The Pelicans have sent Jordan Hawkins, Micah Peavy, a future second-round pick and a future second-round pick swap to Memphis for AJ Johnson and Taj Gibson, per the reporting that surfaced this morning. Four players, two pieces of draft capital, and one detail that tells you more than the names do: New Orleans paid to make this trade, not the other way around.
Read that again, because it's the part that will get skipped in the tracker updates. Hawkins was the 14th pick in the 2023 draft. Three years later his own team attached a second-rounder and a swap to move him. That's a tell.
Why did the Pelicans trade Jordan Hawkins?
I don't have New Orleans' front office on the line, so I'll stick to what the deal itself says. When a team sweetens a package to move a young player still early in his career, it's usually one of three things: a roster crunch, a money problem, or a quiet admission that the fit was never going to arrive. Sometimes all three holding hands.
Hawkins came into the league as a shooter, and shooters are the most fit-dependent players in basketball. Put one next to the right playmaking and downhill pressure and he looks like a rotation staple who bends a defense before he ever touches the ball. Put him in a lineup that already has too many mouths at the same portion of the floor and he looks like a guy hunting for minutes that aren't there.
checked the almanac: hawkins was launching threes for uconn's 2023 national championship team, and that was barely three years ago. the league moves faster than the memory does.
What the Grizzlies are actually buying
Memphis is the side that gets paid twice here. They add Hawkins and Peavy and they collect a second-rounder plus a swap for the trouble of taking on the experiment. That is the shape of a deal a team makes when it believes it can be the better environment for a specific skill and it doesn't mind being wrong, because the cost was somebody else's picks.
Peavy is the piece that gets undersold in a headline that leads with Hawkins. Young wings who can be pointed at the other team's best perimeter player are the connective tissue of a rotation, and they tend to be cheap. If he defends, he plays. If he plays, this trade grades out fine for Memphis even if the shooting swing never lands.
Here's the accounting, plain:
| Going to Memphis | Going to New Orleans |
|---|---|
| Jordan Hawkins | AJ Johnson |
| Micah Peavy | Taj Gibson |
| Future second-round pick | |
| Future second-round pick swap |
Two bodies and two picks in, two bodies out. On paper that is a small trade. In practice it is a roster-shaping trade for two teams operating in the same conference and the same range of ambition, and September deals like this one are exactly where next spring's rotations get quietly decided.
What comes next for both teams
For New Orleans, AJ Johnson is the interesting name. He's a young guard whose NBA career has already involved more than one address, which in this league is less a verdict than a scheduling accident. Change of scenery guys are worth watching in October, not judging in September.
For Memphis, the question is simpler and harder: do they have the ball handling to make a shooter matter? Shooting doesn't create itself. It gets created for you.
What I'm watching is training camp usage. Specifically whether Hawkins is running off actual actions or standing in a corner waiting on kick-outs, and whether Peavy gets pointed at starters in preseason minutes. Those two things will tell you what Memphis thinks it just bought long before the standings do. And the second-round pick swap, the piece nobody will remember by November, is the kind of small currency that shows up years later attached to a deal that actually matters.