T10YL - Tyson Chandler from New York to Dallas
Featuring Raymond Felton, Jose Calderon, Samuel Dalembert, Wayne Ellington, Shane Larkin, Cleanthony Early, and an Antetokounmpo (find out which one!)
The Names: Dallas Mavericks receive: Tyson Chandler, Raymond Felton. New York Knicks receive: Jose Calderon, Samuel Dalembert, Wayne Ellington, Shane Larkin, two 2014 2nd round picks (#34, Cleanthony Early selected and #51, Thanasis Antetokounmpo selected).
The Team Context: Basketball is back! We haven’t discussed the NBA since our 2014 Trade Deadline series concluded in February. In the four months since then, the season ended and the playoffs happened (the San Antonio Spurs beat the Miami Heat, flipping the result in a rematch from the 2012-13 Finals). This trade kicks off the basketball offseason and marks our first foray into different league years – quite a few guys who arrived during the 2013-14 NBA season will be traded again in the coming weeks as the 2014-15 season officially starts. Somehow, neither the Mavericks nor Knicks made any trades at the 2014 trade deadline, so this is our first opportunity to discuss either team.
The Mavericks’ 2011 title is viewed today as Dirk Nowitzki’s crowning achievement; an example of the rare NBA scenario where one singular talent could outweigh the superteam that had coalesced in Miami. A quick glance at the Dallas roster should be enough to dispel the narrative that Dirk was acting alone. Late-career Jason Kidd was still playing at a high level, Jason Terry and Shawn Marion still had several years of good basketball left, and they even had Peja Stojakovic kicking around their bench after picking him up midseason. Tyson Chandler was perhaps the most impactful of the bunch, which we’ll get to later.
Chandler’s departure from Dallas in 2011 (we’ll get to that later too) combined with another year of age for each player on the roster meant the Mavericks didn’t win a playoff game in either of the next two seasons, though they returned to the 2014 playoffs and lost a seven-game first-round series to the eventual champion Spurs. The team was in an awkward spot; they didn’t seem good enough to seriously contend in the Western Conference and hadn’t attracted star free agents like Dwight Howard, but the memories of being good enough to win the whole thing were still fresh. They still had Dirk, who was still showing up on MVP ballots in 2014 as he plowed into his mid-30s. It was too soon to tear down and they needed to get better.
The Knicks were coming off their franchise’s best stretch of the 21st century, which sounds way more impressive than it is. The Knicks made the playoffs every season between 1987-88 and 2000-01, though they never managed to bring home a championship. They managed to make the playoffs in 2003-04 (while going 39-43), but were otherwise mired in futility. By the 2010-11 season, New York was fed up with losing and cashed in a tremendous number of trade chips to acquire Carmelo Anthony at the deadline. The Knicks made the playoffs that season and then traded for Tyson Chandler during the following offseason (we’ll get to that soon), culminating in a 2012-13 season where they won the only Atlantic Division title in team history and defeated the Celtics in a first round playoff matchup.
The Knicks fell from those heights to start the 2013-14 season and the team embraced an organizational pivot when coaching legend Phil Jackson was hired as president of basketball operations in March. Jackson fired previous head coach Mike Woodson at the conclusion of the year and hired Derek Fisher, a former player on Jackson’s Laker teams who had just retired from playing at the age of 40. The roster had been frozen since the end of the season, but that was about to change.
The Player Context: Part of the reason the 2011 Mavericks title gets remembered as the exclusive achievement of Dirk Nowitzki is that we fools tend to underestimate the impact of elite defensive players. During that postseason, Dirk scored 27.7 points per game. It’s very easy for us to conceptualize the influence of those points on the game, but the impact of a lockdown defender can only be gleaned from watching the game and paying attention. Who has time for that in the modern age, let alone several years after the fact? I know that Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points in a game in 1962 but I can’t tell you much about Walt Bellamy, the Chicago Packer center who held Chamberlain to a 15-for-34 shooting performance four games after the 100-point game (a quick perusal suggests that Walt was pretty good too).
