Why the Desmond Bane trade isn’t the overpay by the Magic that it appears to be on first glance

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Four first-round picks and one first-round swap for a player who’s never made an All-Star Game? It’s a curious price on the surface for Desmond Bane, and the reactions have reflected that. Is Orlando running back the Mikal Bridges trade? If Bane is worth this, what is Kevin Durant worth? Have the Magic just reset the entire trade market with this one move?

Well, no. On paper, the Magic gave away control of their drafts for the foreseeable future to get someone who may never be described as a star. The truth, though, is much more complicated. This was actually a fairly rare alignment of circumstances, one in which it actually made a fair bit of sense for this specific team to pay this specific price for this specific player.

Let’s start with the players Orlando gave away here. At worst, the Magic traded away neutral player value. At best, they just overtly dumped their two worst contracts. Kentavious Caldwell-Pope was a splashy free-agent addition last offseason, but he was a borderline disaster for the Magic last season. By box plus-minus, for instance, he was the 10th-worst qualifying offensive player in the NBA last season. He remains a valuable defender, but he’s moving into his age-32 season and has two expensive years left on his deal. He might make more sense on a team with a bit more creation than the Magic, but his contract was a negative the Magic no longer have to deal with.

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Jasmyn Wimbish

Cole Anthony’s contract wasn’t quite as harmful. He’ll only make $13.1 million next season and has a team option for the 2026-27 campaign. That’s small enough to move into someone’s mid-level exception. But part of the reason the Magic felt the need to trade for Bane was Anthony’s offensive stagnation. His minutes have now decreased four years in a row. He has never shot a league-average true shooting percentage or effective field goal percentage. Orlando signed him to a contract that suggested he was, at the very least, a high-level sixth man and perhaps had the upside to start. Instead, he’s more like a playable ninth or 10th man. Maybe not as obviously negative as Caldwell-Pope, but neutral at best.

The cost of getting off of these deals was baked into the cost of the trade, but so was the cost of preserving the young players who actually mattered here. The names Anthony Black and Tristan De Silva might not mean much to you yet, but remember, the Timberwolves were once mocked for sacrificing picks to keep Jaden McDaniels out of the Rudy Gobert trade. Looks pretty smart now, right? The Magic preserved not only their entire present core, but kept the young players they are most excited about moving forward. That was naturally going to inflate the pick cost.

Let’s talk about those picks, specifically. In short, this was a case of quantity over quality. The No. 16 pick in this year’s draft is… fine. It’s a relatively deep draft, but it’s also a non-lottery pick. The potential crown jewel is Phoenix’s 2026 pick, but remember, the Suns aren’t trying to be bad. They’ve gotten there through mismanagement, but they have no incentive to try to lose for anyone else’s benefit. They are currently in the process of trading Kevin Durant. The assumption is that they will get back a package built largely around win-now role players. Is that going to fix their mess of a roster? Probably not. But it likely insulates the Suns against the most embarrassing possible outcomes. As kind as the lottery has been to play-in teams of late, the odds still suggest that unless Devin Booker gets hurt, this pick is probably going to be in the 10-15 range, not the top five.

In most trades of this nature, unprotected picks deep into the future are the best assets involved. Think again of the Bridges trade. Brooklyn controls New York’s unprotected pick in 2031. At that point, Jalen Brunson will be 34 and Karl-Anthony Towns will be 35. It’s fair to assume that this version of the Knicks will be bad by then, or at least different. But that won’t be the case for the Magic in 2028, 2029 or 2030, when the Grizzlies control Orlando’s first-round picks. Those selections only go out through Paolo Banchero’s age-27 season. Even Bane, the oldest player in this new Orlando core, will only be 32 when that last pick gets paid out. Their own picks just aren’t going to be that valuable for the next few years. They’re planning to be good as long as they owe them. And when that debt expires? They can still pivot pretty easily.

