Hoops Rumors Retro

Hoops Rumors Retro: Antonio McDyess To The Nuggets

September 5th, 2017 at 7:26pm CST by Austin Kent

Before the chair, before Grandpa Pierce, before DeAndre Jordan‘s infamous change of heart and the Emoji War that inspired it, there was Antonio McDyess. McDyess, obviously, but then of course French-Canadian ice hockey legend Patrick Roy, an impromptu charter flight across the southwest, dozens of unanswered pager calls and a good old-fashioned Rocky Mountain blizzard.

In January 1999, a 24-year-old with jetpacks for calves and long sinewy arms found himself at an emotional fork in the road. Fresh off of his third season in the NBA and his first in the desert, Suns power forward Antonio McDyess had the choice between re-signing with the team he just won 56 games with or returning to the basement-dwelling franchise that shipped him out of town less than 18 months prior.

After playing his first two seasons with the Nuggets and establishing himself as one of the most satisfyingly athletic big men in the game, McDyess enjoyed his first taste of team success following his arrival in Phoenix. The trade that sent him from Denver to the Suns prior to that 1997/98 season was precipitated by the fact that McDyess and his representative, Arn Tellem, were seeking a six-year, $100MM contract extension back when the club’s front office refused to go any higher than $70MM.

“I guess they had no choice but to trade me,” he said at the time, adding shortly thereafter that he didn’t think there was any possible way he would return to the Nuggets when he hit free agency seven months later.

Of course it was seven months later when things got unprecedentedly interesting.

When the NBA revealed that the lockout had ended and there would be an abbreviated 50-game 1998/99 season, basketball fans the world over braced themselves for a whirlwind free agency period in the middle of January. It was during this frenzy that McDyess flipped and then flopped and then, assuming he’s only human, broke down in tears at a Calgary Flames game while clutching a Hall of Fame goaltender’s hockey stick. Just go with it, trust me.

While the quote above – and another from the same Deseret News piece calling the idea of McDyess returning to Denver “the biggest fib” he’d heard this year – may have done a good job of accurately depicting what was in his head at the time, it didn’t account for what would come next.

From various interviews over the years, we can piece together that McDyess initially opposed the idea of returning to the Nuggets because they traded him, but ultimately soured on a return to Phoenix because he felt the Suns didn’t feature him enough in their offense.

At that point, nearly a year after saying that he had no intention of returning to Denver, McDyess and Nuggets general manager Dan Issel zeroed in on a deal that would see him return to Colorado. Just when the club was set to announce that it would be bringing McDyess back on a new long-term deal, however, the forward got cold feet and cancelled the press conference.

Back in 1999, Sports Illustrated’s Jackie MacMullan wrote that McDyess’ doubts about returning to Denver were fueled by the fact that the Nuggets would be forced to renounce the rights to LaPhonso Ellis, a teammate and close friend of McDyess’ during his first tenure with the club.

Turned off by the realization that he wouldn’t get the chance to play with Ellis, McDyess started questioning the decision to sign the deal altogether and ultimately called Jason Kidd, Phoenix’s starting point guard of the day, to express his reservations. Kidd, 25 years old at the time and fresh off of his first full season with the Suns, in turn rallied teammates George McCloud and Rex Chapman to join him on a Colorado-bound private jet in order to meet with McDyess face-to-face and convince him to fully back out of the decision and return to Phoenix.

As MacMullan wrote back in 1999, when Issel heard that a convoy of Suns teammates were coming to try and change McDyess’ mind, he brought the power forward to McNichols Arena for an NHL game between the Colorado Avalanche and visiting Calgary Flames.

“If Antonio had left that arena without some kind of handshake deal, we were in trouble,” he told MacMullan.

So serious were the Nuggets about getting a commitment that night that when they learned that the free agent’s favorite player was Avs goaltender Patrick Roy, they introduced the two prior to puck drop, a meeting from which the forward is said to have come away with one of the goaltender’s sticks.

