NBA 75 trade deadline: The 33 deals that swung championships in league history
The NBA's annual trade deadline is set for 3 p.m. ET on Thursday. We have already seen Indiana Pacers big man Domantas Sabonis sent to the Sacramento Kings and Portland Trail Blazers guard CJ McCollum dealt to the New Orleans Pelicans. Negotiations on a swap of Brooklyn Nets star James Harden and Philadelphia 76ers counterpart Ben Simmons could gain momentum at any moment. What better way to pass the time between than to remember the 33 trades in the league's 75-year history that directly swung championships.
Let this trip down memory lane be a reminder that disgruntled stars, trade requests, contract disputes and head-scratching deals involving headlining names were a reality long before the player empowerment era ...
June 1948: Dolph Schayes for nothing but a chance to save a league
Leo Ferris, serving as both general manager of the Tri-Cities Blackhawks and vice president of the National Basketball League, was trying to save the NBL in 1948, when four teams left for the Basketball Association of America and two more folded under financial pressure. As the struggling Syracuse Nationals fell into danger of becoming the NBL's third victim of lost revenue, Ferris' role in the league office took precedent.
Ferris knew his Blackhawks could not convince Dolph Schayes to play for them in Moline, Illinois, not when the NYU product's hometown Knicks had also selected him in the 1948 BAA draft, so Tri-Cities transferred his NBL rights to Syracuse. In his capacity as a league executive, Ferris had facilitated the sale of 25 $1,000 shares in the Nationals and offered Schayes $7,500 of it — $2,500 more than the Knicks were offering him.
"I figured out that $2,500 was a lot of money and professional basketball might not have a long life," Schayes told The New York Times in June 2015. "So I figured I might as well take the best offer."
Ferris negotiated the NBL/BAA merger a year later, when he also left Tri-Cities to run Syracuse's front office, where he built a contender around Schayes. The Nationals reached three Finals and won the 1955 title in Schayes' 15-year career, which spanned the franchise's relocation to Philadelphia as the 76ers.
April 30, 1956: Bill Russell for the Ice Capades
What could have been for the Blackhawks. Not only did they gift-wrap Schayes, who would have been a rookie in Moline under coach Red Auerbach during the 1949-50 season, they traded fellow Hall of Famer Bob Cousy's draft rights to the Chicago Stags for Frankie Brian in 1950. Auerbach quit to join the Boston Celtics, who landed Cousy in a dispersal draft when the Stags folded. It gets worse for the Blackhawks.
They changed their name to the Hawks when they moved to Milwaukee in 1951 and moved again to St. Louis three years later. They drafted Bob Pettit in 1954 and Bill Russell in 1956, which means at one point or another the Hawks had the rights to the greatest coach of his generation and every one of the league's foundational superstars of the 1950s but George Mikan. And only Pettit ever played a game for them.
Auerbach made public his interest in Russell and privately went about securing his rights. Legend has it Celtics owner Walter Brown offered to bring his Ice Capades to Rochester if Royals owner Les Harrison did not draft Russell No. 1 overall, so they took Sihugo Green instead. The Hawks owned the second pick. St. Louis remained segregated at the time. The team was no different, and Russell refused to play for them. In stepped Auerbach, who traded future Hall of Famers Ed Macauley and Cliff Hagan for the rights to Russell.
Pettit, Macauley and Hagan won a championship in 1958, the last for an all-white championship rotation, while Russell and Auerbach's Celtics won 11 titles from 1957-69, with Cousy as point guard for six of them.
January 15, 1965: Wilt Chamberlain for pennies on the dollar
In the stairwell of Stan Musial's St. Louis restaurant, the San Francisco Warriors and Philadelphia 76ers orchestrated a seismic trade at 12:30 a.m. after the 1965 All-Star Game. The Warriors saw no need to pay Wilt Chamberlain $100,000 to lead the league in scoring for a last-place team, not when he was clashing with teammates and failing to fill seats for a cash-strapped organization, so they dealt him to the Sixers.
The return? Paul Neumann, Connie Dierking, Lee Shaffer and somewhere between $50,000 and $150,000.
"Chamberlain is not an easy man to love," Warriors owner Franklin Mieuli bluntly told Sports Illustrated's Tex Maule years later. "I don't mean that I personally dislike him. He's a good friend of mine. But the fans in San Francisco never learned to love him. I guess most fans are for the little man and the underdog, and Wilt is neither. He's easy to hate, and we were the best draw in the NBA on the road, when people came to see him lose. I traded him because of cold, hard facts — I was making money for everyone but myself."
After initially threatening to retire, Chamberlain warmed to the Sixers, who he led to the 1967 title.
July 9, 1968: Wilt for pennies on the dollar ... again
Chamberlain soured on the Sixers by the summer of 1969, when their playoff record against Russell's Celtics fell to 1-4. The three-time reigning MVP demanded a trade for various reasons that included the Los Angeles lifestyle and threatened to join the ABA if Philadelphia general manager Jack Ramsay did not oblige. He did, trading Chamberlain to the Lakers for Darrall Imhoff, Archie Clark and Jerry Chambers.
