About last night: The Indiana Pacers stay busy on draft day

Now what?

While the frontcourt has been effectively filled out, there is still a lot of work to do. A starting point guard and small forward need to be signed. Further point guard depth needs to be added, as does a reserve two-guard, which will be a very important spot if Victor Oladipo is not healthy to play at the very beginning of the season.

Currently, excluding Bojan Bogdanovic’s cap hold, Indiana has $32.5M in cap space after Warren’s trade. If you include Bogdanovic’s  $13.6M cap hold, then the Pacers have $18.9M in space, with obviously less the more cap holds you cling on to.

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Now, $32.5M is more than enough to offer someone like D’Angelo Russell a Max contract (Russell could get paid approximately $117.2M over four seasons, starting with $27.3M next season).

If you want to sign Russell, that’s the space you need to secure to put yourself in the best position to sign him. Obviously, keeping Bogdanovic’s hold on the books is over $8M short of that maximum space.

Where could that $8M come from while keeping Bogdanovic’s hold on the books? The contracts of Edmond Sumner and Alize Johnson are both non-guaranteed, but even if you released both that’s not enough (combined $3M, $5M+ short).

A quicker solution would be trying to flip Doug McDermott and his $7.3M salary to a team that has cap space and could use a shooter, say Sacramento, or New Orleans or Orlando.

Offer McDermott plus one of the plethora of future seconds and now you’ve freed up nearly enough space to afford Bogdanovic’s cap hold and  have enough space for a max contract. Making that trade plus waiving Sumner or Johnson puts you over the top.

Or you don’t want to open up max space, or really like McDermott, $18.9M is still not something to shake a stick at. It’s for sure more than enough room to sign Utah exile Ricky Rubio, which ESPN’s Adrain Wojnarowski wouldn’t shut up about in the lead-up and through the NBA Draft.

Say you offered half of that $18.9M to Rubio, you’d still have near mid-level exception money to lure more wing help. In that case, you could fill out your roster with Rubio at the point, Bogdanovic on the wing and that’s certainly not a bad team.

Another option, instead of going the free agent route to fill out the wing rotation, you could work with the likely newly displaced Thaddeus Young via a sign-and-trade. This would allow Young to, in all likelihood, make more money because he can sign a bigger deal with Indiana and get to pick his new destination.

Young’s from New Orleans and there are two teams very close to the Big Easy: the Pelicans and the Houston Rockets, which is 340 miles down the coast from New Orleans. New Orleans could use another veteran stabilizing presence, Houston could be interested in a shake-up. Signing and trade Young plus some assortment of those bonus picks could net Indiana Eric Gordon (Houston) or E’Twaun Moore (New Orleans), or someone of their ilk.

A positive from the draft is that Indiana should feel pretty good about their frontcourt. The work is cut out now. Keeping Bogdanovic (a sensible solution) would solve one piece of the puzzle, the Pacers still need a point guard and a second guard who can create his own shot. Indiana doesn’t exactly have max cap space but can create it. However, if they elect not clear out spots, they can still net two guards for the price of one expensive guard. One thing is for certain this offseason is far from over, actually, it’s just begun. Get ready for July.