Heat Trade Darnell Jackson

Looks like his career as a member of the Heat was all too brief. The Heat selected forward Darnell Jackson from Kansas with the 52nd pick and decided to trade him to the Cleveland Cavaliers for a 2009 second round pick (The Cavs have two and the Heat will receive the lesser of the two picks).

This deal makes sense for a couple of reasons – the Heat have several forwards on the roster (Haslem, Marion, Wright, Beasley, Barron, Lasme and Powell) and Jackson offers a similar skill set to what is there. Also, to get Mario Chalmers the Heat had to trade away 2 future 2nd round picks – this gets one of them back.

Second Round Shuffle

Let’s make sense of this. For the 2009 draft, Miami has three second round picks: their own owed to them plus one from Indiana (for Stanko Barac) and one from Philadelphia (for the Daequan Cook deal). When the Heat acquired the draft rights to Mario Chalmers, they traded two of those picks plus cash (up to $3M according to NBA rules) to get the Jayhawk point guard.

Now, in trading Jackson, the Heat acquired another 2nd round pick for 2009 (the Cavaliers have two themselves, one from the Bulls as well as their own pick) bringing their total up to 4. Again, two of those picks are being used in the Chalmers deal, so Miami – at this point – has one first round pick and two second round picks for the 2009 NBA draft.