Last year, Mustafa Shakur was one of the top point guards in the NBA Development League as he averaged 19.2 points, 6.9 assists and 4.5 rebounds per game for the Tulsa 66ers before being called up by the Oklahoma City Thunder to end the season. Shakur was then signed by the New Orleans Hornets to a partially-guaranteed contract, but ended up as a training camp casualty and decided to re-join the D-League.Despite being the 66ers' on-court leader last season, however, Tulsa has decided to trade Shakur to the Rio Grande Valley Vipers for the seventh overall pick in Monday night's D-League Draft -- a pick that became sweet-shooting Robert Vaden -- according to a source with knowledge of the trade.
Both the 66ers, owned by the Oklahoma City Thunder, and the Vipers, whose basketball operations are headed by the Houston Rockets, had ulterior motives to make the deal which pertain more to their NBA affiliates than the actual D-League squads put on the court.
As far as trading for Mustafa Shakur, the Houston Rockets have continued with their philosophy of bringing in as many NBA-caliber players to the Vipers as possible, hoping to get a better look at them running their system as well as developing players in case of an injury. It doesn't hurt, though, that the Vipers had a gaping hole at point guard to fill because last year's All-Star point guard, Will Conroy, didn't return.
The Thunder were also able to get a more than solid player with their first round pick to replace Shakur at the point by drafting Scottie Reynolds, a first-team All-American for Villanova last season.
It will be interesting, as the NBA D-League progresses into more of a true minor league, to see how many more trades are made that affect both the D-League and those team's NBA-affiliate rosters quite like this one will.
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