Tyson Chandler had arrived in Dallas just ahead of the 2010-11 season as part of the fourth trade of his career. Chandler’s first trade was on draft night 2001, when he was selected with the Clippers’ 2nd overall pick and simultaneously traded to the Bulls for Elton Brand. Chandler’s next trade wasn’t until 2006, when the Bulls sent him to the New Orleans Hornets in exchange for the initials-first/generic-last pair of P.J. Brown and J.R. Smith. The third trade of Chandler’s career, a 2009 swap that sent him to Charlotte in exchange for Emeka Okafor, kicked off the “turbulent era.” Arguably, the turbulence began a few months prior when the Oklahoma City Thunder agreed to acquire Chandler at the midseason deadline, but failed to complete the trade after getting a closer look at his big toe. But plenty of teams remained interested in acquiring him; Chandler was only in Charlotte for one season before he was sent to Dallas.
He only spent one year in Dallas, too, but it was a very good one (they won the championship, as discussed). Chandler was a free agent entering the offseason, but his recruitment was stalled by an NBA lockout that prevented business from being done until December. When the league opened back up, a new collective bargaining agreement gave Mavericks owner Mark Cuban pause about committing substantial sums of money to his championship-winning veterans, and Chandler was ultimately sent to the Knicks in a sign-and-trade (fifth trade of his career).
On arrival in New York, Chandler expressed his intention “to get everybody playing defense,” then backed that up by winning Defensive Player of the Year in 2012. During the aforementioned 2012-13 season, he attained new first-time career accolades when he made the All Star Game and the NBA All-Defensive 1st Team (he only made 2nd Team the year before despite winning overall Defensive Player of the Year). But injuries the next season made him miss about a third of the season and left him slightly less effective when he played, setting the table for his sixth and final career trade.
Raymond Felton joined Chandler on his way out of New York, probably in part because the Knicks were acquiring a roster’s worth of guards from Dallas. Felton was on his second stint with the team after previously playing with the team for the first half of the 2010-11 season. He had started at point guard for the Knicks over the last two seasons and, like the rest of the team, performed much better in 2012-13 than in 2013-14. In February of 2014, Felton experienced some personal turbulence when his then-wife filed for divorce on February 18. His then-wife, whose married name was confusingly “Raymondo-Felton,” alleged that Felton subsequently threatened her with a firearm, leading to his arrest on felony gun charges on February 25. It’s really surreal to look at these events through the context of Raymond Felton’s 2014 game logs, which show no interruption in play. New York lost on the first night of a back-to-back on the day Raymondo-Felton filed for divorce, but won the next day. The night before Raymond Felton was arrested on felony gun charges, the Knicks lost by two points to the Mavericks and he was 3-for-4 shooting with 7 assists. Two days after, with felony charges now on the books, the Knicks got blown out in Miami and Felton was 1-for-7 shooting as the Knicks fell to 21-37. Why were they letting him play through this?
The most exciting player among the Mavericks coming to New York was probably Jose Calderon, the Spanish point guard who came to the NBA in 2005 but didn’t come to America until January of 2013, when the Toronto Raptors traded him away to Detroit. Calderon was an “exciting” player in the sense that he held (and still holds) a single-season NBA record, but also only “exciting” in the sense that the record he holds is for free throw percentage (he made an absurd 98.05% of his free throws in the 2008-09 season; nobody else on the leaderboard has a single-season mark above 96%). Calderon had signed a four-year contract worth $29 million with Dallas in the summer of 2013 and he started all but one game in the first season of that contract. Despite the seemingly solid play, he would be spending the final three seasons elsewhere.
Samuel Dalembert had a more successful NBA career than Jose Calderon to this point, but was also closer to the end. The 76ers drafted Dalembert out of Seton Hall in 2001 and kept him in the fold until 2010, when he began a not-always-voluntary cycle of hopping from teams after one season. First he was sent to Sacramento, then signed with Houston, then was shipped to Milwaukee. He had joined Dallas of his own volition and was their typical starting center in 2013-14, but was about to get sent elsewhere once more. He was ostensibly swapping roles with Tyson Chandler as a byproduct of this trade.