That is twice in three years that the game's most productive player was traded for a total of six players, none of whom made an All-Star appearance on the teams that acquired them. Meanwhile, Chamberlain, Jerry West and their Lakers made four of the next five Finals, winning L.A.'s first championship in 1972.
December 19, 1968: Dave DeBusschere for a couple malcontents
The New York Knicks had a chemistry problem midway through the 1968-69 season, when Walt Bellamy and Howard Komives butted heads with teammates Willis Reed and Cazzie Russell, respectively. Knicks general manager Eddie Donovan shipped Bellamy and Komives to the Detroit Pistons for chemistry solution Dave DeBusschere. The beloved teammate slotted into power forward, moving Reed to center, and the roster clicked. DeBusschere was an All-Star in each of his five years with the Knicks, and they made three Finals appearances during that span, winning the only two titles in franchise history in 1970 and 1973.
April 21, 1970: Oscar Robertson for a stroke of Bob Cousy's ego
Robertson spent three years in college and the first 10 years of his NBA career in Cincinnati, where his Royals were working on six seasons without a playoff series victory in 1970. They hired Cousy to coach, and he even played seven games just to sell some tickets for a franchise that would skip town in two years.
Cousy and Robertson clashed. The NBA's biography of Robertson even suggests the discord stemmed from Cousy's jealousy of Robertson, who had recently broken the Celtics legend's career assists record.
"Whatever his reasons were," Robertson once said, "I think he was wrong and I'll never forget it."
Robertson was due a new contract and had veto rights to any trade, so the cash-strapped Royals shopped him to a handful of teams, the Knicks and Lakers reportedly among them. Robertson nixed a deal with the Baltimore Bullets, and the Royals eventually settled on a Milwaukee Bucks offer of Flynn Robinson, who was fresh off his lone All-Star appearance, and Charlie Paulk, who was still on active duty in Vietnam.
The Bucks won the title in their first season pairing Robertson with Lew Alcindor, and they reached the Finals again in 1974, Robertson's final season. Robinson and Paulk each spent one season in Cincinnati.
November 10, 1971: Earl Monroe for anywhere but Baltimore
Earl Monroe wanted nothing to do with Baltimore, either. The Bullets were lagging on payments already, and he was due a new contract, so he requested a trade prior to the 1970-71 season. When his request was not granted three games into the 1971-72 campaign, he stayed home, demanding a deal to the Lakers, Sixers or Chicago Bulls. Meanwhile, Monroe met with the ABA's Indiana Pacers to increase his leverage.
"Don't want a raise," he told Bullets owner Abe Pollin. "Don't want Baltimore."
Monroe acquiesced to a trade with the Knicks, who sent Mike Riordan, Dave Stallworth and an undisclosed amount of cash back to the Bullets. Monroe offered to come off New York's bench behind Dick Barnett, but it soon became obvious that he and Walt Frazier would mesh to form the league's best backcourt tandem.
“It was depressing in Baltimore, playing before only 5,000 fans," Monroe said at his Knicks introduction. "I do want to say, though, that my gripe in Baltimore was not with the fans, just with the general atmosphere."
Not so in New York. Two years removed a title, the Knicks had gotten off to a rocky start in 1971, but they rallied behind Monroe to reach the Finals by season's end and won their second championship a year later.
June 23, 1972: Elvin Hayes for an attitude change
Playing for the Rockets in San Diego and Houston was eating Elvin Hayes up inside. As he later told Sports Illustrated, "I was expected to make a winner out of a team which didn't have the ability." He alternated between sleeping pills and Rolaids to cope with stress that was also agitating his coaches and teammates.
When the Rockets traded Hayes to the Bullets four years into a career that already included scoring and rebounding titles, Baltimore coach Gene Shue claimed it was not solely a swap for All-Star Jack Marin.
"We get Elvin's psychiatrist, too," Shue said from an offseason news conference announcing the trade. The ex-player turned coach added, "With a change in location, we hope Elvin will have a change in attitude."
Hayes left his sleeping and stomach troubles behind in Houston. He and Wes Unseld complemented each other in the frontrouct, and the pair reached three Finals together, winning Washington's only title in 1978.
June 16, 1975: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar for the culture
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar won a title in his second season with the Bucks and three MVP awards in his first five years, but he was no fan of Milwaukee. He reportedly told teammates, "Live in Milwaukee? No, I guess you could say I exist in Milwaukee. I am a soldier hired for service and I will perform that service well."
By October 1974, Robertson had retired, Abdul-Jabbar had a year plus a team option left on his contract, and the Manhattan native's cultural differences with the Midwest had worn on him. He requested a trade to New York or Los Angeles over beef Wellington. (The Bullets and Atlanta Hawks were briefly entertained.)
