T10YL - The October 2014 Recap, Parts 1 and 2
NFL midseason trades and last-minute NBA housekeeping before the MLB stove heats up
Part 1
October 1 - October 16, 2014: Nothing happened.
The beginning of autumn is one of our longest trade quiet periods of the year. MLB has gotten through both of its trade deadlines by September and NFL teams aren’t typically inclined to make trades so early in their season. NBA teams are still in their offseason, but the early front-end rush for transactions means that there’s little left to do by the end of summer. There were three NBA trades in September of 2014, all in the second half of the month, and two of them involved Keith Bogans, who was not going to play in the NBA again. The other leagues we cover didn’t make any trades that month.
Here in October, the Kansas City Royals were carving through the American League playoffs and everyone was panicking about Ebola outbreaks. “All About That Bass” by Meghan Trainor was in the middle of an 8-week run on top of the Billboard Hot 100. Gone Girl was the top movie at the box office for two consecutive weekends.
Part 2
October 17, 2014:
Boston Celtics receive: Will Bynum
Detroit Pistons receive: Joel Anthony
When we wrote about Joel Anthony in January, he was being cast from his longtime organizational home because his $3.8 million salary was onerous for the tax-paying Miami Heat. During his time in Boston, Anthony missed 22 games and played in 21, averaging just over 7 minutes in those appearances. On the bright side, the 1.0 points per game he averaged in Boston was enough to bring his full-season points per game up to 0.8. Unsurprisingly, Anthony chose to exercise his $3.8 million player option for the 2014-15 season, a decision that he amusingly claimed “wasn’t even about getting more money.” Anthony went on to explain that “there may or may not be an opportunity to play here, but I wasn’t too interested in moving. I wasn’t too interested in exploring things, especially after not playing.”
Will Bynum was an undrafted free agent in 2005 who played with the Celtics in Summer League. He earned a full NBA contract that August, then went to White Palace Grill in his hometown of Chicago to celebrate with teammates, including Celtics guard and high school teammate Tony Allen. That outing ended pretty poorly, with one man shot and another man punched and both filing civil suits against Allen in connection with the incidents (Allen was also indicted for aggravated battery, but found not guilty at trial). Whether directly related to the incident or not, Bynum was waived by the Celtics that October and never played a game for the team.
After a couple of seasons in Israel, including another party that was ruined by potentially criminal events prior to eventual exoneration, Bynum signed with the Pistons in 2008 and had stuck with the team in a reliable bench guard role since then. This came with multi-year, low-dollar contract extensions, most recently a two-year contract for $5.75 million that had one year and $2.9 million left on its term.
The multidimensional contrast between these players allowed for their two teams to find a mutually beneficial outcome. Joel Anthony was a center who made $3.8 million and Will Bynum was a guard who made $2.9 million. The Pistons wanted to convert some of their guard depth into big depth and found a reasonable basketball opportunity to do so. The Celtics had 16 guaranteed contracts and were allowed to have 15 when the season started on October 28, so somebody was getting cut regardless. If the person getting cut made $2.9 million instead of $3.8 million, that was $900,000 cheaper.
Despite his earlier misgivings about moving, Joel Anthony enjoyed slightly more opportunity in Detroit than he had as a Celtic. His minutes per game increased to 8.3 and his points per game jumped to 1.8, which doesn’t sound like a lot even though it more than doubled his prior season’s output. When we last wrote about Anthony, he was serving as GM for the Canadian Elite Basketball League’s Montreal Alliance despite the team’s 4-16 and 7-13 records in the first two years of his tenure. He seems to have kept his job despite slight regression in a 6-14 2024 season for the Alliance, which tied for the worst record in the league. Notwithstanding the futility, Montreal automatically qualified for the 4-team playoffs by virtue of hosting the championship tournament, which seems like an insane loophole for competitive integrity in the Canadian Elite Basketball League. The Alliance came three points from defeating the eventual champion Niagara River Lions in a game that could have unjustifiably vindicated Anthony’s reign as executive.
