The Oklahoma City Thunder moved on from their mistake about as fast as possible for an NBA team. Their lack of faith in Dillon Jones has spiraled into a career-destroying summer for the young wing.
It was an extremely curious move even at the time for the Oklahoma City Thunder. This was a franchise that was focused on winning a championship entering the summer of 2024. Rightfully so, in fact, as their moves to trade Josh Giddey for Alex Caruso and sign Isaiah Hartenstein helped to propel them to the 2025 title.
Moving on from Giddey in particular was a massive coup for the front office. They loved Giddey and saw the value in his skillset, but he was never going to be able to scale into the support role this team needed given that they had three stars rising into superstardom. They made the difficult but necessary decision to move on from Giddey, and turning him into Caruso was perhaps the move of the offseason for any team.
Yet in the 2024 NBA Draft, it was as if Sam Presti forgot the very lesson that he had learned about Giddey's inability to scale into a support role alongside the team's stars. The Thunder traded five second-round picks to trade up into the first round and take Weber State point forward Dillon Jones.
Jones had a lot of skill and feel and was a strong defender, but he also had no shot-making ability, was vastly undersized to defend forwards and needed the ball to have any level of value. He was a different version of Josh Giddey but had the same fundamental problem: nothing about his game scaled into a support role on a contender.
The Thunder realized that over the course of the season, of course. Jones popped into the rotation quite often over the course of the year, and he did a whole lot of nothing to suggest he was the right fit with this roster. He shot 38.3 percent from the field and 25.4 percent from deep, defended hard and otherwise was a black hole offensively.
The Thunder moved on from Jones
Oklahoma City, to their credit, didn't prolong the mistake. They cut ties this summer after just one year, dumping him on the Washington Wizards. Jones has talent and deserved another chance, but he was never going to find it on the Thunder. A tanking team like the Wizards was the perfect choice.
Except that they were not, as they turned around and waived Dillon Jones themselves. The Wizards loaded up on a number of "second draft" players this summer, from AJ Johnson to Cam Whitmore to Malaki Branham. That meant that Jones was the odd man out for the 15-man roster.
He should have been an obvious choice for a two-way spot, then, but the Wizards are swimming in some level of dysfunction and gave the two-way spot to failed point guard Sharife Cooper in some sort of bizarre favor or payment to his father, Omar Cooper, who tried to steer rookie Ace Bailey to the Wizards in the 2025 NBA Draft.
That means that Jones is expected to hit free agency after his waiver and hope to find a spot on a two-way deal somewhere else. It's an almost unthinkable place for a first-round pick to be just one year later, but that's how the cookie has crumbled for Jones.
His career is falling apart and so far nothing has happened to stop his downward momentum.