Good morning. Let’s basketball.

The Persistence of Memory, Salvador Dali, 1931

As has long been rumored, the Portland Trail Blazers traded for Jerami Grant, who has starred on a bad Detroit Pistons team for the last couple of years. The twist is that the Blazers didn’t have to give up their prized No. 7 pick in Thursday’s NBA Draft to do it. They ended up sending a top-4 protected 2025 Bucks pick to Detroit, plus moved down 10 spots in the second round this year.

The Blazers took Grant’s contract into a trade exception, allowing the Pistons to open up a prodigious amount of cap space, with which the expectation is that they will work to get Deandre Ayton to sign a max offer sheet in hopes the Suns won’t match. The name Jalen Brunson has been mentioned for Detroit as well. I like Brunson, but I hope Ayton’s the target for the Pistons’ sake. He would seem to be a smart match for Dwane Casey and (more importantly) Cade Cunningham and Saddiq Bey. The Pistons have the No. 5 pick in the Thursday’s draft, too.

The pick that Detroit got in this deal isn’t all that great a value — what are the odds the Bucks will stink in three years? — and perhaps the Pistons could have done better four months ago at the deadline. But remember that the Pistons just straight-up signed Grant as an unrestricted free agent a couple years ago. They turned cap space into a future first. That’s a pretty good hustle. If the Ayton gambit goes bust, they can probably turn all this cap space they have into another future first by helping out a tax team. Or they can be an attractive partner for any other team trying to unload a pricey center.

For the Blazers, Grant fits Damian Lillard, Anfernee Simons and theoretically unrestricted free agent Jusuf Nurkic well. For the record, I’m a little skeptical about whether Portland spends the money to bring Nurk back. ...