Another big trade in the Association, as the Charlotte Hornets dealt star point guard LaMelo Ball to the Minnesota Timberwolves on Thursday for former Sixth Man of the Year Naz Reid and a bevy of draft considerations. Let's dig into the fantasy ramifications of this splash deal.
The Timberwolves have been the proverbial "one hit away" from true championship contention for several seasons now, capable of consistently winning series in the playoffs and even making the conference finals, but unable to get over the hump to make the NBA Finals. Anthony Edwards has developed into an MVP contender, but the team lacked a second dynamic playmaker to take some defensive pressure off and create easy shots for the rest of the team. They have needed a high-level point guard, and with this trade they are attempting to fill that need.
Ball is a high-usage player and an extremely creative creator with the ball in his hands. He is a scoring point guard who takes a lot of shots, particularly from 3-point range, but he is also an elite distributor who sets up his teammates in position to score. The tradeoff should be a net positive for the fantasy prospects of Edwards, who has been catching major double-teams from opposing defenses for years and should now get better quality looks. Ball could eat slightly into his shot volume, but his scoring efficiency should improve and he may get more 3-point opportunities as well.
Ball played last season next to multiple high-scoring perimeter players, with each of Brandon Miller, Kon Knueppel and Coby White routinely dropping 20-plus-point games. So Ball knows how to get his looks while still setting up teammates, and I don't expect his volume to drop.
The other player who may benefit most from this move from a fantasy perspective is Jaden McDaniels, who is coming off his best season and likely shifts from a pure small forward to more combo and power forward work. Ball is great at playing two-man ball with his frontcourt mates, as evidenced by his play with Miles Bridges in Charlotte. McDaniel, like Bridges, is another athletic combo forward who could benefit from getting looks both at the rim and behind the 3-point line that Ball facilitates.
With this move, Edwards projects to a top-10 fantasy option, with Ball in the top 25 and McDaniel in the top 75.
On the Charlotte side, While Reid is an impact player and has traditionally been a sixth man for the Timberwolves, so he doesn't hugely change the dynamic for the Hornets. He will compete with Moussa Diabate, Bridges and Ryan Kalkbrenner for big-man minutes and likely has a similar production profile for the Hornets as what he had with the Timberwolves.
But the Hornets are an entirely different team after this deal with Ball gone. Ball, when healthy, has been their centerpiece for multiple years, and the rest of the team was largely built around him. This move signals that the Hornets were ready to move more responsibility to White, whom they traded for midseason, as their lead guard. They also brought in Christian Anderson, the 18th pick in the just-completed NBA draft, and he could see a large enough role as a rookie to be on the fantasy radar. White, who showed with the Chicago Bulls that he could be a consistent 20-plus PPG scorer in his own right, could vault into a top-50 fantasy prospect this season.
Miller and Knueppel now have space for more scoring volume themselves, but both are finishers rather than creators on offense. So their increase in scoring volume potential could come with a decrease in efficiency because White isn't the team offense generator that Ball is. All told, their fantasy value likely increases slightly, as both also become more experienced as rising star players, but their shooting percentages could go down. Both should come off the board in the top 50 or so picks in fantasy drafts.
