T10YL - Lou Williams (and Lucas Nogueira) to Toronto
Atlanta salary dumping the man who got millions to work the night shift
[This trade occurred on June 30, 2014. Audio will be added when we are back on schedule.]
The Names: Atlanta Hawks receive: John Salmons, 2015 2nd round pick (#50 overall, Marcus Eriksson selected). Toronto Raptors receive: Lou Williams, rights to Lucas Nogueira.
The Team Context: We were entering Masai Ujiri’s second summer in charge of Toronto basketball operations. The franchise had already traded Rudy Gay in December (our first post) and had just begun their annual tradition of extending qualifying offers to Nando de Colo. They were a much stronger team in 2014, but were taken down by the Nets in a 7-game first round series. In the 2014 Draft, Toronto had just selected Bruno Caboclo, the mysterious Brazilian prospect who was infamously described by Fran Fraschilla on draft night as being “two years away from being two years away.”
The Hawks had been a playoff team in the 2013-14 in an embarrassing mid-2010s Eastern Conference fashion. They went 38-44 and still managed to take the crumbling Pacers to seven games in their first round series. There was still optimism in Atlanta, as the poor performance was easily attributable to Al Horford’s torn pectoral muscle. Players like first time All-Star Paul Millsap had taken a step forward in Horford’s absence and fans had confidence in head coach Mike Budenholzer and GM Danny Ferry.
The Player Context: Lou Williams was an established veteran scorer who had recently returned to Atlanta. He had arrived in Atlanta from his birthplace of Memphis at age 11, then set the Georgia high school basketball scoring record at South Gwinnett High School in his new hometown. The Philadelphia 76ers drafted Williams in 2005 (the last year where a high school player could be drafted) and he was mentored by Allen Iverson (which seems to have mostly consisted of staying out late at the Philadelphia TGI Friday’s). The only season where Williams started games for Philadelphia was 2009-10; otherwise, he carved out a useful niche as a scoring option off the bench. He had received votes for 6th Man of the Year in four of his 76ers seasons, finishing as high as 2nd in 2011-12.
Williams signed with the Hawks that summer, with the press release noting that he was now only the second-leading scorer in Georgia high school basketball history (I’m not sure why, MaxPreps still has him as top in state history). Williams signed a three-year deal for about $15 million, but tore his ACL midway through the first season. The timing of the injury caused Williams to miss the first eight games of 2013-14 and to bounce back slowly once he was cleared to play. The 10.4 points per game he scored in 2013-14 were his lowest total for any season since his first years in the league. He was still owed more than $5 million for the 2014-15 season and it was fair to question whether that was a good investment.
John Salmons had shown up to Toronto as part of the aforementioned Rudy Gay trade. Salmons had been a regular member of the Raptors’ bench rotation in his time there, but not a particularly good one. His contract had a $7 million team option for 2014-15 and nobody expected him to contribute $7 million worth of value that season. In the NBA trade context, this mismatch is precisely what made Salmons valuable. An acquiring team could send out salary to match Salmons’ $7 million figure, then decline the option and end up with salary cap space.
The Trade: The function of this trade was to open up cap room for Atlanta by swapping Williams’ guaranteed salary for Salmons’ optional salary. Toronto wouldn’t do this favor for free, so the Hawks had to throw in recent first-round draft pick Lucas “Bebe” Nogueira. Nogueira was a Brazilian center who had played professional basketball in Spain since 2009 and signed a two-year extension with CB Estudiantes on the day he was drafted in 2013 (by the Celtics, before being flipped to the Mavericks and then Hawks). He seemed ready to come to the NBA after winning Liga ACB’s defensive player of the year award that season even as he played limited minutes. Nogueira would be a pretty rich price for Williams’ salary, so the Raptors threw a 2nd-round pick in to help balance the scales. This is the first NBA trade we’ve dealt with where a 2015 draft pick is not a “future” pick.
Hawks fans were puzzled by this trade until the salary cap math became clear. The prevailing sentiment was still to trust in Danny Ferry even as it seemed like Toronto had just made a fantastic trade. Given that the Raptors now had Brazilian first-round picks from the two most recent drafts, there were plenty of jokes about the ongoing World Cup in Brazil and teaching Neymar to play point guard.
The Results: The Hawks waived John Salmons a couple of weeks after receiving him. This trade only yielded cap space and a 2015 2nd-round pick. The 2015 2nd-round pick was used to select Marcus Eriksson, a Swedish shooting guard who had just missed the 2014-15 season with a torn ACL and meniscus. Nobody expected him to make it to the NBA anytime soon and he never did; Eriksson was essentially played off the roster of FC Barcelona after being drafted, moving to Gran Canaria and then Alba Berlin until 2022. When I try to visit his Basketball Reference page it crashes my browser, so we’ll have to assume he’s not still playing.
Lucas Nogueira signed a contract with the Raptors in the summer of 2014 and started his NBA career, which never got much traction. He spent the four years of his rookie contract playing minor roles in the Toronto rotation, with his peak involvement coming in a 2016-17 season where he played 1,088 of his 1,754 career minutes. When his contract expired, he returned to Spain to sign with Fuenlabrada and then gave an interview where he discussed the depression he felt after “losing his identity” in the NBA. His final NBA game was 1:51 of action in a season-ending 35-point loss to Cleveland that ended a second-round sweep. His final NBA point was scored in the first game of the previous round, where he hit one of two free throws he attempted against the Wizards.