It was not until March 1975 that a young Marv Albert reported Abdul-Jabbar wanted out. Abdul-Jabbar confirmed it, telling reporters, "I don't have any family or friends in Milwaukee. Milwaukee is not the kind of city I'm about. I'm not knocking it or the people. It's just that socially and culturally I don't fit in Milwaukee."
The Bucks reportedly rejected Knicks offers of Frazier and Monroe and were focused on the Lakers by June 1975. They met for four hours in the Denver airport, where nobody would recognize the principles, and they hashed out the trade: The three-time MVP for second-year guard Brian Winters, 26-year-old center Elmore Smith, the Lakers' two top-10 draft picks in 1975, David Meyers, Junior Bridgeman and $800,000.
“Kareem is 28," Bucks GM Wayne Embry told reporters, "and they’ll be around when Kareem is long gone."
Winters made a pair of All-Star appearances. He and Bridgeman were rotational players when the Bucks returned to the Eastern Conference Finals in 1983, but Abdul-Jabbar outlasted them all, playing 14 more seasons for the Lakers, earning three more MVPs and winning five championships next to Magic Johnson.
August 5, 1976: Maurice Lucas for a bum knee
The Portland Trail Blazers missed the playoffs in Bill Walton's first two years, as teammates Sidney Wicks and Geoff Petrie "continued sniping at each other as well as undermining management and criticizing their young pivotman's social behavior." Walton was a vegetarian who favored "ecology, the American Indian Movement and the non‐proliferation of nuclear energy plants" over Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War.
The Blazers sold Wicks to the Celtics for $500,000 and traded Petrie along with Steve Hawes to the Hawks for the No. 2 pick in a 1976 ABA dispersal draft that featured three future Hall of Famers. Petrie, mind you, required a third surgery on his left knee before ever playing in Atlanta and never played another NBA game.
"I really don't know why I'm here," Petrie told reporters soon after his arrival in Atlanta.
Meanwhile, Portland selected Maurice Lucas with the second pick in the dispersal draft, and he instantly connected with Walton, both as a vegetarian off the court and an enforcer on it. The Blazers rolled to the 1977 title and were the favorites to repeat when Walton suffered a career-altering foot injury in February 1978. Lucas was named an All-Star in each of his three full seasons in Portland and played until 1988.
October 20, 1976: Dr. J for straight cash
As part of the 1976 merger, the ABA's St. Louis Spirits received $2.2 million and a piece of NBA revenue in perpetuity to fold the franchise, a deal the league eventually bought out for a reported $500 million in 2014.
Meanwhile, the New York Nets were among four ABA teams that owed the NBA a $3.2 million entry. The Knicks also docked the Nets $4.8 million for infringing on their territory. And Julius Erving was holding out of Nets training camp in Long Island as he demanded a renegotiated contract for roughly $3 million over four years.
Nets owner Roy Boe, facing this heap of debt, opened the bidding for Erving's services. He offered Erving to the Knicks if they waived the $4.8 million indemnification fee, but they refused, offering $2.5 million instead. The Sixers outbid the Lakers and Bucks, among other teams, with a $3 million offer that all but waived the Nets' entry fee. Philadelphia also met Erving's $3 million contract demand as part of the deal.
The Nets moved to New Jersey a year later. Boe met the first $800,000 in payments to the Knicks but fell behind thereafter. The two sides landed in court, where in 1978 they reached an agreement that paved the way for Boe's $8.5 million sale of the franchise that same year. As part of the deal, the Nets agreed to give the Knicks $3.2 million, a first-round pick swap in 1978, the best of their two first-round picks in 1979, Phil Jackson's contract and the next four years of their television revenue (an estimated value of $2 million).
Erving had led the Nets to ABA titles in 1974 and 1976 and was the league's three-time reigning MVP when they sold him to the Sixers. The franchise won one playoff series in the first 25 years of their NBA existence.
The Knicks passed on Erving when their record and Madison Square Garden attendance was suffering. Of course, they also could have used the first of their two picks from the Nets to select Larry Bird fourth overall in 1978, when the Celtics drafted his rights two spots later, a year before he left Indiana State. The Knicks then sent their second Nets pick to the Seattle SuperSonics as compensation for signing Marvin Webster.
Erving played 11 seasons in Philadelphia. He was an All-Star each year and the 1981 NBA MVP, leading the 76ers to seven Eastern Conference finals appearances, four Finals showings and the 1983 championship.
February 15, 1980: James Worthy for the Stepien Rule
At the February 1980 trade deadline, the first-place Lakers sought the defensive services of Cleveland Cavaliers guard Butch Lee, who had just returned from knee surgery, in exchange for reserve forward Don Ford. Cleveland asked for L.A.'s first-round pick that season to sweeten the deal, and Lakers GM Bill Sharman only consented when the sub-.500 Cavaliers also agreed to swap their 1982 first-round pick.
Lee reinjured his knee 11 games into his Lakers tenure, but they won the 1980 title anyway, transferring the No. 22 pick to the Cavaliers. Cleveland selected the immortal Chad Kinch, who we will get to in a moment.
