With the 2022 NBA draft officially in the books, there’s a new set of draft picks that are now officially available to the Houston Rockets and other teams across the league for consideration in potential trades.
The NBA allows teams to trade draft picks for up to seven years in advance. Thus, when each draft passes, another year is added to the list. In this case, the passing of the 2022 draft puts 2029 picks on the market.
In the case of the Rockets, whose rebuild is led by a duo of elite draft prospects in Jalen Green (2021) and Jabari Smith (2022), there will soon come a point at which Houston considers more aggressive moves to upgrade its roster — perhaps by using future draft assets as incentive.
That aggressive window could open as soon as the league’s 2023-24 fiscal year, which is now less than a calendar year away, since that season is when Houston’s future draft obligations to Oklahoma City (from the Chris Paul-Russell Westbrook trade in 2019) come back into play. After all, there’s no incentive to lose at a high level if the primary benefit of the resulting high draft pick would likely be headed to the Thunder.
On the other hand, the good news is that Houston has more draft assets headed its way from an increasingly unstable situation in Brooklyn. The Rockets also added to their stockpile of future second-round draft assets by trading back from No. 26 to No. 29 in the 2022 first round.
Through 2029, here’s an updated year-by-year list of the Rockets’ draft picks, as of July 2022. Scroll on for further details.