Lonzo Ball is on the move Saturday as the former No. 2 overall pick in the 2017 NBA Draft is reportedly headed to his fourth NBA team. After four injury-riddled seasons with the Chicago Bulls, he is going to the Cleveland Cavaliers in exchange for former lottery pick Isaac Okoro, a wing defender with a shaky jump shot.

Cleveland, coming off a 64-win regular season, was disappointed by a five-game, second-round loss against the Indiana Pacers and needed to do something to shake up the roster despite overwhelming luxury tax and apron-related challenges. They’ve now done so with Ball. The Bulls, meanwhile, add a bit to last season’s No. 19-ranked defense while getting younger and healthier in the process. With that in mind, let’s grade this trade.

Cleveland Cavaliers: A-

There’s really only one reason this isn’t an “A” trade for Cleveland, and it’s Ball’s medical history. He just missed two full seasons due to knee issues, and last year, he played only 35 games in his comeback. This is a risk. There is absolutely a chance Ball isn’t healthy enough to help them when it counts. Even if he is, his minutes need to be monitored carefully. He averaged 22.2 of them last year and did not play in a single back-to-back. That will probably be the formula moving forward.

But Cleveland had a somewhat similar player on last season’s roster in Ty Jerome. Despite his injured past, Jerome was a Sixth Man of the Year contender even as he averaged fewer minutes per game (19.9) than Ball did. That’s going to be the formula here. Jerome is an impending free agent, and with Cleveland already above the second apron before re-signing him, his departure was almost inevitable. 

In this trade, Cleveland fills the void left by Jerome and saves a bit of money: Ball makes $10 million this year while Okoro makes $11 million, and Ball’s 2026-27 salary is not guaranteed because of a team option, while Okoro’s 2026-27 salary of $11.8 million is guaranteed. Cleveland is still far from ducking the second apron entirely, but this team has an obvious championship window. Now is the time to spend, and the Cavaliers have filled a dire need while trimming payroll. That’s a huge win.

So let’s talk about what Ball brings to the court. He isn’t going to score like Jerome did. He’s practically allergic to the paint, and he’s not quite as gifted a shooter either, though he’s taken significant strides since those early struggles with the Lakers. Cleveland gets two important things with Ball that it lacked in Jerome. The first is stellar all-around defense. The second, and more important for Cleveland’s sake, is transition brilliance. The Cavaliers ranked 10th in pace last season, but 19th in fast-break points and 28th in passes per game. Now, none of this is meant to suggest any deficiency in Cleveland’s No. 1-ranked offense, but to show that even it had areas in which it could improve. Ball adds an element of chaos and speed that should give Cleveland a new dimension.

Is Okoro a loss? Sure. He was probably Cleveland’s best regular-season wing defender. But every postseason, we’re reminded that nobody guards him on the perimeter, so he has become too much of an offensive impediment to retain. This trade is going to strain players defensively like De’Andre Hunter and Max Strus. Cleveland badly needs Dean Wade to stay reliably healthy, which he has never done, to defend at a championship level.

Those health risks are concerning, but they’re attached to role players on a 64-win team. Cleveland can manage its minutes better throughout the regular season than most teams, and hopefully, it will get to April in one piece. If they can do so, the Cavaliers still stand out as the Eastern Conference favorite, with Boston and Indiana hobbled. Ball is about as perfect a replacement for Jerome as Cleveland could have hoped for.

Chicago Bulls: C-

What is it with the Bulls and trading really good, all-around role players to contending teams for former lottery picks that those teams would probably prefer to dump anyway? This deal isn’t as bad as Alex Caruso-for-Josh Giddey, but it’s the same basic principle. The Bulls started the offseason with a very valuable supporting piece and turned it into a younger player with theoretical upside, but who can’t shoot and seemingly had limited value to basically any other team. Quite a few teams likely made offers for Ball. This was really the best the Bulls could do? As was the case in the Caruso trade, they didn’t even get a single draft pick on top of the questionable player swap?

Chicago did need more perimeter defense. The Bulls ranked 19th in overall defense, but more pertinently, 25th in half-court points per play allowed, according to Cleaning the Glass. They are young and athletic enough to limit the bleeding in transition, but when the Bulls actually needed to get stops last season, they really didn’t have a chance. Okoro will help on that front. He’s generally a safer health bet than Ball. And if you look at the percentages, he’s been an above-average 3-point shooter for three seasons now.

The problem, of course, is that you can’t just look at the percentages. It’s the volume that typically determines how vigorously a player is defended, and Okoro rarely shoots and only takes wide-open looks. Those were plentiful on a dominant Cleveland offense. How is Okoro going to survive offensively when Donovan Mitchell and Darius Garland aren’t creating his shots? The Bulls, like the Cavaliers, took a ton of 3s last season. The difference is that the Cavaliers led the league in true shooting while the Bulls hung around the league average. Now, with Okoro cramping their spacing, things get harder. At the very least, he overlaps with Patrick Williams, who was taken one pick in front of Okoro in the 2020 NBA Draft. Williams is also an athletic defensive forward without a reliable shot.

If you wanted to try to define Chicago’s overarching roster-building plan, you can actually see some broad similarities to the way that the Eastern Conference champion Indiana Pacers built. Like the Bulls, the Pacers loved bringing in former lottery picks whose original teams were ready to dump them. Maybe the Bulls are hoping Okoro can be their Aaron Nesmith, a young wing who didn’t make shots with his first team but improves with his second. Josh Giddey has vague similarities to Tyrese Haliburton as a dynamic passer and transition player who doesn’t often look for his own shot. There’s a lot of individual creation and athleticism here. They want to play fast.

The key to this build, though, is that you have to actually get the specific additions right. It’s not enough for Giddey to be like Haliburton. He has to generate team offense at the same dominant level. Chicago’s offense was indeed great in March and April, but those months tend not to be reliable indicators of future performance. The Bulls played a bunch of bad, tanking teams. Nesmith didn’t make shots in Boston, but he was marketed as a shooter while going through the draft process. He had much more of a track record than Okoro does.

The Bulls have not won a playoff series since Arturas Karnisovas took over in 2020. They don’t have Rick Carlisle as their coach. They don’t deserve the same benefit of the doubt that Indiana gets because the Pacers have been significantly more successful over the past 25 years despite having far fewer resources at their disposal. Neither of these teams wants to go on prolonged tanks, but the Pacers have such a strong organizational track record of building through the middle that they can get away with not doing so. The Bulls don’t. They may be attempting to imitate the Pacers, but without the infrastructure and expertise that has guided Indiana for so long, it seems more like a parrot echoing a sound than a team that has truly internalized the lessons taught by one of the league’s smartest teams.