The Oklahoma City Thunder had an amazing summer, from winning the NBA Championship to adding multiple players in the NBA Draft. One move that is flying under the radar was trying to get out of a colossal mistake from last year -- one of the only blemishes on Sam Presti's record. That is drafting and trading away Dillon Jones.
It's an uncomfortable thing to try and say anything negative about Thunder general manager Sam Presti. He flawlessly executed a quick rebuild and has built not only the reigning champions but the prohibitive favorites for next year and likely many years beyond.
Much of his success has come via the NBA Draft. The team just locked up Chet Holmgren and Jalen Williams to long-term extensions after drafting both in the same draft in 2022. Cason Wallace and Jaylin Williams played key roles after being recent draft picks. You can obviously go all the way back to his first years with the team to see his work drafting three future MVPs in consecutive years with Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook and James Harden.
His draft day acumen is why, in part, it was so puzzling to see the move that he made in the 2024 NBA Draft. He kicked things off by drafting Nikola Topic 12th overall, and after missing last season due to injury, Topic showed plenty of potential at Summer League as a potential rotation player down the road. Later in the draft, Presti took Ajay Mitchell with the 38th pick; Mitchell could be a full-time rotation player as early as this season, and played real minutes for them last season.
Sam Presti made a bizarre decision
In between, however, Presti made a very puzzling move. He traded five future second-round picks to go up into the first round and take Weber State forward Dillon Jones with the 26th pick of the draft. It was a move that made little sense at the time and turned out to be a complete disaster.
Sam Vecenie of The Athletic ranked Jones 65th on his 2024 Big Board. Jones is 6'5" but trying to play power forward, an incongruous combination. He was not a shooter in college and that carried through into the NBA. He was not and is not an impact defender. He has a high level of feel for the game and is built like a linebacker a la Lu Dort, but he is the opposite of a Presti pick in that he lacks positional size and shooting touch. It was a bizarre selection.
One year later, Presti was convinced he had made a mistake. Rather than earmark a roster spot for a player who would never pan out in Oklahoma City, he turned around and dumped Jones on the Washington Wizards, attaching a second-round pick to him for Washington to take him. That's a first-round pick being salary-dumped just one year into his NBA career. That's an epic whiff.
In the grand scheme, the Thunder are fine. This was not David Kahn taking two point guards ahead of Stephen Curry bad; the Thunder used 6 second-round picks, of which they have billions, to draft and dump Jones. Yet it's also hard to call it anything other than what it is: an embarrassing miss for the best general manager in basketball.
Jones will get a chance with the Wizards to prove he is an NBA player. He was never going to have room to do that on the title favorites. The Oklahoma City Thunder made a mistake, but to their credit they owned it and moved on quickly. Even when they mess up, the Thunder make the right move.