Late last season, the New Orleans Pelicans owned the rights to the Indiana Pacers' 2026 first round pick in addition to their own first.
As of today, the Pelicans and Pacers rank first and second in the 2026 NBA lottery standings (in other words, last and penultimate in wins across the league).
In what can be described as nothing short of a complete catastrophe, the Pelicans fumbled both incredibly lucrative picks. Long have Hawks fans compared the youngsters Derik Queen and Asa Newell thanks to their linkage in the Pels-Hawks trade, but the trade goes a level deeper into foolishness than this.
Prior to acquiring the rights to the 23rd overall pick in the 2025 NBA Draft, the Pelicans made a deal with the Indiana Pacers. They acquired this pick in exchange for the Pacers' unprotected 2026 first - effectively trading not one but both of the (current) top two picks in the 2026 NBA Draft for Queen.
The New Orleans blunders are salvaging two disappointing seasons for Atlanta and Indiana
If it weren't for this pair of deals, both the Indiana season and the Hawks season would have fans down in the dumps.
The Pacers, simply due to a terrible stroke of injury luck, fell one game short of an NBA championship, and are now bereft of their superstar Tyrese Haliburton for at minimum the entirety of the current season.
Pacers GM Chad Buchanan pulled off an absolute miracle of a trade when he re-acquired his own 2026 pick for pennies on the dollar a mere week before Haliburton tore his ACL – a move that can only be rivaled by Saleh's savvy when he acquired the (slightly) better of the two top 2026 picks.
Atlanta's season isn't going too much more smoothly than Indiana's. Moving off of Trae Young in yet another .500 season would weigh far heavier were a top pick not on the horizon.
Both the Hawks and the Pacers stand to have significant odds of gaining one of the dynamic trio in the '26 draft – AJ Dybantsa, Darryn Peterson, and Cam Boozer are about as talented a big three in a draft that we've seen in the 21st century.
Once brushed off as a laughable quip, Dyson Daniels' comment regarding the "Pelicans curse" may have some underlying truth to it. Combine their brutal injury history with their pair of awful gambits in the last year, and the Curse of the Bayou is delving further from fiction than ever before.