The 2026 NBA offseason saga for guard Kam Jones took another plot twist Saturday when ESPN's Shams Charania reported that the former Indiana Pacers guard, whom the Bulls traded their 38th overall pick in the 2026 NBA Draft to also receive cash considerations and two future second-round pick swaps, reached an agreement on a two-way contract with the Milwaukee Bucks.
The Milwaukee Bucks have agreed to sign 2025 second-round pick Kam Jones on a two-way NBA deal, sources tell ESPN. Jones was traded from Indiana to Chicago on draft night before being released, and now joins the Bucks.
— Shams Charania (@ShamsCharania) July 4, 2026
In multiple rounds of defending his rationale for trading away their 2026 NBA second-round draft picks, Bulls lead front office executive, Bryson Graham, has pleaded that his draft room didn’t see any players worth targeting in the second round.
Graham’s explanation doesn’t pass the sniff test for an NBA executive highly touted for his scouting abilities and points to an early blind spot in his second-round draft talent evaluation.
Multiple levels of scouting questions
The Bulls’ Kam Jones trade on the second night of the 2026 NBA draft is bad in whatever context you choose to judge NBA draft decisions: business, process, optics. It’s bad, bad.
Graham may be new to the Bulls organization, but he isn’t new to the NBA.
Surely Graham had scouting intel on Kam Jones to either negotiate better draft compensation to attach to Jones or simply not do the deal at all. Pacers fans who get their hoops content from the great Caitlin Cooper of 'Basketball, She Wrote' (includes paid subscriber content) already knew about Jones’ liabilities as an NBA player during the 2025 NBA offseason.
Why would Graham take on a known flawed player for no surplus draft compensation, only to turn this player into dead money within a week of trading him?
The Bulls are at the beginning of a rebuild and supposedly value player development. Do the Bulls have the requisite level of player development staff and infrastructure to find talent advantages via second-round draft picks?
In general, the NBA is recalibrating the perception of second-round draft talent due to the proliferation of name, image, and likeness (NIL) compensation becoming more lucrative for NCAA men’s basketball players compared to NBA non-lottery first-round or second-round player contracts. Are the Bulls going to completely dismiss scouting this tier of draft talent?
Selecting players via second-round picks doesn’t make or break NBA franchises. However, those picks do have the ability to be disruptive advantages when the right circumstances align, such as Nuggets center Nikola Jokic, Golden State Warriors forward Draymond Green, or even newly acquired Bulls center Nic Claxton.
Until proven otherwise, Bryson Graham also needs to understand that he works for an ownership group that has consistently constrained Bulls spending on active player salary, even when there were opportunities to acquire talent to bolster playoff-contending chances, most recent example being the 2022 NBA trade deadline.
Graham should quickly remove his blind spot about the second round of the NBA Draft because he will need to uncover talent stones in that round sooner than he may realize.
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