Eventually Issel and McDyess made their way up to a private box prior to Kidd and company’s arrival at the arena. When the Suns teammates, desperate to connect with McDyess, they were railroaded by security who, per Chapman, went so far as to tell them that McDyess had specifically said to “beat it.”

Pressed by Chapman, the security guard admitted that he was just parroting what he had been instructed to say but the wheels were in motion.

McDyess and Issel were ultimately joined in the private box by head coach Mike D’Antoni and guard Nick Van Exel (who drove through a blinding snowstorm from their training camp facility in Golden Springs just to be there) and any lingering doubts that McDyess had about returning to Denver were assuaged. Within 24 hours, the six-year, $67.5MM deal that would stretch 2003/04 season was announced by the organization.

The trio of Suns players eager for one last chance to retain their explosive, young teammate never did make contact. Would history have unfolded differently if they had?

“I probably would have been more confused than ever,” McDyess said.

Photo courtesy of USA Today Sports Images.

Hoops Rumors Retro: Dikembe Mutombo to the Sixers

January 21st, 2017 at 3:06pm CST by Austin Kent

The mandate at Hoops Rumors is to consolidate news from throughout the professional basketball world, but nobody ever specified from which decade. Join us as Austin Kent, a grown man with a binder of 1996/97 NBA trading cards beside his desk, cannonballs down the rabbit hole of nostalgia to give significant trades of yesteryear the modern media treatment.

This isn’t the first time a sassy, seven-foot pillar of physical wonder from Africa has arrived in Philadelphia and immediately upgraded the status of the Sixers’ organization, but while Dikembe Mutombo may not publicly hound Rhianna with the same vigor that Joel Embiid does¹, his brief tenure in Pennsylvania does deserve its own small subsection in the Philly basketball history books.

In February of 2001, Allen Iverson’s Sixers were barreling toward the Eastern Conference Championship at a 41-14 clip. Their biggest problem, however – a gigantic Shaquille O’Neal-shaped problem – remained unsolved.

Could the Larry Brown-led ensemble of ragtag supporting cast members in Philadelphia really give the league’s leading scorer and ultimate MVP enough help to actually compete with the Lakers in their bid for a second-straight title? Would it make a difference if you piled George Lynch, Aaron McKie and Tyrone Hill on top of one another, veiled them in a gigantic trench coat and threw them in the low post to defend 28-year-old O’Neal at the height of his prime?

The answer to both is ‘Probably not, but actually, well… I don’t know, maybe’.

Regardless, fate had other plans, and on that February 22, 2001 trade deadline, it commandeered the mind and body of Billy King and made the decision to go big or go home².

Perhaps it was the untimely wrist injury to 27-year-old defensive anchor Theo Ratliff that compelled Philly to pull the trigger on the deal that would land them a 34-year-old, three-time Defensive Player of the Year. Perhaps it was just growing trepidation that what they had wouldn’t be enough to keep up with the Lakers. Maybe they just couldn’t find a trench coat long enough to cover three professional basketball players without anybody noticing.

What we do know is that the Sixers didn’t want – and possibly couldn’t afford – to take any chances. Not with Ratliff sidelined and question marks surrounding his long-term health. Not with Iverson somehow single-handedly dragging fellow starters Lynch, McKie, and point guard Eric Snow to relevance for the first and only times in their respective careers³.

Alas, with pressure to keep their arguably unsustainable momentum rolling, the Sixers dealt Ratliff, along with Toni Kukoc, Nazr Mohammed and Pepe Sanchez, to Atlanta in exchange for Mutombo and Roshown McLeod.

In Mutombo, the Sixers gained a generational defensive stalwart, somebody with the gravitas to convince Iverson that they were committed to building a winner around him. The best part is that it worked. Sort of. The acquisition helped Philadelphia stave off the best that the Eastern Conference could throw at them, something that even the staunchest critics of the deal would have to agree wasn’t guaranteed.