Ted Stepien, one of the worst team owners in NBA history, purchased the Cavaliers that summer. Over the next five months, he traded Kinch and all of his first-round picks from 1983-86 to the Dallas Mavericks for Mike Bratz, Richard Washington, Jerome Whitehead and Geoff Huston. Only Huston lasted in Cleveland beyond 1982. The NBA paused all Cavs transactions, installed the Stepien Rule, which prevented teams from trading consecutive first-round picks, and gave picks back to Cleveland when Stepien sold in 1983.
The Cavaliers fell to the bottom of the East by the 1981-82 season. The San Diego Clippers were the worst team in the West, and a coin flip decided the No. 1 pick between the two Southern California teams. The Lakers chose heads and won the right to draft James Worthy, who helped the defending champs to three more titles by 1988. (The Clippers selected Terry Cummings over Dominique Wilkins with the No. 2 pick.)
June 9, 1980: Robert Parish and Kevin McHale for 'Joe Barely Cares'
On the eve of the 1980 draft, the Celtics swapped their two first-round selections — No. 1 overall and No. 13 — with the Golden State Warriors for Robert Parish and the No. 3 pick. The Warriors drafted centers Joe Barry Carroll and Rickey Brown, who respectively earned the nickname "Joe Barely Cares" and lasted 177 games in Golden State. Boston took Kevin McHale third, pairing him with Parish in the greatest frontcourt the game has even seen. They joined Bird in leading the Celtics to three titles in five Finals appearances.
February 16, 1982: Bill Laimbeer for a Polish guy
Relegated to backup center duty behind James Edwards and playing fewer than 18 minutes a night, a young Bill Laimbeer made no secret of his desire to get out of Cleveland ahead of the 1982 trade deadline.
"I’ve got my fingers crossed, my toes crossed, everything that will cross crossed that they trade me," he said publicly, as the Cavaliers careened toward the worst record in the league with no pick to show for it.
So, Pistons general manager Jack McCloskey leveraged Stepien's ineptitude, too. The Cavaliers had rejected multiple offers from the Pistons, so McCloskey made one last pitch to Stepien for Laimbeer: Paul Mokeski, Phil Hubbard, one of Detroit's three first-round picks in 1982 and their second-round pick.
"I knew he was Polish and I said to him, ‘In Mokeski, you’re getting a Polish guy on your team.’ And he said, ‘I didn’t know he was Polish.’ I said, ‘He is, and he’s a great guy and a big guy.’ And that’s how we completed the deal," McCloskey later told "Blue Collar Blueprint" author Eli Zaret.
The Pistons moved Laimbeer into the starting lineup, where he made four All-Star appearances and won back-to-back titles before retiring in 1994. As an NBA executive conceded to the New York Post's Peter Vecsey, "Yeah, it was a great trade, but McCloskey had to go to Cleveland to make it. That doesn’t count."
September 15, 1982: Moses Malone for $2 million a year
The Sixers had just lost to the Lakers in the 1982 Finals and needed a counter to Abdul-Jabbar. Who better than restricted free agent and reigning MVP Moses Malone. With no salary cap to prevent the 76ers from adding to a team that already featured fellow future Hall of Famers, Erving, Bobby Jones and Maurice Cheeks, as well as All-Star guard Andrew Toney, they signed Malone to a six-year, $13.2 million offer sheet.
Charlie Thomas, a car salesman who had just purchased the Rockets, opted against paying Malone $2 million a year to play for a team he took to the 1981 Finals but could not carry out of the first round in 1982. Houston orchestrated a sign-and-trade deal instead, flipping Malone to the Sixers for 32-year-old Caldwell Jones and (you guessed it) Cleveland's 1983 first-round pick, which Philadelphia had swindled years earlier.
In the 1982-83 season, Malone became the only NBA player ever to win back-to-back MVPs with two different teams and led the Sixers back to the Finals, where they swept Abdul-Jabbar and the Lakers.
June 27, 1983: Dennis Johnson for Larry Bird's liver
The Bucks swept the Celtics in the 1983 Eastern Conference semifinals, and Auerbach was looking to bolster his backcourt. He also wanted to get rid of Rick Robey, who was Bird's late-night drinking buddy. Why not swap a backup center for Dennis Johnson, who in the previous four seasons had been an All-Star and First Team All-Defensive selection each year, the 1979 Finals MVP and a 1981 First Team All-NBA pick.
"Even now Rick says that the best thing that happened to my career was him getting traded to Phoenix," Bird conceded in the autobiography he co-authored with legendary Boston Globe writer Bob Ryan in 1990, "and in many ways I've got to agree with him. ... He was slowly killing me by keeping me out so late."
The Celtics also scored a 1983 first-round pick from the Suns and drafted reserve center Greg Kite.
Dubbed a malcontent in both Seattle and Phoenix, Johnson helped the Celtics to championships in 1984 and 1986, earning high praise from Bird, who has called the late Hall of Fame guard his greatest teammate.
