Grades and Fallout For Knicks, Nets, Rockets After Blockbuster Mikal Bridges Trade

Even with the NBA opening up the period between the Finals and the start of free agency for teams to negotiate with their own free agents, things felt eerily quiet on the news front this week.

That was until Tuesday when ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski shattered the silence with a report on the New York Knicks acquiring Mikal Bridges from the Brooklyn Nets.

New York now has four members of the 2015-16 Villanova Wildcats team that won the NCAA championship, but is that novelty worth the massive price the Knicks gave up to put these four together?

Let’s take a closer look at both sides of the deal below.

This is an absolute grand slam for the Nets, especially when viewed in connection with the picks-heavy trade Brooklyn made with the Houston Rockets that followed.

Mere months after ending the 2023-24 campaign in what felt like one of the most dire situations in the NBA, the Nets are suddenly flush with picks and headed toward a full-scale rebuild.

From the Bridges trade alone, they extracted a whopping five first-round picks, one first-round pick swap and two second-round picks. That’s genuinely bonkers for a player of Bridges’ caliber.

With all due respect to the biggest name in this deal, Bridges is a three-and-D specialist who was miscast as a top scoring option in Brooklyn. Catch-all metrics from around the internet pegged him just inside the top 100 for the 2023-24 campaign, and now he’s being moved for a return that’s arguably bigger than the Rudy Gobert haul that everyone guffawed at two years ago.

The picks make this an unqualified win for the Nets, who were nowhere near contention with Bridges in the role he had there.

And somehow, that’s not the only positive aspect of this trade for Brooklyn.

The one player headed from New York to Brooklyn, Bojan Bogdanović, is on an expiring contract that will pay him $19 million in 2024-25. Bridges’ deal pays him $23.3 million this season and $24.9 million in 2025-26, so there are some significant savings here, too.

However you look at it, the Nets aced this trade.

This move is as win-now as win-now moves get.

Two years ago, fresh off a fringe All-NBA campaign, Gobert was dealt to the Minnesota Timberwolves for Walker Kessler, veterans who turned out to be salary filler (Patrick Beverley, Malik Beasley and Jarred Vanderbilt have all since moved on from the Utah Jazz), Leandro Bolmaro, four first-round picks and a first-round pick swap.

Much of the internet (fans and analysts alike) then proceeded to lose its collective mind over the “overpay,” but Gobert helped Minnesota make the conference finals and won his fourth Defensive Player of the Year this season.

It’s hard to imagine that kind of individual upside for Bridges, but New York can make the Eastern Conference Finals. Had they not been ravaged by injuries in the playoffs, they may have made it there in 2024, and Bridges undoubtedly makes them better in the short term.

That’s pretty obvious when you just compare he and Bogdanović in a vacuum. The latter was almost completely out of the Knicks’ playoff rotation before he got swallowed up by the wave of injuries that hit New York. Bridges, on the other hand, is coming off averages of 21.2 points, 3.4 assists and 2.6 threes in his season and change with the Nets.

His efficiency took a big hit there, but he’s better suited to play alongside Jalen Brunson, Donte DiVincenzo and Josh Hart in New York, and not just because they were teammates in college.

Since he was acquired by Brooklyn, we’ve learned that Bridges is much more of a complementary player than a lead one. And New York has one of the fastest-rising leading scorers and playmakers in the league in Brunson. Surrounding him with as much length, toughness, defense and shooting as possible is a smart approach, and Bridges fits that perfectly.

If New York can re-sign OG Anunoby (something it’s still angling for), the versatility and switchability the Knicks will have at the forward spots will be the envy of much of the East. And it could make them the likeliest potential foil for the reigning champion Boston Celtics.

Still, that price tag. That’s, uh, crazy.

Even the most seasoned residents of Mikal Island would have to admit top-40 status is probably pushing it for him. In reality, he’s probably one of the 50-60 best players in the league. And the Knicks just sent the Nets the kind of package typically reserved for superstars.

They can argue that they’re in a unique position to surrender more than most. There were similar arguments made in support of the Timberwolves after the Gobert deal. But there are plenty of future timelines in which all those picks being gone comes back to haunt New York.

In the short-term, this is a clear win, but there is massive potential downside here.

They weren’t technically a party to the Knicks-Nets trade that brought us here today, but the Houston Rockets pulled off a separate deal to bolster their own pick stash on Tuesday.

Wojnarowski’s report on the deal is linked above, but it’s worth another look.

Shortly after that report, Wojnarowski did something he rarely does. He threw a Woj bomb to the internet that hadn’t yet detonated. The fuse might not even be lit, but this news has the potential to be as explosive as anything we’ve seen post-Finals.

“The implications of the Rockets landing the Suns’ picks?” Wojnarowski teased. “Houston wants to trade for Kevin Durant and that becomes far easier if they can return the Suns’ picks that they gave up in the Durant deal to the Nets. Suns have said they’re keeping Durant for now, but that could change next season. But now, Houston has the picks to make the Suns whole again.”

That had most of NBA X double-taking on Tuesday night. And if Houston does indeed wind up with Durant, assuming it doesn’t cost them rising center Alperen Şengün, it’ll be easy to return to this deal and give it an A. That might even be possible if Houston lands a slightly smaller-profile star, something it may be interested in if Phoenix won’t budge on Durant.

For now, though, this one isn’t quite ready for the final grade.