Let’s make a deal, shall we? With a draft class as muddled and hard to differentiate as any in recent memory, NBA teams found themselves wheeling and dealing all over the place last night.

The center of this vortex was in Portland, who made trades involving four of the top seven picks. First, the Blazers traded up, swapping their no.4 pick with Chicago for the no. 2 choice, with the only cost being the rights to little-used Viktor Khryapa. That enabled them to snag LaMarcus Aldridge, which should solve their center problems for the next decade or so.

Then the Blazers struck again, swapping guard Sebastian Telfair and center Theo Ratliff to Boston for center Raef LaFrentz and the seventh overall pick. I don’t get what Boston was thinking here at all. Telfair, the Coney Island kid, is still a work in progress who has no semblance of a jump shot, so it’s hard for me to see why Boston would trade away a high lottery pick just to get him. The only explanation I can come up with is that Isiah Thomas secretly took over as the Celtics’ general manager and forgot to tell everybody.

For the Blazers, it worked out great, because they ended up with guard Brandon Roy when it was all said and done. Roy is going to be better than Telfair right out of the gate,and the Washington guard’s Pacific Northwest connections should help sell tickets for a Blazer team that is struggling at the gate. They got Roy by trading the no. 7 pick – the one they’d just aquired from Boston – to Minnesota for pick no. 6, throwing in some cash as a sweetener.

The T’wolves ended up with guard Randy Foye in the process, which could go down as another Kevin McHale draft stinker. Let me backtrack a bit here. There are four players in this draft who looked like stone-cold locks – incredible athletes who produced at a high level and are still young enough (aged 19 or 20) to get much, much better. Those four are Andrea Bargnani (picked first by Toronto), Aldridge, Rudy Gay, and 6-foot-9 lightning bolt Tyrus Thomas. To my way of thinking, any team who picked another player while those four were on the board deserved ridicule.

Amazingly, several made that mistake. The Bobcats, selecting third, picked the less talented and much older Adam Morrison ahead of Gay and Thomas (who Portland took fourth and then shipped to Chicago for Aldridge). Then Atlanta and Portland passed on Gay, perhaps more defensibly.

Picking fifth, the Hawks opted for Duke strongman Shelden Williams over Gay, but Williams was the nextbest player on my list and the Hawks already have an armada of small forwards. Portland made the same mistake in going for Roy, but it was defensible in the Blazers’ case because they need shooting and ticket sales, and Roy provides both.

But Foye? That one I don’t get at all. My basic theory on guards is that you don’t take them with a high pick unless they’re either an incredible athlete or an incredible shooter. Foye doesn’t seem to be either. He shot .398 for his career at Villanova, including .329 on 3-pointers, so we can cross “great shooter” off the list. As for athleticism, he’s two inches short for a prototype shooting guard at 6-foot-3, and he’s not one of those guys with a 40-inch vertical, either.

And the winner in all of this? Believe it or not, the Memphis Grizzlies. In yet another draft-day trade, they somehow duped the Rockets into accepting Shane Battier in return for the rights to Gay, and now stand to have the athletic complement to Pau Gasol they’ve been wanting for years. Make no mistake, Battier will help Houston – he’ll probably be the Rockets’ starting power forward next year – but the Rockets missed an opportunity to get a star.

If Minnesota was so gung-ho on a guard, they should have taken Arkansas guard Ronnie Brewer.Yes, his shooting form is terrible, but statistically he was actually a better shooter in college than Foye. He’s also four inches taller, vastly more athletic, and a year and a half younger. Amazingly, Brewer fell to the 14th overall pick and Utah, a huge coup for the Jazz considering their major struggles at the shooting guard spot last season.

Another good choice would have been Rutgers star Quincy Douby, who was selected 19th overall by Sacramento. He’ll be instant offense off the bench for the Kings, whose second unit struggled last year. Overall, I was a little surprised NBA execs saw such a difference between Foye and Roy compared to Douby and Brewer, because if anything the latter two seemed superior players based on their age and production.

A few other trades highlighted the night. Phoenix and Boston were working on a deal to send the no. 21 pick and the contract of Brian Grant to the Celtics, which should allow the Suns to stay under the luxury tax and put to rest all the Shawn Marion trade rumors for at least another 12 months. For Boston’s part, the deal netted them another point guard who can’t shoot in Rajan Rondo – apparently they’re trying to corner the market on this. Suddenly my stealth-Isiah-takeover theory doesn’t seem so far-fetched.

Chicago and Philadelphia made a fairly insignficant swap of picks no. 13 and 16, sending Swiss guard Thabo Sefolosha to the Bulls and swingman Rodney Carney and a future second-round pick to the Sixers. And in a little-reported swap, somebody named Renaldo Balkman traded incriminating photos of the Dolan family in return for his selection as the 20th overall pick.

Of course, it’s tough to know what to make of a draft until years after the fact. But we know one thing to expect – more trades. Wednesday’s swap market was a mere preview of what’s to come this summer, as an increased salary cap and a lame free-agent market send general managers scurrying to the phones for talent. So strap yourself in for three more months of Deal/No Deal, NBA style.

Mr. Hollinger is the author of the 2005-06 Pro Basketball Forecast. He can be reached at jhollinger@nysun.com.