA Draft trades are a tricky beast.
Teams usually want who they want, and so they aren’t that concerned about who the other team ends up with.
But sometimes, they age miserable.
They can even be considered “haunting,” which is the theme of Bleacher Report’s latest piece looking back at the worst recent trades.
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For the Denver Nuggets, the timeline goes back to 2017. That’s when they sent the draft rights to Donovan Mitchell to the Utah Jazz for Trey Lyles and Tyler Lydon.
At the time, ESPN’s Kevin Pelton gave the trade a C- grade. And it looks even worse now.
“Folks weren’t exactly skewering the Nuggets at the time for flipping Mitchell, the 13th pick, for Lydon, the 24th pick, and Lyles, the 12th pick of the 2015 draft,” wrote B/R’s Zach Buckley. “ESPN’s Kevin Pelton, for instance, gave Denver a C-minus for the swap but only granted Utah a B. Hindsight has, of course, since revealed that the Nuggets were totally fleeced here. Lyles spent two seasons in Denver before bolting in free agency, Lydon was gone (from the Nuggets and the league at large) by 2019 and Mitchell has become an offensive force while riding a six-year All-Star streak that seems like it could stretch to another half-decade.”
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It’s impossible to play the NBA history game in full. Who knows if the Nuggets would’ve traveled a similar path if they got Mitchell? And we don’t even know if Mitchell would’ve developed as well in Denver as he did in Utah.
What we do know is that one side of that trade worked out, and the other didn’t.
That’s often the case, but this one is a bit under the radar while also being particularly egregious in Denver history.
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