June 22, 1987: Scottie Pippen for Olden Polynice
The Sonics and Knicks swapped first-round picks in a deal that sent Gerald Henderson to New York in November 1986. The Knicks won 24 games that season and transferred the No. 5 overall pick to Seattle.
The Sonics were targeting Reggie Williams, but when the Georgetown guard came off the board at No. 4, they swapped selections with the Bulls and picked up two future draft picks in the process — a 1989 first-rounder and a 1988 second-rounder. Chicago took Pippen fifth, leaving Olden Polynice for Seattle at No. 8.
Polynice enjoyed a long career that peaked after the Sonics traded him with two more first-round picks for Benoit Benjamin in 1991. Pippen, meanwhile, transformed Michael Jordan's Bulls into a six-ring dynasty.
February 15, 1989: Mark Aguirre for another headache
Detroit and Dallas swapped dissatisfied players in February 1989, when the two teams swapped All-Star forwards Mark Aguirre and Adrian Dantley. The Pistons also traded their 1991 first-round pick in the deal.
The Mavericks celebrated Aguirre's exit. Teammates went on the record saying, "Sometimes Mark would just loaf," "He let us down a lot," and, "Today should be an all-day party because he's gone. Good luck, Detroit, because you're going to need it," via Sports Illustrated. That last barb came from Sam Perkins.
Dantley's departure was met with mixed feelings in Detroit. Joe Dumars called him the best teammate he ever played with, and John Salley told Detroit Free Press writer Mitch Albom, “How could they trade the Teacher? He was my mentor. A lot of the guys felt that way. I like Mark. He’s OK, but AD did a lot for us.”
But Dantley was giving Pistons coach Chuck Daly the business about losing minutes to Dennis Rodman, and Aguirre was childhood friends with Pistons star Isiah Thomas in Chicago, so they pulled the trigger. Thomas has never heard the end of it, even though he and McCloskey denied his involvement.
"You shouldn't blame Jack McCloskey," Dantley's mother, Virginia, told the Detroit Free Press. "He's not the one. It's that little con artist you've got up there. When his royal highness wants something, he gets it."
Dantley did not report to Dallas for a week, partly because he could not get over being traded for Aguirre, according to SI's Jack McCallum, and played 76 games for the Mavericks before suffering a broken leg. For his part, Aguirre accepted a diminished role and helped Detroit to back-to-back titles in 1989 and 1990.
February 21, 1990: Vernon Maxwell for $50,000
Vernon Maxwell was a first-round talent who fell to the 47th overall draft pick in 1988, after he reportedly failed three drug tests at the University of Florida. He played a season and a half for the San Antonio Spurs before a pair of incidents — an alleged assault of a Spurs fan outside a San Antonio nightclub and a bitter divorce that included accusations of "cruel treatment" — led them to sell his rights to Houston for $50,000.
The Rockets kept "Mad Max" mostly in check, save for a contract holdout, several altercations with teammates and a heap of fines for his on-court conduct. Even Hakeem Olajuwon once slapped him at halftime. Still, Maxwell was Houston's second-leading scorer behind Olajuwon on their 1994 title run.
February 14, 1995: Clyde Drexler for Phi Slama Jama II
The honeymoon for Maxwell wore off by the start of the playoffs in 1995. Frustrated by his dwindling minutes following the trade deadline acquisition of Clyde Drexler, Maxwell straight-up quit the Rockets after Game 1 of their first-round series against the Utah Jazz, a hamstring injury disguising his bruised ego.
Drexler was nearly 12 seasons into a Hall of Fame career when he made a public trade request before the 1995 deadline. His Blazers acquiesced, sending him and Tracy Murray to Houston, where Drexler also played college ball with Olajuwon. The Blazers received an unhappy Otis Thorpe, the rights to Marcelo Nicola, who never played a minute in the NBA, and a conditional first-round pick for a future Hall of Famer.
“It’s been a dream of ours ever since we left the University of Houston to play together again," said Drexler. “We were just in the locker room together, and we were laughing like little kids. We couldn’t believe it.”
Not everyone was thrilled. Rockets forward Robert Horry said of the trade, "I hate it." But Drexler recharged the struggling Rockets, who in 1995 became the first team seeded sixth or lower to win a championship.
October 2, 1995: Dennis Rodman for a 'nobody'
The stoic Gregg Popovich was not so short with the media when Dennis Rodman refused to report to San Antonio Spurs training camp without a raise in 1995. Popovich, then the general manager of the returning Western Conference finalists, traded the First Team All-Defensive forward and four-time defending rebound champion to the Bulls for backup center Will Perdue, and proceeded to undress Rodman on the airwaves.
"Big surprise, huh?" Popovich told reporters, conceding it was "difficult" to find a trade partner for Rodman.
The Spurs got the full Rodman treatment for two years. He separated his shoulder in a motorcycle accident. He skipped practices and team huddles. He brought Madonna into the locker room. He removed his shoes and threw ice onto the court during games, earning additional suspensions. He took a leave of absence.
