With the 2025 NBA Draft set to get started in a few hours, casual Nuggets fans may be getting excited, thinking the team will add some young talent on Wednesday night. But they’ll quickly find out what the rest of us have known for a long time: the Nuggets have no picks in this draft.
Denver is one of only two teams in the entire league without a pick in either Wednesday night’s first round or Thursday night’s second round (The Rockets are also without a pick after trading for Kevin Durant). Deals are going down left and right, mostly involving picks in this draft, and the Nuggets are left sitting on their hands.
Could the Nuggets make a draft day trade?
There have been some whispers that the team would like to trade back into this draft, but that will be difficult given their lack of picks to send back. They could offer out picks far out into the future, beyond 2030, or trade away some of the young players they’ve been developing, but that feels like doubling down on a problem.
Trading future picks for picks in the moment is what got them into this picks mess. Doing so again would only cause that problem to go on for longer. And the result of all the traded picks is all the young guys on the team now, like Christian Braun, Peyton Watson, Julian Strawther, Jalen Pickett, and DaRon Holmes.
If they want to get into this draft, they’ll likely have to part with at least one of those players, which would just mean restarting the development process with another rookie. It could lead to a better player eventually, but it feels like a backwards move with a 30-year-old Nikola Jokic on the roster.
Nuggets will never stop paying for past mistakes
Ultimately, the two picks in this year’s draft weren’t necessarily wasted; Denver will send #25 overall to the Magic, which stems from the Aaron Gordon trade. And the Nuggets will send the 52nd overall pick to the Suns as part of the DaRon Holmes trade during last year’s draft.
The Gordon move was obviously a home run, and the jury is still out on Holmes after he tore his achilles during Summer League and missed all of last season. But it’s about the greater point and the principle; the Nuggets used draft picks and mortgaged the future to cover up other mistakes, and now they are paying the price with an empty cupboard on draft day.