Fact of Fiction: Zion Williamson should have a trade market

Each week during the 2024-25 NBA season, we will take a deeper dive into some of the league’s biggest storylines in an attempt to determine whether trends are based more in fact or fiction moving forward.

[Last time on Fact or Fiction: The Suns have nowhere to go but up]

Fact of Fiction: There should be a trade market for Zion Williamson

We are only eight months removed from the last time we wondered if Zion Williamson can anchor a contender, as he torched LeBron James in a play-in tournament game against the Los Angeles Lakers.

Except, in a microcosm of his young career, Williamson left that outing with a left hamstring injury that later cost him the New Orleans Pelicans’ entire first-round playoff series with the Oklahoma City Thunder. He has not played a single playoff game in six seasons. Williamson’s impact is more theoretical than actual.

Is there anywhere but New Orleans that still wants to test that theory?

Williamson returned from another left hamstring injury to total 22 points, six rebounds and four assists in 28 minutes on Tuesday, the latest glimpse of the potential that made him the No. 1 overall pick in 2019.

When healthy Williamson has been one of the league’s most tantalizing talents. Though he has never made an All-NBA team, he has earned a pair of All-Star selections, in 2021 and 2023, when he finished both seasons on the injury list. Nobody who has averaged a 24-6-4 for his career has had so high a true shooting percentage as Williamson (62.7 TS%). Only Kevin Durant is in the ballpark.

Normally this would be enough for most teams to take a flier on Williamson. The possibility of landing one of These Guys — in a league that can only be won with one of These Guys — is worth considerable injury risk, especially to a team that otherwise has no real chance of acquiring a player of that caliber.

A team like New Orleans.

The Pelicans reportedly shopped Williamson in their attempts to land a top pick in the 2023 draft, and less than 18 months later they are the worst team in the Western Conference — in line for a top pick. If New Orleans was still willing to move on from Williamson, who would bat an eye? It makes a lot of sense.

And surely the Pelicans could find a trade partner. If the Washington Wizards traded the four years left on Bradley Beal’s supermax contract, anyone can be dealt, especially Williamson, a potentially paradigm-shifting 24-year-old. The question is not whether anyone would trade for Williamson; it is if they should.

Only four other players in NBA history are listed shorter than 6-foot-10 and heavier than 280 pounds, according to Basketball Reference’s database: Glen Davis, Robert Traylor, Jahidi White and Oliver Miller. All were out of the league by age 30. This is the likelihood Williamson faces, even acknowledging that he is the most athletic of them all. (Which might actually make it less likely he sees a game in the 2030s.)

Another inglorious list includes Williamson, the one of great big men whose careers were ravaged by injuries. Bill Walton, Ralph Sampson, Yao Ming, these guys did not get any healthier. Joel Embiid is the best-case scenario, and you will not find a ton of teams lining up for the $250 million left on his contract. The Philadelphia 76ers have spent the past decade in service of a player whose availability is unreliable.

Williamson has about half as much money left on his deal, which runs through his 27th birthday. The window for him to find his footing as an impactful superstar is the remainder of that contract, before his journeyman era, when contracts dwindle and expectations abate, until the league loses its faith entirely.

What are the Pelicans going to fetch for Williamson anyhow? We have two more years of injury history since the last time the top-end of the lottery turned them down for trades. A draft stash is not their problem. They can still hope another pick becomes the next face of this franchise. The only other two, Chris Paul and Anthony Davis, left for larger markets. They have never signed a top free agent. Whatever they get for Williamson gets them no closer to a championship than the possibility he puts it all together.

What the Pelicans should be doing is trading everyone not named Herb Jones, Trey Murphy III, Yves Missi and maybe Jose Alvarado. Shed salary and build from the bottom up, with whatever pick they land from this dreadful season, as if Williamson were not there, and if he is, well, maybe then he delivers their title.

That is the hope for New Orleans. A wing and a prayer. Zion Williamson’s health.

It is a years-long process that, if it fails, will free up salary-cap flexibility in the end.

There is no other path from here. What the Pelicans are doing, stockpiling talent, even if it stunts their internal development, is clearly not working. Brandon Ingram, Dejounte Murray and CJ McCollum do not a contender make. They have hit their ceiling at the NBA’s floor, and trading Williamson is a lateral move.

No other team can afford this strategy, reconstructing their roster around prospects and picks, while carrying Williamson’s contract for the ride. Of course, nobody should ask for this situation. Why trade anything of value for a max-salaried player who has not made it healthy to the playoffs in six seasons?

But if the Pelicans, a team with no other hope, give up hope on Williamson, a player who only embodies hope, then how should we interpret that? There is no hope for Zion, then, and who wants that world?

Determination: Fiction. There should be no trade market for Zion Williamson. Hope for him lives in New Orleans, however diminished, and once the Pelicans give up on the dream it is only a matter of time before the league does, too.