Examining the Ivica Zubac Trade Package
On the Ivica Zubac trade, why the Pacers paid a big price for him, why the Clippers had to accept their offer, and how the trade impacts the NBA's tanking crisis.
NBA All-Star Weekend is upon us, and the event meant to celebrate the league is overshadowed by all-time negative vibes. Teams have been jockeying for lottery positioning more aggressively than in the past. The outcry against it is louder than it’s ever been. Some have stopped trying to hide it altogether.
The Wizards, who are already missing their new All-Stars with injuries, received a lot of criticism over the weekend for benching their core against the Nets, another lottery rival. More egregiously, the Jazz benched their veteran All-Stars for the entire fourth quarter with leads against the Heat and Magic.
The unspoken rule is that these things are supposed to happen in late March when teams are already mathematically eliminated from the playoffs or close to it. That rule is being broken with teams resorting to anti-competitive measures far earlier than that.
The common variable between the Wizards and Jazz is that they aren’t guaranteed to keep their first-round picks this year. Both are top-8 protected, meaning they have a 96.1 percent chance of keeping them if they finish sixth or worse. These picks were traded by front offices that preceded both teams’ current regimes, so they couldn’t have anticipated being in this position.
Now we have a third team with those same incentives with the Pacers. Last week, they acquired Ivica Zubac and Kobe Brown from the Clippers for Bennedict Mathurin, Isaiah Jackson, and two first-round picks. One is their unprotected first in 2029. The other is a heavily protected 2026 first that only conveys to the Clippers if it’s 5-9. If it doesn’t convey, it rolls over into a 2031 unprotected first-round pick.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a team trade some form of reverse protections on a first-round pick. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a lottery team trade its upcoming first-round pick with light protection ahead of the trade deadline. But this is the first time a bottom-tier lottery team traded its upcoming first-round pick with heavy protections ahead of the trade deadline.
The Pacers, who had the third-worst record in the league at the time of the trade, just made a trade that artificially created conditions to further incentivize losing. Sure, they added 10-30 protection, but that is window dressing to make the appearance that they might push for the playoffs. They are going to try to keep their top 4 pick this year.
In the league’s eyes, this may be one of the more unethical trades in terms of the tanking component in recent history. They must be furious about it.
