Jae Crowder and Darius Johnson-Odom: NBA Draft Picks!

With the way the mock drafts were trending, it was going to be a surprise if Marquette had a player taken in the first round. That surprise never came to be, but we didn't have to wait long into the second round for a selection. With the 34th pick in the draft, the Cleveland Cavaliers selected Jae Crowder in a pick that was part of a trade with the Dallas Mavericks. Crowder's draft rights head to Dallas along with the rights to Oregon State's Jared Cunningham and Florida State's Bernard James, while the Cavaliers acquired Kelenna Azubuike and the draft rights to North Carolina's Tyler Zeller.

After that, it was more waiting to see if Darius Johnson-Odom would be selected by the end of the draft. With the 55th pick, the Mavericks took DJO and immediately traded his draft rights to the Los Angeles Lakers for cash considerations. In this case, cash considerations turns out to be in the neighborhood of $500,000, according to Mike Bresnahan of the Los Angeles Times. That's a significant chunk of change to just acquire the draft rights to a very late second round pick, so one has to presume that the Lakers are interested in keeping DJO around.

Hit the jump and we'll go over what this means for Jae & DJO for wearing an NBA jersey when the season starts!

The current structure of the NBA Draft gives guaranteed two year contracts with team options for years 3 and 4 to first round selections. There is no guaranteed contract for second round picks. There's an upside and a downside to this. The downside is obviously that teams don't have to keep second round picks on the roster for any reason, or even put them on the roster for that matter. The upside is that it makes it pretty easy for second round picks to outperform their rookie contract, which is usually for one year and less than $1 million, and earn a solid, if not outstanding free agent contract fairly rapidly.

Let's look at the Dallas Mavericks contract situations right now, with the help of HoopsHype.com. It appears that the Mavs have just 5 players under contract for next season right now, with team options on just 3 players after the trade of Azubuike, and one of those players is Lamar Odom, who the Mavericks just flat out sent home during this season, so it seems unlikely that he'll be back. With lots of roster space available, a guy like Crowder who's willing to compete for everything should get a good chance to end up on the Mavs roster after summer league and training camp.

As for DJO, the Lakers have 7 players under contract, 2 players with team options, and one player with a qualifying offer for next season. Combine open roster space with dropping half a million already to acquire DJO's rights and it seems pretty likely that Johnson-Odom will be wearing Laker gold by the time the start of the season rolls around.