He was also a dominant defensive and rebounding force — exactly the player the Bulls needed to replace Horace Grant and return to the Finals. Rodman met with all the principles in Chicago before the October 1995 trade, including Michael Jordan on the set of "Space Jam," and got their cautious endorsement. The result was a whole lot of headaches made palatable by Rodman's contributions to three consecutive titles.
July 11, 1996: Kobe Bryant for Vlade Divac
Lakers GM Jerry West desperately wanted Kobe Bryant in the 1996 draft and needed cap space to sign Shaquille O'Neal in free agency. Bryant wanted to play in L.A., too, and they went about making it happen.
Bryant was a 17-year-old phenom who most teams considered a developmental question mark. Five future All-Stars and a Defensive Player of the Year were among the college talent at the top of the draft. The Nets liked Bryant with the No. 8 pick, but he floated the possibility of playing in Italy if New Jersey selected him.
Bryant fell to 13, where West had a deal in place to acquire him from the Charlotte Hornets for Vlade Divac, whose $4.1 million salary would also clear the way fort he Lakers to sign O'Neal. All was going according to plan, up until Divac threatened to retire if he was sent to Charlotte in the days following the draft-day deal.
"Kobe is extremely excited about the prospect about playing for the Lakers. This is where he wanted to be and when the dust settles, this is where he will be," Bryant's agent, Arn Tellem, told the Los Angeles Times, all but confirming the rumors of backroom dealing with the Lakers. "I can’t speak for Vlade. But if anyone should have a reason to complain, it’s Kobe because he sacrificed a higher draft pick to make this happen."
When the dust settled, Divac agreed to join the Hornets, the Lakers acquired Bryant, and O'Neal joined him in L.A. Bryant was an All-Star by age 19, and the pair won three straight championships together from 2000-02. Bryant returned to the mountaintop for two more in 2009 and 2010 in a 20-year legendary career.
June 24, 1998: Dirk Nowitzki for a Tractor
The Bucks wanted Robert "Tractor" Traylor in the 1998 draft and made arrangements to trade the Nos. 9 and 19 picks to the Mavericks for the right to move up three spots and select Traylor sixth overall.
Dallas knew Dirk Nowitzki would still be available at No. 9 and packaged Pat Garrity with a 1999 first-round pick to swipe third-year point guard Steve Nash from the Suns. It was one of the greatest draft-day coups in NBA history, even if Nash was back in Phoenix by the time the Mavs won a title with Nowitzki in 2011.
The Bucks insist they never had Nowitzki, because Dallas would have drafted Nowitzki sixth in any other scenario, but that is little consolation when they were pawns in a scheme to secure two Hall of Famers.
February 19, 2004: Rasheed Wallace for 10 days with the Hawks
In a December 2003 interview with the Oregonian, Blazers star Rasheed Wallace described the NBA's power dynamics between white team owners and Black players as exploitative. He cited commissioner David Stern's estimated $8 million salary, "more than three-quarters of the players in this league," as evidence.
"It’s as if we’re going to shut up, sign for the money and do what they tell us," Wallace said, using more colorful language to describe an influx of high school players who "don't know the real business."
"Mr. Wallace’s hateful diatribe was ignorant and offensive to all NBA players," Stern countered in an official league statement. "I refuse to enhance his heightened sense of deprivation by publicly debating with him."
What might spark a meaningful conversation today was instead met with a media narrative that mostly sided with Stern. Wallace's remarks were lumped into a bin — along with his record-breaking 41 technical fouls, a seven-game suspension for threatening since-disgraced referee Tim Donaghy and a misdemeanor marijuana possession charge — and packaged by Portland in a February 2004 trade with the Hawks.
Atlanta sent Dan Dickau and the $25.6 million owed to Theo Ratliff and Shareef Abdur-Rahim for the 2004-05 season to Portland for the expiring contracts of Wallace and Wesley Person. Wallace played one game for the Hawks before they flipped him to Detroit 10 days later. It was a three-team deal that cost the Pistons four players on the end of their bench and a pair of first-round picks — one to Atlanta and the other Boston.
Wallace raised the Larry O'Brien trophy in Detroit that season, returned to the Finals a year later and reached the conference finals in his five seasons on the team, cementing his legacy as an underrated star.
July 14, 2004: Shaquille O'Neal for Kobe Bryant's pride
The relationship between Bryant and O'Neal was rocky, and it unraveled during the 2003-04 season, when the two openly sniped at each other through the media and Bryant was charged with sexual assault. They made one last trip to the Finals in 2004, but O'Neal requested a trade shortly thereafter, upset Lakers owner Jerry Buss would not meet his contract demands and catered instead to Bryant in free agency.
Dallas rejected a deal that would have sent a 25-year-old Nowitzki to the Lakers for O'Neal. He instead landed on the Miami Heat in exchange for a 2006 first-round pick, a 2007 second-rounder, Caron Butler, Brian Grant and Lamar Odom, who missed the playoffs in their first season as Bryant's supporting cast.
