11 best OKC Thunder acquisitions in franchise 11-year history

OKC Thunder acquires Jerami Grant:

This trade began as a salary dump and ended up being much more. Ersan Ilyasova came over in the Serge Ibaka trade (which will be talked about in the upcoming slides) and played just three games for the Thunder before Presti decided to dump his salary.

So OKC sends a top-20 protected first-round pick to the 76ers (which again ends up to be perfect timing with the Thunder entering rebuild mode) to take on Ilyasova’s contract and in return, the Thunder got Jerami Grant.

At the time Grant was just a young, athletic forward OKC thought they’d to take a chance on as a throw-in for their salary dump trade. But, Grant ended up turning out to hold much more value than his “just a throw-in guy” label. Within his first three seasons with the Thunder, he was able to slide his way into a starting spot averaging 13.6 points per game in his third year.

This move ended up paying off hugely after seeing how Grant improved post-trade. This was also further evidenced in trade number seven on this list. On that slide, we looked at what OKC later was able to get in return for sending Grant to Denver (a top-10 protected first-rounder).

Looking deeper into these draft picks, it would appear OKC would likely fall within the top 20 picks in 2020 and therefore keep their pick sent to the 76ers and the Nuggets are looking to be one of the top teams in the west in 2020 so their pick will more than likely fall out of the top-10 and transfer to OKC.

So if you merge those trades together, basically OKC was able to dump Ilysova’s contract and gain an additional first-round pick in the process. That’s a solid pair of deals for the Thunder.