In late August 2026, the Pelicans agreed to a two-year, $16 million deal with Bennedict Mathurin, a wing they'd chased for over a year. Good player, fine price. One problem: they didn't actually have the room to sign him. Several outlets spelled it out plainly. The agreement was just that, an agreement, and the signing couldn't be completed until New Orleans cleared cap space.
About two weeks later, they cleared it. On Tuesday, per ESPN's Shams Charania, the Pelicans 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. New Orleans gave up two players and two draft assets and got back a 41-year-old veteran one Pelicans-focused outlet expects to be waived, plus a 21-year-old flyer that even a friendly trade-grade piece doubts sticks around. That's not a basketball trade. That's a receipt.
The money moves work, technically. Bobby Marks pegged the savings at $5.7 million, and Spotrac's Keith Smith had New Orleans about $7.9 million under the tax before Mathurin's deal hard-caps them at the first apron. Fine. But you don't get credit for solving a math problem you invented. The front office committed to adding Mathurin before it had the room, which turned dumping Hawkins into a chore it should have seen coming, not a savvy pivot. When your salary relief costs a second-round pick, a pick swap, and a rotation player, you weren't negotiating from strength. You were paying a convenience fee.
The word "extension" doesn't really fit here, though one outlet used it loosely. The Pelicans didn't hand Hawkins a new deal this summer. They picked up his roughly $7 million rookie-scale option back in October 2025, guaranteeing him through this season. He was eligible for a bigger rookie-scale extension this summer, the kind of long-term commitment Victor Wembanyama just signed, and New Orleans passed. Fair enough, too: his fourth season had gone sideways. A No. 14 pick in 2023, he averaged 8.0 points across 174 career games, then slid to 5.1 points in 51 games last season, benched midseason with nine straight DNPs during a cold shooting stretch.
So moving on from Hawkins is defensible on its own. The choreography is what doesn't add up: keep him on the books in October, sit on him all offseason instead of finding a real market, agree to a Mathurin contract you can't yet fund, then dump Hawkins for scraps weeks before the season and staple two draft assets to the deal to make it go. Every one of those steps might be individually explainable. Strung together, they describe a plan that keeps discovering its own consequences a step too late.
Peavy is the part that should sting. He appeared in 61 games last year and scored at least 20 in two of his final three, exactly the kind of cheap, ascending role player a rebuilding team is supposed to hoard, not toss in to grease a cap dump.
This was the main summer move for a front office run by Joe Dumars, coming off a 26-56 season, and one that entered this cycle without a first-round pick to begin with. When you're already short on draft capital and coming off a season like that, shipping out second-rounders to fund a deal you chose to make first is exactly the kind of asset leak a rebuild can't afford.
The grades already split along these lines, and they're fresh reactions, not settled verdicts. SI's Terry Kimble gave New Orleans a D, arguing there was a better path that didn't cost assets. Yahoo was kinder with a B, calling it understandable while flagging the draft capital as the sticking point. Even the charitable take can't get past the sweeteners. When your best review is "reasonable, except for the part where you gave away picks," that's the argument against the process.
Memphis had been circling Hawkins since July and got him at basically no cost, according to its own reporting, while it retools after trading Ja Morant earlier this summer. One outlet called it a textbook flyer for Zach Kleiman. Memphis planned for this. New Orleans didn't, and paid for it.
Mathurin is a legitimate player, 24 years old, averaging 16.2 points over his first four seasons, and if he takes off in New Orleans this trade will read better in hindsight. But you judge process before the results roll in. And the process here was: want the player, sign the player, then scramble to afford the player. Do it in that order and the market always makes you pay.