The reactions varied, depending on which team was gaining O'Neal and which was losing him.
"I never imagined that we would acquire Shaquille O’Neal," Heat guard Eddie Jones told reporters at the time. "It’s once-in-a-lifetime trying to get a player like this guy. It’s an unbelievable, unbelievable move."
"I don’t think that when the season was over Shaq was really that adamant about leaving," Lakers guard Derek Fisher told the Los Angeles Times in the immediate aftermath. "He obviously was disappointed, like all of us were. But that changed when the line was clearly drawn that it wasn’t his team and it was all about Kobe and that he’ll have to take a back seat. I think at that point, Shaq washed his hands of the Lakers."
The Heat reached Game 7 of the Eastern Conference finals in O'Neal's first season paired with Dwyane Wade in Miami and won the title a year later, defeating Nowitzki's Mavericks in the six-game 2006 Finals.
July 31, 2007: Kevin Garnett for a missed phone call
The famously loyal Kevin Garnett had finally acquiesced to a trade from the Minnesota Timberwolves in 2007, after three straight lottery campaigns. The Wolves were rebuilding, and the Suns, Lakers and Celtics emerged as the strongest contenders to deal for Garnett and re-sign him to a hefty contract extension.
The Suns faded, as they were hesitant to move Amar'e Stoudemire, Shawn Marion's contract demands stalled negotiations, and Steve Nash informed Garnett he would have to take a pay cut to join their roster.
The Lakers thought they had a handshake deal on a package centered around Andrew Bynum and Odom, but Bryant never answered Garnett's phone calls and McHale — the former Boston star turned GM in Minnesota — was bending Timberwolves owner Glen Taylor's ear toward a deal with his former team.
McHale's former teammate turned Celtics GM Danny Ainge had offered Al Jefferson, Gerald Green, Ryan Gomes, Sebastian Telfair, Ratliff's expiring contract and a pair of first-round picks in 2009 to Minnesota. Garnett initially balked at joining Paul Pierce on a team that won just 24 games the previous season, but a draft-day deal for Ray Allen helped the Celtics convince the former MVP they could win a title in Boston.
They did, and nearly won another in 2010.
February 1, 2008: Pau Gasol for his lesser-known brother
Three weeks before the 2008 trade deadline, under the cover of night, Lakers GM Mitch Kupchak was trying to finalize a deal for Memphis Grizzlies star Pau Gasol before teams around the league caught wind. The Lakers planned to send troubled rookie Javaris Crittenton, Kwame Brown's expiring contract, the rights to Pau's younger brother Marc and two first-round picks, but the money was not matching. The solution: Kupchak convinced Sixers assistant coach Aaron McKie to sign a $750,000 contract to facilitate the deal.
The trade drew criticism from everywhere around the NBA but Los Angeles. Bryant called the trade "a donation." Popovich publicly called for "a trade committee that can scratch all trades that make no sense." Even Grizzlies owner Michael Heisley conceded, "I don’t know if I got the most value. Maybe our people should’ve shopped [Gasol] more and maybe we would’ve gotten more, done a better deal. Maybe Chris [Wallace, the Grizzlies' GM] did call every team in the league. I don’t think he did, but maybe he should’ve."
West, the Lakers great who ran Memphis' front office from 2002-07, denied any involvement in the deal. Wallace said of the trade, "We're looking at it like we're getting four No. 1 picks," citing Crittenton and Marc Gasol as high-end prospects. By 2015, the former was arrested for murder and the latter was a two-time All-Star and Defensive Player of Player of the Year, which really runs the gamut of possible outcomes.
Pau Gasol, meanwhile, helped Bryant to three straight Finals appearances and rings in 2009 and 2010.
July 10, 2010: LeBron James for Cleveland's tears
Given how Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert reacted to the news that LeBron James had chosen Miami over Cleveland in 2010 free agency, it is a wonder he facilitated a sign-and-trade deal that sent James to the Heat. One way or another, James was going to join Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh in Miami, so cooler heads in Cleveland prevailed, and the Cavaliers salvaged a decent haul of draft picks out of the transaction.
The Heat sent two fist-round picks, two second-round picks and the rights to swap picks in 2012 to the Cavaliers in return for James. Cleveland also created a traded player exception. None of it amounted to much for the Cavs, but the Heat got four straight Finals appearances and two championships in the deal.
February 24, 2011: Kyrie Irving for a salary dump
Then-Clippers owner Donald Sterling was so fed up with the five-year, $65 million contract he signed Baron Davis to that he began heckling the two-time All-Star point guard from the sidelines in December 2010. Two months later, then-Clippers GM Neil Olshey dumped Davis' contract in a deal as unthinkable today as it was then.
The Clippers, who were 21-37 at the 2011 trade deadline, attached their unprotected pick that season to Davis' deal in exchange for injured one-time All-Star Mo Williams and Jamario Moon's expiring contract.