“My sense is we might not have been able to hold on without Theo,” head coach Brown would tell the Associated Press several weeks after the team completed the trade. “I didn’t expect him to be back and contributing until the playoffs.”

Mutombo averaged 11.7 points and 12.4 rebounds per game for the Sixers over the course of the subsequent 26 regular season contests – and while his 2.5 blocks paled in comparison to the 3.7 bar Ratliff had set in the season’s first 50 games – there was finally an established star on the roster to help shoulder some of the pressure otherwise carried by Iverson alone.

In 23 playoff games that year, Mutombo ramped up his averages to 13.9 points, 13.7 rebounds and 3.1 blocks per game, but not even that would be enough. Though Mutombo would respectably claim his fourth Defensive Player of the Year award during that postseason run, the team still couldn’t find a way to slow the 300-plus-pound O’Neal when they eventually encountered him.

En route to his second consecutive Finals MVP, O’Neal overpowered anything Philadelphia decided to throw his way, averaging 33.0 points and 15.8 rebounds per game in the eventual five-game series. Seeing as both O’Neal and Mutombo have since been enshrined in the Hall of Fame, that’s more of a compliment to the former than it is a knock on he latter, but it is kind of both.

Simply put, the peek of the Iverson Era Sixers happend to overlap with O’Neal’s physical prime. That’s not Mutombo’s fault, it’s not Iverson’s fault – it’s not even King’s fault. Just because doubling down on the present didn’t work, doesn’t mean it wasn’t still the best course of action.⁴

Sure, one need not look far to find Sixers fans griping about King’s decision making while an executive with the organization, but while I won’t defend the fact that Ratliff and Mutombo were literally the only players to be named to an All-Star Game alongside AI during his entire Philadelphia tenure, the deal that yielded Mutombo can’t be judged too harshly.

Hindsight reveals that the blockbuster deal didn’t deliver the result that Sixers fans wanted at the time – and, granted, it may have hamstringed them down the road – but hindsight also tells us that Ratliff was never quite the same player after the deal as he was before. In fact, when you consider that Mutombo was promptly unloaded to the Nets when the Sixers started trending downward the following season⁵, all hindsight really tells us is that Shaquille O’Neal was a destroyer of worlds who feasted on the souls of any who dared to oppose him, striking fear in the hearts of Eastern Conference executives whose only conceivable response was to desperately acquire Dikembe Mutombo and hope for the best.

This is nothing that we couldn’t have guessed at the time.

In that spring of 2001, the Hawks were in no position to contend in the Eastern Conference and Mutombo was a pending free agent, anyway. For Atlanta, the move was a no-brainer. In reality, the decision to move their cornerstone effectively served as a symbolic end to the era in which he and Steve Smith combined to position the team as fringe contenders year-in and year-out⁶.

As a result, the Hawks team that Ratliff would join was a dismal one led by a 23-year-old Jason Terry and, although it would eventually feature an impressive-sounding frontcourt of Ratliff, Shareef Abdur-Rahim and Glenn Robinson two seasons later, nothing would ever come of it. The Hawks franchise wouldn’t win more than 35 games until Joe Johnson and Josh Smith led them to the postseason in 2008⁷.

With little incentive to rush back, Ratliff didn’t return from his wrist injury during that 2000-01 campaign, suggesting that Brown’s concern over Ratliff’s health was eerily well-placed. The next season, his first full one in Atlanta, a hip injury sidelined the big man for all but three games and he would never go on to average more than 8.7 points again for the remaining 10 years of his career⁸.

More impactful during his stint with the Hawks was Toni Kukoc. Despite that or perhaps because he joined a team whose only real offensive weapon was a diminutive second-year guard named Jet, Kukoc came alive in Atlanta, showcasing his versatility and the potential to lead an offense that he had occasionally shown flashes of with the historic Bulls several years prior.