The Celtics waived Will Bynum ten days after acquiring him in a trade (and two days after the nine-year anniversary of the first time the Celtics waived him), ensuring that the trade of Joel Anthony would remain strictly financial from their perspective. Bynum’s next basketball team was the Guangdong Southern Tigers, though he’d return to the Wizards for a cameo at the close of the 2014-15 season, and his final basketball team was a Turkish team called Yeşilgiresun Belediyespor that shut down due to financial problems six months after he signed there. Currently, Bynum is incarcerated at FCI Manchester in Kentucky as a result of his involvement in an insurance fraud scheme perpetrated by several former NBA players. His release date is October 2, 2025.
October 18, 2014:
New York Jets receive: Percy Harvin
Seattle Seahawks receive: 2015 6th-round pick (#181 overall, traded to Washington, Kyshoen Jarrett later selected)
Landstown High School is (still) the newest high school in the Virginia Beach City Public Schools system. The school opened in 2001, but quickly competed in state championships for football (2003-2005), basketball (2005), and track and field (2004 and 2005). These precocious athletic achievements for the school can generally be traced to the singular talent of Percy Harvin, the latest in a long line of electric and controversial athletes to hail from Hampton Roads. Harvin ended his high school athletic career ranked as the top football recruit in the class of 2006 by Rivals and suspended from all competition by the Virginia High School League after numerous disciplinary incidents, a dichotomy that fit neatly on Urban Meyer’s Florida Gators. Harvin was an immediate star on a Florida team that won national championships in his freshman and junior seasons, earning accolades and putting up ridiculous numbers while limited by injuries. In his final performance, Harvin touched the ball fourteen times as a combination receiver / running back and accumulated 171 yards and a touchdown, all while playing with a sprained ankle and hairline leg fracture.
Despite the clearly all-world athletic talent, several teams removed Percy Harvin from their 2009 draft boards after he tested positive for marijuana at the NFL combine. There might have been something to that theory, as Harvin would admit after the conclusion of his playing career that he was high for every single NFL game he played as a means of self-medicating an anxiety disorder. But the Minnesota Vikings were willing to roll the dice and snagged Harvin with the 22nd overall pick. Their reward was a season where Harvin won Offensive Rookie of the Year and made the Pro Bowl as a kick returner after taking two returns back for touchdowns. Harvin was still quite young and seemed to be taking steps forward in his next two seasons, posting a career-high 87 catches for 967 yards in 2011. The pace continued to accelerate in 2012, but an ankle injury ended Harvin’s campaign after just nine games.
That offseason, Harvin was seeking a big-money contract after the expiration of his rookie deal. The Vikings didn’t want to give it to him and a minor offseason sweepstakes ensued that resulted in the Seahawks trading away picks from the 1st, 3rd, and 7th rounds. The Seahawks gave Harvin a $67 million extension in conjunction with the trade that guaranteed him $25 million, an almost immediately regrettable decision. While preparing for training camp, Harvin tore his hip labrum and required surgery that limited him to one game in his first regular season in Seattle. He did contribute to the Seahawks’ Super Bowl victory with a kickoff return touchdown, but this participation has been overshadowed for two justifiable reasons. First, Seattle really could’ve lived without the touchdown, which turned a 22-0 blowout into a 29-0 blowout on the way to a 43-8 final score. Second, Harvin disrupted team cohesion when he punched teammate Golden Tate in the face in the lead-up to that Super Bowl, the most notable of several altercations with teammates he had in Seattle.
Five games into the 2014 season, Harvin had compiled a quiet 22 catches for 133 yards and had scored one touchdown on a rushing attempt. Apparently, this was partially self-inflicted – during games against the Chargers and Cowboys, in which Harvin produced his quietest performances, he reportedly refused to reenter the game as some sort of protest. This followed another incident from preseason where he tried to fight a fellow receiver (Doug Baldwin this time) and a mostly-unsubstantiated claim that Harvin wanted to fight Russell Wilson as well.
