Recently, I wrote that the Nuggets mission ahead of the NBA trade deadline is an obvious one; trade Zeke Nnaji for a rotation player. Nnaji is the fifth highest-paid player on the Nuggets, in the first year of a four-year, $36 million de-escalating deal; he makes $8.8 million this year.
But Nnaji has almost completely fallen out of Michael Malone’s rotation over the past year. Even with injuries and a lack of options in the frontcourt, Nnaji hasn’t been able to carve out a consistent role in Denver.
Still, Nnaji is only 23 years old, has solid size and athleticism, and can stretch the floor with his shooting as a big man. There’s a world where a team could see Nnaji as an intriguing young prospect who just needs a change of scenery and could potentially thrive in an expanded role - especially on a young rebuilding type of team.
Jake Fischer: Nuggets must pay heavily to move Nnaji
But on Friday, Jake Fischer of Bleacher Report, on a live show to discuss the NBA’s trade landscape, talked about the Nuggets and stated that to move off of Nnaji, they will have to “add a lot of draft capital”.
That pretty much eliminates the idea of convincing a team to take a shot on Nnaji. It appears that the word is out on him around the league and he’s mostly just viewed as a contract at this point. Unfortunately, with three more years on the deal, we are now faced with the reality that any Nnaji trade is likely to be no more than a salary dump.
The other troubling thing about this report from Fischer is that the Nuggets really don’t have a lot of draft capital to trade. The Nuggets have traded their second-round picks all the way out through 2031 and they’ve traded away their first-round picks in 2025, 2027, and 2029.
The Stepien Rule doesn’t allow teams to trade first-round picks in back-to-back years, so that means the earliest pick the Nuggets can trade would be a 2031 first-round pick.
There are two ways to look at that; on the one hand, teams and GMs probably won’t be that excited about gaining draft picks more than five years in the future to take on four years of Zeke Nnaji. But on the other hand, that far in the future, Nikola Jokic may have declined and with the dearth of draft capital, the Nuggets may be quite bad; that pick could become a major asset.
The Nuggets must be careful as well. They badly need to make moves and upgrade this roster to maximize Jokic’s prime. But they also can’t just be giving away their few remaining upgrades for players who don’t move the needle.
This is a very tense situation and Calvin Booth needs to be extremely diligent. Given the lack of assets, the team doesn’t have many moves left to make. The next one needs to be a slam dunk and giving up the remaining draft capital just to dump Nnaji’s deal would not be that.