I traded for Gordon Hayward in my mock draft - here’s why

The results of our SBNation Mock Draft are being published Monday and Tuesday - follow along with all the action here.

With the 3rd pick in the draft, I selected...

...to trade the pick. I agreed to a trade with the Jazz getting Gordon Hayward in exchange for the #3 pick, the #23 pick, and Jonas Jerebko.

Basically I wanted to upgrade our talent by consolidating our assets. My opinion is that there are a lot of good-not-great options at #3, and the upside potential for any of them is right around the level of a Gordon Hayward-type player. I gave up the 23rd pick and Jerebko as part of the cost of removing that uncertainty.

I feel like Hayward would be a beautiful fit in Brad Stevens’ system. He would provide scoring from the wing and allow us to move Jae Crowder over to play more from the stretch 4 position that he’s so effective at.

I polled Twitter to see what they thought of the deal and the results are pretty well split down the middle. Which means, I think, that this is a pretty realistic deal!

In my mock, I’ve still got the 16th pick to select (stay tuned). I also maintained future trade assets for potential deals down the line (you would have to pry those future Nets picks from my cold, dead hands).

Note: I did make a passing effort to get Jimmy Butler, but the Bulls blogger/GM wasn’t interested. I played with offers from the Sixers, Nuggets, and others, but nothing got really close.

So, how’d I do?