The Derik Queen draft pick is working out far better than the Derik Queen trade

A bad trade can have good components. The Luka Dončić trade has been an unmitigated disaster for the Dallas Mavericks. Max Christie has still emerged as a possible long-term starter. That doesn't erase the disaster. It's just the flower growing in the rubble. Basketball is still being played in Dallas. Some of it, though not nearly as much as the city would hope, is being played well. A team can find small victories in major defeats. It's worth remembering because, while the defeat is over and done with, the victory is still there. The Mavericks can't bring Dončić back. They can enjoy having Christie, though, and hopefully make him a part of something better that comes down the line.

I bring all of this up because "disaster" and "rubble" and "major defeat" are terms being thrown around relatively frequently in regards to the 2025-26 New Orleans Pelicans. Most of it absolutely applies -- in July, I ranked their front office as the worst in the NBA and things have only gotten worse since then. They fired head coach Willie Green on Saturday. They have the worst record in the Western Conference. All of that can be true without it negating one of the few bright spots of their season to date: their rookies, despite all of the turmoil, are good.

That's not especially notable in the case of Jeremiah Fears. He's a No. 7 overall pick benefitting from all of the available usage that comes from playing on a bad team and, more to the point, his arrival in New Orleans came through the most common of mechanisms. The Pelicans were bad last season. That gave them a high draft pick. They used it on Fears, who has thus far lived up to expectations. There's not much discourse to be mined out of that sequence of events. Derik Queen? That's drawn much more discussion and controversy.

The trade to get Queen has been, by far, the most discussed element of this Pelicans disaster. No one has much to say about how bad the Nets or Wizards are because they'll take that common path: be bad, collect high draft pick, move on. The Pelicans won't. They traded their unprotected 2026 first-round pick to get Queen, but that wasn't all they did. They also gave up the No. 23 overall pick. To get No. 23 overall, they traded Indiana's top-four protected first-round pick. Right now, the Pacers have the worst record in the NBA.

This sequence of transactions may not go as poorly for New Orleans as the Dončić trade has for Dallas, but it still has significant disaster potential. There are very real scenarios in which the picks New Orleans gave up to get Queen land at No. 1 and No. 5 overall in one of the most anticipated drafts in recent NBA history. If that's how this ends up, the price they paid would frankly have been too high for any player in the 2025 draft, Cooper Flagg included. Even in the more plausible world in which those picks wind up at, say, No. 4 and No. 8, it is a colossal price to pay for any player who you could have simply drafted at No. 7 if you'd held that much belief in him.

All of this is valid. It has also completely warped the perception of Derik Queen, the player. The odds of him living up to the price that was paid to get him are extremely long. The odds of him performing up to or above the level of a standard, No. 13 overall pick? Right now, those odds are much shorter. If you can just ignore the trade that got him to New Orleans and judge Queen as a player, you'll be pretty pleased with how well he's performed in the first month or so of his career.

His minutes were inconsistent before Zion Williamson got hurt. With Willie Green gone, he'll likely play more even once Williamson returns. With Williamson on a non-guaranteed contract and the two sharing so many stylistic similarities, it might not be too long before Queen is the offensive focal point of the Pelicans' front court. He's already showing he can handle that workload.

As of Sunday, only his teammate Fears and Dylan Harper, who played all of his games thus far this season without De'Aaron Fox, have higher usage rates among rookies. He's outscoring, out-rebounding and out-assisting Cooper Flagg on a per-possession basis, and while Flagg's poor circumstances have been well documented, it's not as though Queen is point-forwarding some five-out behemoth of an offense. The Pelicans rank 22nd in 3-point attempt rate and 19th in 3-point percentage. Yet Queen makes them at least somewhat viable. Take all small-sample net rating numbers with a grain of salt, but the Pelicans are 20 points per 100 possessions better with Queen on the floor through their first 12 games.

None of this is especially easy either. Queen isn't an elite athlete and he doesn't, at least to this point, have a reliable jumper. This is all balance and craft. What are you supposed to do with someone this big that spins like a ballerina?

That spin move is remarkably advanced for a big this young and it works because of how comfortable Queen is shooting at odd angles. When you're as coordinated as he is, you can create space in unusual ways and trust yourself to actually make the unusual shots that you create or leverage those weird angles into fouls. The number of big men displaying this degree of on-ball skill as a rookie is low. How long did it take Giannis Antetokounmpo to Euro Step like this?

What's more is that Queen doesn't drive like this with tunnel vision. His vision is uncommon for any big man, especially a rookie. Being a willing passer is one thing. Knowing intuitively where your open teammate is cutting is another. Those instincts are there already and, as he eventually gets more comfortable navigating tight spaces in the NBA, they're going to lead to a whole lot more passes like these.

It's way, way too early to say where the ceiling on these traits falls. We live in Nikola Jokić's NBA. You don't need to be an elite athlete to be a star anymore, but that lack of elite athleticism is going to be a problem Queen needs to overcome. There's a reason we've only had one Jokić. His shooting needs to be a growth area. He needs to play faster as well, but that will come with time. It's no great sin for a rookie in a high-usage role to slow possessions to a crawl and try to read the court before acting. He'll be able to do that faster with time and he'll learn to milk more out of the slower possessions as well. But that manipulation of pace is a superstar skill. Not everyone gets it, and Queen may or may not. He'll almost certainly remain a minus defender on physical traits alone. He might be an All-Star. He might be Bobby Portis -- a really solid tertiary or reserve scorer and spot starter who just isn't good enough to lead anything more than a bench unit.

For the trade to be justified, the Pelicans really need Queen to be the former. But for Queen to justify where he was drafted? The latter is more than enough and he likely falls somewhere in between. The likeliest outcome is a long-term NBA starter, someone with unique skills and meaningful drawbacks, which is more than most late lottery picks can say.

And that would be a victory, perhaps a small one for the Pelicans in light of the disaster potential of the trade, but a much bigger one for Queen who, crucially, did not choose to trade two potential top-five picks for himself. The evaluation of Queen the player and Queen the return on potentially one of the most important trades of the last year are separate matters. It would be unfair to Queen to suggest that anything less than a return equivalent to what the Pelicans gave up to get him would constitute a disappointment. Untangle him from the circumstances he didn't create for himself and he's been one of the more impressive rookies in a stellar class. No matter how poorly the trade ultimately plays out for the Pelicans, that is at least a win worth noting.