How many teams haven't been to the lottery at all in the past three years? Eight. Only four have made the playoffs five times in a row, and only one has done it more than six times. It's actually not very likely that Atlanta will avoid conveying a lotto pick three years in a row to SA. Spurs fans don't tend to appreciate it for obvious reasons, but franchises tend not to be stable. In order for Atlanta to both benefit from the trade and avoid giving the Spurs a lotto pick, they'd have to make the playoffs seven years in a row. That's extremely unlikely. Right off the bat, the picks have more value than some people might fear.
Unprotected picks also allow the Spurs to trade way more of their assets that they could before. For example, the Spurs could trade each of their natural picks from 2024 all the way to 2028 without having to worry about the Stepien rule. That's not a huge thing now, but obviously it can be down the road. Those 2026 and 2028 picks are also enhanced because they come with swap rights. You're not betting on the Spurs being bad; you're betting on at least one of the Spurs or Hawks/Celtics being bad. Those are much better odds, which removes much of the downsides of the pick while adding upside. The Spurs are also able to use the unprotected firsts for swaps instead of their natural picks. So if they make another trade that involves a ton of picks coming from a team, they can, instead of offering a swap between their pick and that other team's pick, they can get the two best of their pick, ATL's pick and the new team's pick. That almost happened last year, when the Rockets barely avoided OKC being able to swap Houston's pick with Boston's that year.
There are 17 unprotected picks/swaps in the NBA right now, and the Spurs have three of them. And this is not counting Boston's top-1 protected swap. They are a rare commodity, and SA is probably third behind OKC and NOP in terms of their collection, and they've been doing this for less than a year. It's why I was telling folks to not freak out about the Spurs "not picking a direction" two years ago. It's easy to collect assets when you're rebuilding. They weren't going to miss their chance just because guys like Gay, Mills and even LMA didn't get moved for value.
As I said in another post, I think things were significantly rockier between Murray and the Spurs than we knew. Credit goes out to DJM and Klutch for keeping everything in house, and I don't think there's bad blood or anything. But I don't think the front office saw him the same way as the marketing team did. I don't think they believe him leaving is the blow a lot of us perceived it as. They MIGHT miss out on a higher return if he has another All-Star season. But they might've missed out on three years of complete control of another team's picks if Murray didn't put it together or if the buyers moved on or had bad starts to the season. I'm all about leverage and hope the Spurs did everything they could to bring in OO too, but I also understand why they wanted to do this cleanly and move on.