You can tell a lot about a trade by how fast a team throws away one of the players it just acquired.
On Tuesday, September 8, 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. On Wednesday, September 9, they waived Gibson. One day. If you blinked, you missed the entire New Orleans chapter of his career.
What makes this more than a shrug: reporters flagged the waiver as a near-certainty the moment the trade was announced, not some sudden change of heart. Gibson was never really a plan that fell through, cutting him was the plan all along. He was ballast dressed up as a basketball player, dropped into the deal so the salary math would balance.
Once you accept that Gibson was never really coming to New Orleans in any meaningful sense, the trade sits there exposed. So what did the Pelicans actually pay for?
Follow the money, because that's the whole reason
The stated motive was cap relief. New Orleans needed room to sign Bennedict Mathurin to a two-year, $16 million deal, and this trade dropped them to roughly $9.5 million under the first apron, where the Mathurin signing then hard-caps them. That's not a knock I'm inventing, it's the stated reasoning: this move was about the payroll first, the roster a distant second.
Which is fine, as far as it goes. Teams shed money all the time. The problem is the toll booth on the way out.
To solve its own cap problem, New Orleans attached a second-round pick and a swap. Per SI, the Pelicans hold only one second-round pick over the next three years, so if that's the pick headed to Memphis, they've cleaned out the cupboard for the near future. You don't usually pay draft capital to give money away. You get paid to take money on. New Orleans did it backwards.
Add up the return and squint
Look at what came back. Gibson, a 41-year-old who appeared in 10 games for Memphis last season averaging 3.4 points and 2.7 rebounds, waived inside 24 hours. And AJ Johnson, the No. 23 overall pick from the 2024 draft, who has already bounced through several organizations and never played a game for Memphis before this. Johnson averaged 3.3 points across 48 games last season split between Dallas and Washington. His spot in New Orleans isn't even guaranteed. As of this writing he'll battle in training camp for the 15th roster spot, and the team hasn't decided whether he stays.
So the honest accounting of the return is a veteran cut in a day, and a young flier who might not make the team. That's the basketball value New Orleans surrendered draft assets to obtain.
Now look at what left. Hawkins was the Pelicans' 2023 lottery pick, 14th overall. He'd fallen out of the rotation, so moving on from him isn't the crime here. But Peavy is a 2025 second-rounder who logged real rotation minutes as a rookie and showed enough to make people notice. Him plus a pick plus a swap, for cap relief, is a heavy invoice.
The grades disagree, the diagnosis doesn't
The analyst verdicts split. SI handed New Orleans a D and called giving up Peavy plus a pick "baffling." Yahoo's grader was gentler at a B-, but for the same underlying reason, writing that Memphis "is basically getting paid to help the Pelicans clean up the payroll." Those are opinions, and reasonable people can argue the letter. What nobody disputes is the shape of it: the Grizzlies got compensated to absorb someone else's math.
The waiver just confirms it in plain sight. If Gibson had any role to play, you keep him for a week, a preseason look. You don't hand him back to the waiver wire before the ink dries. The speed is the confession.
The bill was always going to come
None of this means signing Mathurin was wrong. It might well be the smartest thing New Orleans did all summer. But a good signing doesn't erase the cost of the cleanup around it, and the cleanup here cost draft capital a rebuilding-ish roster can't casually replace.
Taj Gibson deserved better than being a spreadsheet entry that got deleted after 24 hours, and he'll land somewhere fine. The Pelicans, though, spent real assets to make a problem disappear, and the fastest way to see that clearly is to watch how quickly they discarded the one piece they told everyone was part of the return.
