The Pelicans have agreed to trade wings Jordan Hawkins and Micah Peavy to the Grizzlies along with a future second-round pick and a second-round swap, according to Shams Charania of ESPN (Twitter link). In return, New Orleans will receive guard AJ Johnson and big man Taj Gibson.
It’s a cost-cutting move for the Pelicans, who will be able to complete their reported two-year, $16MM deal with Bennedict Mathurin without surpassing the luxury tax line or first apron once the trade is finalized.
New Orleans was reported back in July to be exploring trade scenarios involving Hawkins, with Memphis identified as a potential trade partner at the time. A subsequent report linked Johnson to those talks, and we speculated a few days ago that a deal involving Gibson could be the plan as of September 8, when Johnson’s two-month aggregation restriction lifted. He was traded from the Mavericks to the Grizzlies on July 8.
The expectation, per ESPN’s Bobby Marks (Twitter link), is that Gibson, whose $3,815,861 salary is currently non-guaranteed, will receive a small partial guarantee so that his outgoing figure can be aggregated with Johnson’s ($3,237,120) to meet the salary-matching requirements to take on Hawkins ($7,021,895).
Memphis is permitted to use the expanded trade exception to take back up to 200% of its outgoing salary, plus $250K, but only guaranteed salary counts toward the outgoing figure, so the team will need to guarantee at least $148,828 of Gibson’s salary in order to use him and Johnson to legally take back Hawkins.
Peavy’s $2,150,917 salary would then likely be absorbed using a portion of the Grizzlies’ non-taxpayer mid-level exception. Memphis has nearly $4.7MM remaining on that exception after using a chunk of it to sign Quinten Post in free agency.
Neither Johnson nor Gibson appeared likely to make the regular season roster for the Grizzlies, who were facing a roster crunch with 19 players on standard contracts. It’s unclear whether the team plans to retain Hawkins and/or Peavy through opening night or if Memphis is just making the deal for the second-round draft assets.
Hawkins was the 14th overall pick in the 2023 draft and had a promising rookie season, averaging 7.8 points per game and making 36.6% of his three-pointers. However, he hasn’t taken a step forward since then — last season, he averaged just 5.1 PPG and had a .348 3PT% in 51 games while averaging a career-low 13.6 minutes per night.
As for Peavy, the 40th overall pick in the 2025 draft averaged 4.3 points and 1.9 rebounds per game in 61 outings (15.0 MPG) as a rookie, shooting just 38.5% from the floor and 25.9% on three-pointers.
More to come…