After the Cowboys game, the Seattle Times published an article about the Seahawks’ desire to “expand Percy Harvin’s impact.” There are quotes from head coach Pete Carroll, offensive coordinator Darrell Bevell, and offensive line coach Tom Cable that all speak to a desire to get Harvin more involved in the offense. This well-coordinated smokescreen effort made it all the more shocking when Harvin was traded one day later, particularly since the well-paid receiver would move from the reigning champion Seahawks to a Jets team that had fallen to 1-6 on Thursday Night Football the evening prior.
Thanks to the insatiable efforts of Reddit user icecreamdude, who first commented only the word “What” and then edited that comment 20 times with subsequent developments as they were reported, we can trace a chronology of reactions to the news of this trade breaking. Once the initial shock passed, the first response was to mock the Seahawks. After all, they had given up a haul of draft picks and awarded huge money to a guy who they had just moved out for a “conditional mid-round pick.” As observers hunted for the Seattle rationale, whispers about discord in the WR room began to grow and the previously unreported fights between teammates entered the public domain. It quickly became clear that this was a move to get rid of a malcontent rather than anything with a football rationale.
This move was seen as a victory for New York based on the ever-tantalizing possibility of acquiring a premium player for almost no risk. In reality, Harvin caught 29 passes for a team that went 2-6 in the eight games he played for the franchise. The actual highlight was probably the one touchdown pass he caught in a revenge game vs. the Vikings, but the real highlight came in his first game with the team. On the opening kickoff of the second half, Percy Harvin fielded the kickoff while fellow Jets returner T.J. Graham laid down in the end zone to disguise himself in anticipation of receiving a lateral pass. Harvin took the kick out of the end zone, started looking to throw before clearing the end zone, then bailed on the concept in a panic while being tackled at the two-yard-line:
And that was about it for Percy and the Jets. Harvin was released after the season and signed with the Bills, which dropped Seattle’s conditional 4th-round pick down to an actual 6th-round pick. That pick was one of three additional picks that the Seahawks utilized in the 2015 draft to trade their 3rd-round pick from #95 to #69 and select Tyler Lockett, who has started at WR for the team ever since. That’s at least a happy-ending to an ill-fated era, but if we factor in the three picks that Seattle used to acquire Harvin it becomes seven draft picks (including a first-rounder and two thirds) utilized in the selection of Tyler Lockett. A little less happy if you look at it that way.
October 22, 2014:
New England Patriots receive: Akeem Ayers, 7th-round pick (#219 overall, subsequently traded, Hayes Pullard selected).
Tennessee Titans receive: 6th-round pick (#208 overall, Andy Gallik selected).
The Titans were on their way to a 2-14 season. Akeem Ayers was a useful player in the final season of his rookie contract. He had been injured to start the year and was barely playing now, but Tennessee still wanted to recoup whatever value they could rather than letting him depart as a free agent. The New England Patriots had lost starting linebacker Jerod Mayo to a torn patellar tendon and needed a replacement.
NFL trades are just so much worse than MLB or NBA trades. If this were baseball, a team could acquire Akeem Ayers using their bountiful semi-fungible currency of minor league prospects. If this were basketball, a player of Akeem Ayers’ relative talent level would be able to step in to help a lot of teams in the league and would garner some sort of meaningful draft pick compensation. But in football, players are in more specific positions that can be narrowed even further by scheme fit. This is part of what was cutting into Ayers’ playing time – new defensive coordinator Ray Horton instituted an offseason switch from a 4-3 to a 3-4 defense, leaving Ayers without a natural position on the team. There did not seem to be many teams that needed a starting-quality 4-3 outside linebacker on a rental contract.
As it happened, all those parameters did fit the New England Patriots. While it’s nice to have any market for a player you want to get rid of, the Titans probably wish it were from a worse team and negotiator than Bill Belichick’s New England Patriots. Ayers was acquired in exchange for a 6th-round pick, but not until the Titans threw in their 7th-round pick as well. The worst team’s 7th-round pick is going to come shortly after the best team’s 6th-round pick, and the net result was that Ayers was acquired for the right to move from pick #219 to pick #208, by which point the draft is largely a crapshoot anyways.