Even with Nogueira not panning out, there were two major problems with this trade from the Hawks’ perspective. The first is that their max-level salary cap space did not result in any major free agents actually joining the team – their only roster upgrade that offseason was Thabo Sefolosha. The second, more noticeable problem was that Lou Williams regained his verve in Toronto. He played in 80 games, all off the bench, and averaged a career-high (to that point) 15.5 points per game on his way to the Sixth Man of the Year award (buttressed by a particularly notable marketing campaign). A year after he was salary dumped on a 1-year, $5.2 million contract, he signed a three-year contract with the Lakers in free agency that guaranteed him $21 million.
Despite another clear trade win for the Toronto Raptors, the Hawks probably didn’t lose much sleep over this one. Part of that is because things were going too well to care; the Hawks won 22 games more than they did in 2013-14 on their way to a franchise-best 60-22 record. Maybe getting Williams off the team helped somehow. But part of that is also because things were going too poorly for the franchise decision makers to care, as the early parts of the 2014 season were engulfed by bizarre racism scandals. The first domino was when Danny Ferry, while on a conference call with seven Hawks owners, was reading aloud from a team scouting report on Luol Deng that said, in part, “He’s a good guy overall. But he’s not perfect. He’s got some African in him. And I don’t say that in a bad way.” This comment resulted in an organizational announcement that Ferry would be punished (but not terminated) for failing to edit out the remark before reading it.
It also resulted in an internal investigation, which turned up a 2012 email that majority owner Bruce Levenson sent to Ferry (with two minority owners cc’d). The email appears to be a list of Levenson’s thoughts on the Hawks’ game atmosphere, concluding with a lengthy bullet point that discusses the Hawks’ struggles to draw in “35-55 white males and corporations to buy season tixs.” Levenson’s theory was that the arena had an “overwhelmingly black audience” that “scared away the whites” because “southern whites simply were not comfortable being in an arena or at a bar where they were in the minority.” Levenson calls these attitudes “just racist garbage,” but also outlines the substantial steps taken to try to alter the demographics of home games.
This followed closely on the heels of the racism scandal that got former Clippers owner Donald Sterling banned from the NBA. The email was considerably different from Sterling’s transgressions, but still resulted in a mutual announcement between Levenson and the NBA that he would be selling his ownership stake in the Hawks. A few days later, Danny Ferry requested to take an indefinite leave of absence and accepted a buyout at the end of the season after the investigation concluded that “none of Ferry’s remarks or behavior during the call were motivated by racial or ethnic animus.” He has since been a front office advisor to the Pelicans and Spurs.
The Aftermath: Lou Williams would get traded two more times before his three-year pact with the Lakers expired (first to Houston, then onward to the Clippers). He ended up extending with the Clippers during the final year of this contract, a year in which he won his second Sixth Man of the Year award. He won the award for the third time the next season, putting him in an echelon with Jamal Crawford as the only three-time Sixth Men of the Year. In July of 2020, Williams was excused from the NBA Bubble to attend a family friend’s funeral. While on excused absence, Williams went to the famed Atlanta establishment Magic City for dinner. Originally this was reported as “picking up food,” which seemed odd because Magic City is a strip club (albeit one with a renowned kitchen). It turned out Williams may have been hanging out longer than was strictly necessary to pick up a food order. This would not be his last Atlanta homecoming, as his final trade sent him back to the Hawks in 2021 to close out his NBA career.
After playing thirteen games for Fuenlabrada, Lucas Nogueira signed a contract with Al-Muharraq in Bahrain. This was on February 18 of 2020, so Nogueira didn’t end up actually playing any games for Al-Muharraq before the season was postponed due to a pandemic. He signed with Cearense in Brazil at the end of that year, but then announced his retirement from basketball in February of 2021 due to injuries. Evidently they healed before too long, because by August he was signing with Sao Paulo FC (the basketball section of the soccer team, which apparently keeps the “FC” for “football club” anyways). His final team was the 2022 Guelph Nighthawks of the Canadian Elite Basketball League, for whom he had 22 points, 36 rebounds, and 11 blocks in 7 games. After the season, the Nighthawks moved cities and became the Calgary Surge, leaving Nogueira behind in Guelph (or Brazil, more likely).
I’ll quote December’s post for an update on what John Salmons has been up to:
“John Salmons began the 2014-2015 season with the Pelicans and was ultimately waived in connection with a deadline trade. His LinkedIn indicates that he’s operating Stone Fire Pizza by MiDiCi (this is apparently a chain I had never heard of), which opened in December 2019 at the site of a former California Pizza Kitchen in the Cherry Hill Mall (New Jersey). The restaurant’s Yelp page includes several reviews between that month and March 2020, most of which Salmons has replied to in earnest. The restaurant appears to have been a pandemic casualty, as it has closed permanently per Google Maps and is not listed on the MiDiCi website. His final NBA game was a 115-100 victoryover the Hawks on February 2, 2015, but his final NBA game where he scored a point (five, in fact) was on December 26, 2014 in a 97-90 win over the reigning champion Spurs.”
Miscellaneous: “So crazy to me that all these nerds cover all sports. Not one athletic bone in their body with all the opinions and analysis.” - Lou Williams. Several quality NBA players were selected in the 2nd round of the 2015 NBA Draft but none of those were in the final 14 picks (Norman Powell is the cut-off). Lucas Nogueira got married on June 26, 2016 and was separated by September 20, 2016, resulting in a divorce that raised questions of Canadian law. When I was building the calendar for this year (working off the NBA transaction log) I wrote “Louis Williams” and cracked up when I realized it was Lou Williams.