In 17 games with his new team, an admittedly bitter Kukoc averaged 19.7 points, 5.7 rebounds and 6.2 assists per game – not bad for a 32-year-old after two underwhelming half seasons in Philadelphia. He didn’t quite match those numbers the following year as the Hawks wisely set about rebuilding and brought in Georgia native Abdur-Rahim to be their focal point, but it was an entertaining taste of what the international star could have been producing all along had he originally landed in a different situation than with Michael Jordan, Phil Jackson and the Bulls.

Of course history won’t remember Kukoc’s brief dalliance with greatness during his 14 starts as a Hawk back in 2001 or Ratliff’s admirable attempts to re-establish himself as a defensive anchor in the early aughts. It won’t even remember that King and the Sixers quickly cut their losses and got at least something out of Mutombo before the sun finally set on Iverson’s time with the franchise in 2006.

No, all history will remember about this trade is the beloved, larger than life, physical powerhouse that arrived in Philadelphia one day, a highly acclaimed fan favorite charged with the unenviable task of leading the Sixers to the next level.

Sound familiar?

At least this time around Shaquille O’Neal isn’t here to ruin this outcome.

Footnotes:

But just imagine if he did…
I have no such logical explanation for other Billy King decisions.
Don’t think I’ve forgotten about your ’95 All-Star nod, T-Hill.
For all we know King could have stood pat at the deadline only to watch the Sixers slide out of pole position in the East, ultimately get dumped in the first-round by a healthier team, exacerbating the rift between Iverson and the team brass, eventually catalyzing their star’s exit from Philadelphia. Way to go, Hypothetical Billy King.
New Jersey’s hasty reaction to their own merciless beat-down at the hands of the Lakers in 2002.
Underrated Fun Fact #567: Pearl Jam briefly operated under the band name Mookie Blaylock.
The 2007 Hawks have a standing reservation on my Maybe Not Necessarily Dominate, But Definitely Awesome Top Ten List.
Although in 2003-04, he would go on to play in 85 games. A product of another mid-season deal, this time to the Trail Blazers.

Hoops Rumors Retro is a weekly feature. Be sure to follow and get at Austin Kent (@AustinKent) with suggestions for future pieces.

Jan. 14, 2017 – Penny Hardaway to the Suns.
Jan. 7, 2017 – Gary Payton to the Bucks.

Hoops Rumors Retro: Penny Hardaway To The Suns

January 14th, 2017 at 11:05am CST by Austin Kent

It’s early August 1999 and the world is racing to prepare for the turn of the millennium. Jerry Colangelo, owner and president of the Phoenix Suns, has other plans.

Sure, the 59-year-old Godfather of Phoenix Basketball reads the papers, he watches the news – but while rest of the country braces for the pandemonium of Y2K, Colangelo and the executive team with whom he manages the organization decide to take the offensive.

The wheels are in motion for a scheme so grand and so bold that it will get the Suns to the top of a mountain they’ve longed to climb since the franchise – and Colangelo along with it – first hit the scene in 1969.

They call it: Backcourt 2000.

The Penny Hardaway that takes a seat at the press conference announcing his arrival in Arizona isn’t the one that you might remember – the last Lil Penny TV spot aired several years prior – but he isn’t the tragic hero that you’ve grown to mourn either.

Not yet at least.

In 1999, Hardaway is coming off a decent lockout-shortened 1998/99 campaign, an abbreviated season in which he suited up for every game. That bold 50 you see in the ‘G’ column of his Basketball Reference profile means more than just league leader – it means hope.

To recap, Hardaway was named to the All-NBA 1st team two times before his 25th birthday. Put another way it’s even more impressive; after winning the Rookie of the Year award in 1994, he finished 1995 and 1996 as one of the top two guards in the NBA. Not bad, young blood¹.

What came after the early accolades but before his exit from Orlando is all too familiar. In the first year after Shaquille O’Neal’s departure, Hardaway would miss 23 games to injury. The following season a pair of knee surgeries would limit him to just 19 total.