In this case, both selections were actually NFL players for a while. The Titans used #208 on Andy Gallik, a center who stepped in at starter midway through his rookie season but then got waived with an injury settlement before playing a game in his second season. He became a police officer in 2019. Pick #219 ended up in Cleveland and was used on linebacker Hayes Pullard. He didn’t make the Browns’ roster, but Jacksonville signed him from the practice squad and he went on to have a four-year NFL career. Now he’s involved with the Celebrity Poker Tour and is the President of Athlete Marketing at Enclave & Key.
In exchange for this 11-spot draft difference in the early 200s, the Patriots got “a steal” in Akeem Ayers. After playing just 10 snaps in Tennessee, he was on the field 62% of the time in New England and was a defensive force with four sacks and an interception. The Patriots frequently used Ayers at defensive end, suggesting that he could’ve found a fit as a 3-4 linebacker if Tennessee were more inclined to search for it. When New England made the Super Bowl, Ayers was on the field to make a goal line stop that kept the Seahawks from scoring a go-ahead touchdown. Instead, they had to run another play. Instead of going back to the ground, Seattle passed, and Malcolm Butler’s interception sealed a Patriots championship.
This is one of the lowest prices we’ve seen for any trade in 2014 and it’s the only one I can think of that can be so directly traced to a championship-saving play. Also, I’m pretty sure this was the NFL trade deadline and all we got was this?
October 24, 2014:
Brooklyn Nets receive: Casper Ware
Philadelphia 76ers receive: Marquis Teague, 2019 2nd-round pick (#42 overall, Admiral Schofield selected).
Not a real trade. Marquis Teague had arrived in Brooklyn as part of a salary dump fake-transaction that we discussed in February. Teague was a recent first-round pick whose stock had soured enough for Chicago to dump him for nothing rather than paying him. After 21 games in Brooklyn, Teague’s stock had fallen even further. Nobody wanted to roster him as a basketball player, so getting somebody to take his contract would require throwing in a sweetener.
Casper Ware played four years of basketball at Cal State Long Beach and had embarked on an international career that would’ve continued uninterrupted if not for the Process 76ers. With so many players sold off at the 2014 trade deadline, Philadelphia had enough roster spots to sign Casper Ware and let him play nine games of NBA basketball. These nine games cannot be taken away from him, and nobody can stop Casper Ware from self-identifying as a “former NBA player” for the rest of his life. The collective franchises of the NBA could, however, stop him from identifying as a “current NBA player” in 2014, and they were set to do so.
Both players were waived almost immediately after the trade was completed, which cost the 76ers a little bit of money and the Nets substantially less money than that. Just like in February, I’m unable to say “neither player ever returned to the NBA” because of three random games that Teague got for the Memphis Grizzlies in 2018, but that’s an essentially true statement.
The Nets sent the 2nd-round pick they had received from Milwaukee in exchange for Jason Kidd, which originally belonged to Sacramento. Philadelphia eventually used the pick on Admiral Schofield, then traded him and the remainder of Jonathan Simmons’ contract to the Washington Wizards in exchange for cash. Simmons had $1 million guaranteed on his contract and the Wizards sent $2 million in cash considerations, so the 76ers would seem to have sold the Schofield pick for $1 million after paying $1,120,920 in salary to receive it. Tough return on investment.
October 27, 2014:
New York Knicks receive: Arnett Moultrie
Philadelphia 76ers receive: Travis Outlaw, 2019 2nd-round pick (#31, Nic Claxton selected), 2018 2nd-round pick swap (swapped #39, Isaac Bonga selected, and #43, Justin Jackson selected)
One day before the start of the 2014-15 season, these two teams consummated a fake trade. Arnett Moultrie was a late first-round pick who played sparingly in his two seasons in Philadelphia. For a young player with potential to play sparingly on the 2012-14 76ers was a damning indictment of their NBA capabilities, which Moultrie seemed to be lacking.