Olshey's rationale? "We’re not that high on this draft to begin with. And we’ve already got six players under 22 on the roster." Olshey left the Clippers a year later, and the Clips dumped Williams' salary within months.
Meanwhile, the Clippers' 2011 pick hit on the 2.8% chances it won the lottery, and the Cavaliers selected Kyrie Irving first overall in a draft that produced seven future All-Stars. Irving was an All-Star by age 20, good enough to entice James to return home, and the pair delivered the franchise's only title in 2016.
June 23, 2011: Kawhi Leonard for a few nerves
Popovich was "scared to death" to trade 24-year-old guard George Hill on draft night for the No. 15 overall pick in 2011. The Spurs coach called the decision to deal one of his favorite players "the toughest" of his career. "It's not even close," he told Jonathan Abrams for Bleacher Report in 2017. But they needed size, so San Antonio pulled the trigger on a deal for a 6-foot-7 San Diego State prospect named Kawhi Leonard.
"In the end, we said we’re going to roll the bones and we’re going to do it," said Popovich, "but I can’t tell that at that point we knew that Kawhi was going to be what he is today. That would be an exaggeration."
Leonard arrived with a drive to excel on defense, but the Spurs were still skeptical about his offense in 2011 training camp. Assistant coaches Chip Engelland and Chad Forcier went about improving the 20-year-old's shooting form and footwork. You know the rest. Leonard was a Finals MVP by 2014, when he averaged 17.8 points per game on 61/58/78 shooting splits and defended LeBron in a five-game rout of the Heat.
July 10, 2013: Andre Iguodala for Bob Myers' sanity
Nuggets forward Andre Iguodala wanted to join the burgeoning Warriors in 2013 free agency and was willing to play for a discount, but Golden State GM Bob Myers could not scrape together enough cap space to offer the $48 million contract that a one-time All-Star needed to justify rejecting more lucrative offers.
As the days passed and Iguodala closed within an hour of joining the Mavericks instead, Myers convinced the Utah Jazz to absorb the $24 million owed Richard Jefferson, Andris Biedrins and Brandon Rush into cap space in exchange for draft picks. Denver joined the deal a day later, just to salvage a trade exception and veteran guard Randy Foye in the sign-and-trade transaction. For their part, the Jazz secured two first-round picks and two second-round picks from the Warriors, the best of which was the No. 23 pick in 2014.
"We feel like he's the missing piece of the puzzle to this team," Myers said of Iguodala at the time, conceding that the trade came within minutes of falling apart financially. "There were 25 moments of panic. ... This thing was on life support 15 times. It was a very unlikely scenario that actually played out for us."
Iguodala was the missing piece next to Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green, capturing 2015 Finals MVP honors on the first of three championship runs in five consecutive Finals appearances.
July 18, 2018: Kawhi Leonard for a one-year gamble
Leonard had soured on the Spurs near the end of his rookie contract extension, when the two sides diverged on how best to handle the right quadriceps tendinopathy that cost him all but nine games of the 2017-18 season. Leonard requested a trade in June 2018, just before the start of the final year of his deal.
The L.A. native preferred to land with the Lakers, but the Spurs were hesitant to engage with their Western Conference rivals, and the Lakers figured they could simply sign Leonard in 2019 free agency. Other suitors withheld significant offers without assurances Leonard would re-sign, but the Toronto Raptors went all-in on the 2018-19 season, trading DeMar DeRozan, Jakob Poeltl and their 2019 first-round pick for Leonard.
The risk was worth the reward of a championship at the end of Leonard's lone season in Toronto.
July 6, 2019: Anthony Davis for a King's ransom
Following years of speculation, Anthony Davis finally requested a trade from the New Orleans Pelicans in January 2019, 18 months before he could test unrestricted free agency for the first time. Davis made clear his preference to play for the Lakers, which gave pause to suitors looking for more than a short-term rental.
The Lakers and Celtics had competing offers for Davis, but Boston could not make its proposal until the summer. The Pelicans were willing to wait, but any hope the Celtics may have had went out the window when Davis' agent, Rich Paul, told Sports Illustrated that his client would not re-sign with Boston in 2020.
“They can trade for him, but it’ll be for one year,” said Paul, whose client list also includes the latest Lakers star, LeBron James. “I mean: If the Celtics traded for Anthony Davis, we would go there and we would abide by our contractual [obligations] and we would go into free agency in 2020. I’ve stated that to them. But in the event that he decides to walk away and you give away assets? Don’t blame Rich Paul.”
Days later, the Pelicans still managed to score a haul from L.A. for Davis: Brandon Ingram, Lonzo Ball, Josh Hart, three first-round picks and the right to swap first-round picks in 2023. It was soon expanded to a four-team deal, opening up more cap space for the Lakers and securing more draft capital for the Pelicans.
Whatever the cost, it was well worth it for the Lakers, who won a championship in Davis' inaugural season.
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Ben Rohrbach is a staff writer for Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at rohrbach_ben@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @brohrbach