At the time of the injuries, few knew what to make of the All-Star’s frequent stints on the sidelines. Doctors barely knew what the future would hold for NBA players with degraded knee cartilage, never mind teammates or fans.

“Nobody bonded with me at that time,” Hardaway has since told SLAM. “No support. It was weird. Nobody would say, ‘Hey man, are you OK?’ Nothing. It was more that people thought I was faking.”

Suffice it to say, Hardaway’s once meteoric star faded as quickly as it appeared on the NBA horizon. In its wake, a once beloved superstar with an elite ceiling but mysteriously compromised body.Read more

The Arizona summer heat builds in the indoor conference room. Watching above from a balcony is 26-year-old Jason Kidd, a reigning All-NBA 1st-teamer in his own right. Together, the plan goes, Hardaway and Kidd will make the best backcourt in the league, together they’ll push the perpetually good-but-not-great franchise to new heights.

In each of the past 11 seasons – and 19 of the past 22 – the Suns have made the playoffs. Still, something needs to be done. First-round exits may build character, but only for so long. Coming off their fourth straight premature exit, the Suns are in desperate need of a home run swing in the awkward, post-Charles Barkley transition years.

Pairing two of the most iconic guards of the decade in one backcourt is such a home run swing

Never mind that even in 1999 Hardaway’s injury history was a potential red flag, the idea of combining two superstar playmakers under 30 years old, was an impossible one to ignore. That Hardaway would ply his trade in Phoenix was the biggest headline of the offseason².

“[This] ranks right up there with any acquisition we’ve ever made,” Colangelo said of the deal. “He’s a marquee guy.”

Considering the Suns had little cap space to sign the then-free agent, Colangelo and company would have to facilitate a sign-and-trade deal with a Magic franchise that had begrudgingly accepted that their once prized All-Star was outbound.

To Orlando went rookie Pat Garrity, 33-year-old Danny Manning, and a pair of first-round picks. Though it was the shedding of Manning’s $6.8MM deal that allowed Phoenix to sign Hardaway to the max allowable under the cap³, the veteran’s tenure in Florida lasted just two weeks.

On August 19, 1999 – exactly 14 days after the Hardaway deal – Manning was flipped to the Bucks alongside Dale Ellis for Chris Gatling and Armen Gilliam. Garrity, by contrast, would stay with the Magic, playing nine seasons before retiring from the NBA in 2008.

The draft picks sent east would prove to be the most valuable aspect of the sign-and-trade package, though even that part of the deal would prove to be a dark spot in Orlando history. With the 2001 first-round pick the Magic acquired, they drafted Jason Collins. The 2002 pick involved would go on to net… Amar’e Stoudemire⁴.

It’s hard to criticize a team’s haul in a sign-and-trade scenario, but there’s no denying that the ripple effects of the Hardaway deal didn’t help the culture in Orlando. The Magic toiled in irrelevance for eight years after the trade, a run of lost seasons and first-round exits ending only when Dwight Howard came of age under Stan Van Gundy.

In Phoenix, too, the forecast would eventually dim, though not without initial glimmers of hope. Limited to just 45 games together in that initial season, Backcourt 2000 didn’t quite make the splash Colangelo and the Suns expected it to. Nonetheless, a reasonably healthy Hardaway showed signs of promise, averaging modestly better numbers than the ones he was posting at the end of his tenure in Orlando.

As Kidd recovered from an ankle injury in the 2000 postseason, Hardaway led his new Suns squad to a first-round victory over the reigning champion San Antonio Spurs, the 28-year-old’s 20.3 points, 5.7 assists and 4.9 rebounds per game as positive a sign that things were turning around as anybody had seen in years.

Alas, as history would have it, the cartilage issues that plagued Hardaway in Orlando would resurface in Phoenix. In the 2000/01 campaign, the guard would play just four games — depressingly, that’s the same number of subsequent knee surgeries he would undergo before his time with the Suns officially came to an end during the 2003/04 season.

