Each NBA team’s best trade in franchise history

Portland Trail Blazers

LaMarcus Aldridge and a second-round pick for Viktor Khryapa and Tyrus Thomas (to CHI) (2006)

With few exceptions, the NBA draft is a crapshoot. It’s a system where NBA executives are putting the futures of their respective franchises in the hands of 18 and 19-year-olds fresh out of college. Even with the most polished prospects, there will always be a heightened level of risk.

This makes the practice of going back in time and chiding teams for questioning teams’ past draft mistakes an exercise in satiating ones purported intellectual superiority over general managers, especially when those general managers consistently flail at picking players year after year.

The LaMarcus Aldridge trade in 2006 is the crystallization of this phenomenon. The Bulls took him with the second overall pick in that year’s draft — a pick they got from the Knicks the previous season for Eddy Curry — and quickly flipped him to the Portland Trail Blazers with a 2007 second-round pick for Victor Khryapa and Tyrus Thomas.

Khryapa played two seasons in the Windy City and averaged a robust 2.5 points per game in the black and red.  Thomas collected a grand total of 13 WS in eight seasons with the Bulls, Bobcats, and Grizzlies. Even before getting into what Aldridge did with the Blazers, the Bulls clearly got the short end of this deal in hindsight.

On the other side, Aldridge became one of the greatest players in Blazers history. His 69.6 WS places him fourth on the team’s all-time list and Basketball Reference’s Hall of Fame probability algorithm gives him a 50/50 chance of making it to Springfield. That makes him a shoo-in compared to the guys he was traded for.