Travis Outlaw was an exciting young player in the mid-2000s who kicked off the new decade by signing a 5-year, $35 million contract with the New Jersey Nets. Outlaw quickly proved that this was a bad investment and, because 2010 was a time where $7 million per year was a serious amount of money for an NBA team, the Nets opted to use the newly-reinstituted amnesty provision to release Outlaw and remove his salary cap hit after just one season. As you might recall from our prior discussion of the amnesty clause, every team can offer to pay part of that player’s contract and whichever team offers the most gets the player on that contract. The Sacramento Kings landed Outlaw on more-palatable terms that came with a cap hit of $3 million for each of the four years left on the contract.
As it would turn out, “more-palatable” would not be nearly palatable enough for a player who had peaked in 2008. Outlaw’s three seasons in Sacramento were ineffective and forgettable, earning the ire of Kings fans who were happy to see him go when he got traded to New York in August (didn’t write about that one, sorry).
Outlaw’s last NBA game was as a member of the Kings and Moultrie’s was as a member of the 76ers; both players were waived from their new teams so quickly that Basketball Reference has the Knicks waiving Moultrie before this trade on his transaction log. Moultrie is still playing basketball today and has managed the impressive concurrent feats of playing in 12 different countries and also playing for six different teams in China. Travis Outlaw had already made his money and was content to spend his retirement in his hometown of Starkville, where he has a rec center named after him and also spent a couple years on probation after getting arrested for felony marijuana possession.
With no on-court implications, this trade amounted to the 76ers paying a little less than $2 million in salary cap space to buy a 2019 2nd-round pick and a 2018 2nd-round pick swap. Ordinarily, a swap of four spots in the second round of the NBA Draft would be about as meaningful as swapping eleven spots in the 7th round of the NFL draft, but in this case it was the difference between selecting an NBA player in Isaac Bonga and a non-NBA player in Justin Jackson, so I guess it worked out. Philadelphia traded the pick used on Bonga to the Lakers for $1.5 million and a 2019 2nd-round pick that came in at #34, so that basically covers the cost of Outlaw’s final year right there. The original 2019 pick ended up right at the top at #31 and was used to select Nic Claxton, who has developed into a starting-quality center and signed an extension for four years and $100 million this offseason. Unfortunately for the 76ers, they had already traded the Claxton pick to Brooklyn in December of 2017 (along with Jahlil Okafor and Nik Stauskas) for Trevor Booker, who was waived after 33 games. The Nets signed Claxton to that extension.
A referendum on whether the 76ers’ Process worked needs to reckon with the fact that much of its work was undone by a new front office after Sam Hinkie was pushed out in 2016. In the last two trades we’ve discussed, the 76ers used present-day salary cap space to architect transactions that landed them future assets of questionable value (two 2nd-round picks in 2019 and a 2nd-round swap in 2018). All three of those bites at the apple turned into some form of NBA player, and one (Claxton) turned into a player that could conceivably help a team win a championship. Of course, skeptics of the Process can argue that draft value is always easier to amass in the hypothetical – would Claxton have developed into the player that he is today if he had to play behind Joel Embiid? (Trick question, Joel Embiid doesn’t play.)
But the Process fun didn’t entirely end in 2016. After rolling forward the Bonga draft pick to #34 in 2019, the 76ers proceeded to trade that pick for a 2020 2nd-round pick and a 2023 2nd-round pick. The 2020 pick came in at #34, which basically turned the 2023 pick into pure profit, but then the 2023 pick also came in at #34, which basically turned the 2020 pick into pure profit. Sure, this chain of #34 picks gets less exciting when you realize they were used to select Bruno Fernando, Theo Maledon, and Colby Jones, none of whom ever played for Philadelphia, but the willingness of the 76ers to use their unspent salary cap space to pay Travis Outlaw rather than present-day players stocked a cabinet for future transactions. In particular, the Colby Jones pick was part of a 4-team trade that brought more 2nd-round picks to Philadelphia, the latest of which is a 2029 pick from Portland. This train can run forever if they let it, but the frequency of future trades involving these 2nd-rounders means that we’ll have several opportunities to revisit.
Later this week, we will cover the final transactions of October and the first one of November, including the reintroduction of MLB trades!