“I was one of the first guys to get microfracture surgery,” Hardaway told SLAM in the same interview. “It wasn’t even heard of in the NBA yet.”

Nowadays the procedure is more commonplace, but don’t let the medical advances of the past 20 years normalize what the guard went through at the time. Microfracture surgery involves a surgeon scratching small perforations in the bone surface of an athlete’s knee, allowing otherwise stationary stem cells to seep out and eventually form new cartilage to supplement the existing stuff.

Some athletes, like the aforementioned Stoudemire, would end up undergoing the procedure with some success much later, but Hardaway never quite recovered as well as he or the Suns hoped.

To the man’s credit, he would bounce back and play 80 games at a less dominant level the following season, but Backcourt 2000 just wasn’t meant to be. Due to, or at least partly influenced by, domestic abuse allegations that surfaced in January 2001, Kidd was promptly shipped off to New Jersey for disgruntled Nets guard Stephon Marbury.

Not surprisingly, as only hindsight can reveal, sometimes headlines break that don’t end up bearing the significance they’re presumed to; sometimes reality just doesn’t quite live up to the narrative and we find ourselves prying the last of Walmart’s canned goods from the desperate fingers of a stranger in hopes of stocking our underground Y2K bunker with enough non-perishables to make it through the impending apocalypse.

And sometimes, just sometimes, a crafty NBA executive’s grand scheme to assemble talent and storm triumphantly into the 21st century on the backs of an unprecedented superstar backcourt proves to be little more than an underwhelming miscalculation.

Footnotes:

Kyrie Irving’s Uncle Drew campaign is the empirical best NBA advertising campaign to run in the years since those Lil Penny, according to Austin’s Fluid List of Preferred NBA Advertising Campaigns.
Come at me, fans of the Antonio Davis/Jonathan Bender deal.
$9MM, with raises over the course of the next seven years (maxing out at $15.8MM). Yes, really.
Two years later the Magic would trade that same 2002 first-round pick back to the Suns along with Bo Outlaw in exchange for Jud Buechler (and, essentially, cap space).

Hoops Rumors Retro is a weekly feature. Be sure to follow and get at Austin Kent (@AustinKent) with suggestions for future pieces.

Jan. 7, 2017 – Gary Payton to the Bucks.

Hoops Rumors Retro: Gary Payton To The Bucks

January 7th, 2017 at 10:54am CST by Austin Kent

It’s mid-February 2003 and the Seattle SuperSonics are slogging through a fifth consecutive mediocre season. As the club preps for an inconsequential contest with the New York Knicks, their leader, a goateed franchise legend, wears a scowl equal parts “Classic Glove branding” and “I’m too old for this s–t.”

Though they’ve averaged over 44 wins per year in each of the previous three campaigns, the Sonics have just one postseason berth to show for it in the unrelenting Western Conference that crushes the spirits of would-be playoff contenders annually. Gary Payton knows this. What Gary Payton might not know is that this will be the last time¹ he wears green and yellow.

Though the Sonics had a rich history in Seattle, it had been half a decade since their last taste of genuine title aspirations. The roster with which Payton battled his way to the 1996 Finals was long gone, his most influential teammate at that time now an overweight footnote² on the other side of the country.

It’s presumably misting ominously in Seattle on this February 19, a much-anticipated deadline day, when the Sonics decide to formally cut ties with their 13-year veteran. Payton, of course, has plied his trade in the rainy state of Washington since the club selected him with the second overall pick in the 1990 NBA Draft. Payton had been an eight-time All-Star for the Sonics during his tenure and still leads the Oklahoma City Thunder franchise in nearly ever significant guard stat category³.

Also outgoing is Desmond Mason, a 25-year-old scorer on the wing just two years removed from one of the most underrated Slam Dunk Contest victories of the decade.