That is probably the biggest reason Orlando was willing to pay out such a high quantity of picks here. They’re not selling out their entire future for this roster. They’re building a core for a four- or five-year run. They’ll have Banchero, Bane, Franz Wagner and Jalen Suggs under contract for the next four years. Then, when Banchero turns 27, the Magic are suddenly pick-neutral again and, if they decide they need to, can trade control of their future drafts again to get him a new co-star or rebuild the entire team around him.

That’s the key to all of this. They won’t need picks in the short term because they kept all of the young players they valued anyway, and they still have picks in the longer term because Banchero is so young that no trade they could legally make at this stage of their roster build could possibly bankrupt his future. This probably isn’t the last major move Orlando makes during the Banchero era. It is, however, the first, and it’s a much more substantial one than Bane’s resume would suggest.

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Brad Botkin

There’s this notion in the aftermath of this deal that Orlando paid a star price for a sub-star player. If they were willing to give up four picks and a swap for Bane, why not do that for someone more accomplished like, say, Trae Young? Well, yes, Young is a better offensive player in a vacuum than Bane is. The Hawks have sniffed around trading him in the past, and had they been offered anything like this, they likely would have moved him.

But they haven’t, and that’s because fitting Young on most competitive rosters would be pretty complicated. All of his value is derived from his shot-creation, so he needs the ball in his hands at all times. That takes the ball away from Banchero and Wagner, which in turn lowers their value, as neither of them are strong shooters. This isn’t a problem for Bane. He’s an elite shooter. Orlando, as a team, made only 35.1% of its wide-open 3s last season. That was the worst mark in the league. Bane has never shot below 38.1% on all of his 3s in a given season, and he made 46.9% of his wide-open looks last season. He offers some secondary creation, which the Magic need, but he doesn’t monopolize the offense.

He’s also a viable defender. Young is not. The Magic have had back-to-back top-three defenses. That is their identity, and they presumably would like to keep it that way. The idea here was to boost the offense without sacrificing defense. Young, or really almost any small, high-usage guard, was going to make that difficult. This is why Bridges went for so much last summer. A player’s trade value has less to do with how good he is in a vacuum than it does with how easily he fits on a variety of teams. Players like Bridges or Bane, who can fit easily onto practically any roster, inevitably bring in bigger trade hauls because more teams want to bid for them. 

Some players are so good that this doesn’t matter. Giannis Antetokounmpo needs a very specific type of roster to thrive. Who cares? He’s Giannis. He’s so good that you tear down your existing roster to give him the one he needs. Young is not. The overwhelming majority of NBA players are not, and it’s exceedingly rare for a small, defensively vulnerable guard to clear that bar. Think of how much trouble the Portland Trail Blazers had in generating a market for Damian Lillard outside of Miami a few years ago. There just aren’t that many teams equipped to pay a small guard on another team max money.

That’s the cherry on top. Young and players of his ilk are just going to be more expensive than Bane. Right now, Bane is locked into a four-year contract that will pay him just below 24% of the projected salary cap next season and will go down below 23% at the deal’s conclusion. Young is currently eligible for an extension that would start at 30% of the cap. That is roughly what most in-their-prime, All-Star-level shot-creators are going to demand. The Magic are already paying Wagner his max and Suggs $30 million per year. With Banchero presumably getting a max extension this summer as well, they needed their inevitable offensive addition to make a bit less than the max just to keep their balance sheet, well, balanced.

So, really, this was a perfect storm. The Magic paid a substantial price, but it was far lower than it seemed on paper because of the absence of player value, the reality of the cap dump and the youth of their roster. They paid that price for a non-star, but it was the exact sort of non-star that they, specifically, needed, and he is on the sort of contract that they, given their impending financial burdens, were able to afford.

If all of these circumstances again line up for a certain player and a certain team, we might see another move this offseason in which an acquiring front office pays this sort of theoretical premium. More likely, this was a one-off event. The Suns can’t say “Desmond Bane got this, so we want even more for Durant” because all of those circumstances are not going to line up for them in the same way. Every trade is unique, and this one, despite appearances, actually makes plenty of sense for the Magic no matter how many picks they gave up.

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