That Payton is on the move isn’t particularly surprising; the superstar is in the final year of a contract that pays him $13MM a year. Since Payton’s performance hasn’t subsided with age, Rick Sund and the rest of the Seattle executive staff recognize that they’d likely be asked to shell out at least that much on the next contract for a 34-year-old guard on a team spinning its wheels in a constant bid for the West’s eight-seed.

On the other side of the blockbuster trade – an unexpected one, given the tentative way in which general managers were approaching the newly instituted luxury tax rules – is Ray Allen.Read more

In 2003, Allen is as far removed from winning his first title with the Boston Celtics (2008) as he is from filming He Got Game (1998). This is the Ray Allen that, though technically just entering his prime, history has seemed to have forgotten.

A year and a half removed from playing in Game 7 in the 2001 Eastern Conference Finals, Milwaukee has a considerably less promising forecast in 2003 — the addition of Anthony Mason allegedly impacted team chemistry. Still, Allen – just 27 years old – has made a name for himself as a consistent, All-Star caliber talent, and the Bucks are an annual playoff threat.

Even at the time, the decision to part with Allen was a questionable one, but the most optimistic Bucks supporter might argue that the high-flying Mason’s name carried certain veritable weight. A 23-year-old Michael Redd waiting in the wings to replace Allen presumably helped too⁴.

Alas, the final packages exchanged ended up being Payton and Mason for Allen, Kevin Ollie, Flip Murray, and a conditional first-round pick that ultimately became Luke Ridnour at No. 14. Considering that Payton played just 28 games for the Bucks before signing with Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O’Neal, and the Los Angeles Lakers the next summer, it’s hard to rate the deal as anything but a disaster for the citizens of Wisconsin.

Hindsight tells us many things, but one detail worth noting is that Payton’s eventual decline arrived quickly and happened swiftly. Though we’ll excuse the Hall-of-Famer for failing to crack the 15-point-per-game plateau alongside Bryant and O’Neal, he was promptly cast aside as a ring chaser, his production diminishing predictably in each subsequent year before he finally won a title off the bench with the Miami Heat in 2006.

The other major parties in the deal would go on to have long – and in Allen’s case illustrious – careers. Mason never did end up being the franchise-leading star the Bucks may have hoped he would become, but his was a respectable career worth remembering in its own right.

Perhaps it was a fear that Allen wouldn’t ultimately re-sign in Milwaukee that worried the Bucks enough to deal the biggest third of the Allen-Glenn Robinson–Sam Cassell Big Three. Perhaps it was overconfidence in Redd’s and/or Mason’s ability to fill his shoes. Nobody can say for sure.

Regardless, the following years yielded little for Milwaukee but early playoff exits until those too fell by the wayside, ushering in the eventual arrival of 2005 No. 1 pick Andrew Bogut and several more years of disappointment.

As for the Sonics, a team that hadn’t finished below .500 since 1987 (15 years before the trade), they immediately petered off. The franchise won just 43% of its games from 2003 to 2008 (which includes an aberrational 52-30 campaign in 2004-05) before relocating to Oklahoma City, just in time to watch Allen win a title in Beantown.

Don’t blame Allen alone for Seattle’s fall from grace — teammates Calvin Booth and Jerome James did little to instill confidence while they started alongside him. Nonetheless, it was an unfortunate end to an era of basketball in the proud city.

While the now-legendary sharpshooter ended up getting the last laugh, playing a vital role with multiple championship contenders in Boston and Miami, there’s nothing quite like the legacy Gary Payton left behind in Seattle. Given what happened next to the franchise, there never will be.

Footnotes:

Also, the 999^th time! Which is neat.
I refer half-heartedly to Orlando Magic era Shawn Kemp during his Fat Elvis phase.
Payton sits just 646 ahead of No. 2 Kevin Durant in all-time points scored for the franchise. Russell Westbrook sits fourth, more than 4,000 behind.
By 2003/04, Redd would embark on a six-year streak of averaging 20-plus PPG for Milwaukee.