Wayne Ellington was yet another NBA veteran who had signed a free agent contract with Dallas in the summer of 2013 (the Mavericks had tried to clear salary cap space for a run at Dwight Howard, then pivoted to this smorgasbord of dudes when he signed in Houston). Signing with the Mavericks looked to be a mistake for The Man With The Golden Arm — after successively increasing his minutes in his first four seasons to a pinnacle of 21.8 per game in 2012-13, his playing time fell off a cliff in Dallas. He was frequently a healthy scratch and played just 393 minutes — nearly 1,000 fewer minutes than he had played in his rookie year, which had been his prior low.
The final player headed out of Dallas was Shane Larkin, who had also only joined the Mavericks one season prior. The son of Cincinnati Red legend Barry Larkin and a product of Dr. Phillips, Florida (the town named after Philip Phillips, a citrus magnate who seemingly only used his Columbia University medical degree to escape the cursed name of Philip Phillips), Larkin arrived in a 2013 draft night trade shortly after he was selected by the Hawks at #18 overall. He broke his ankle during Summer League and missed the early parts of the season, but still managed to get more minutes than Wayne Ellington did that year.
The Trade: Midway through the 2014 season, the Knicks were adamant in their refusal to listen to deadline offers for Tyson Chandler, with Marc Stein reporting that the Knicks “continue to scoff at every one.” But in early March, Chandler spoke to the media and expressed uncertainty about his future with the Knicks. “We’re all going to have a lot of decisions to make,” Chandler said, using language that rarely gets used when the expected decision is “returning for the next season.”
After a few months observing the Knicks’ operations, Phil Jackson was ready to put his imprint on the team. The team’s public announcement of the trade began with Jackson quoted as saying “the journey to build this team for the upcoming season and beyond continues,” which is an amazing turn of phrase for the first sentence of your first public comments about your first trade in charge. In addition to clearing out salary cap space and bringing in a younger set of players, Jackson identified this trade as an opportunity to improve team chemistry after watching, in his words, “guys that looked at each other like, ‘you didn’t back me up, you weren’t there when I needed help.’” Jackson continued to say that “we want to be more aggressive defensively, we want to have a certain sense of offensive alacrity, getting up and down the court and challenging defenses to get back and protect the basket.” These comments were interpreted as unfair shots against Tyson Chandler by neutral fans and as totally reasonable shots against Tyson Chandler by Knicks fans who had seen him play basketball in 2014.
Reddit user “TheAlphaRanger” accurately assessed the two dominant emotions of the Mavericks’ fanbase when referring to their own internal struggle between “my sadness that Calderon is leaving or my jubilation that Chandler is returning.” They assessed their balance as “looking awfully 50-50 right now,” while the rest of the comment thread skews a bit closer to 65-35 in favor of the sadness.
Zach Harper, then writing for CBS Sports, handed out a B- trade grade for the Knicks and a B+ trade grade for the Mavericks. These would both turn out to be entirely too generous.
The Results: With the 34th pick in the 2014 Draft, the Knicks selected Cleanthony Early, a Bronx native who played at SUNY Sullivan before transferring to Wichita State and leading the Shockers to a 34-0 regular season. Early struggled with injuries during his rookie year and then had his second season derailed by a “knee injury,” which is technically an accurate way to describe what happened but not the most accurate way. While Early and his girlfriend were leaving a strip club in Queens at 4 AM by Uber, he was “surrounded by four to six people wearing ski masks and robbed of his items and jewelry – including a gold necklace and gold caps on his teeth.” The knee injury occurred when his assailants shot him in the knee, which feels unnecessarily mean to do to a fringe NBA player under the circumstances where you’re robbing him at 4 AM.
With the 51st pick in the 2014 Draft, the Knicks selected Thanasis Antetokounmpo. Thanasis had declared for the 2013 NBA Draft, but ultimately withdrew and was selected by the Delaware 87ers with the 9th pick of the D-League Draft that season (not clear why this led to him being NBA draft-eligible again the next year and not interested in learning). Thanasis’s contributions to the Knicks were pretty good on a rate basis — in just six minutes of game time, he managed to score six points (making all three 2-pointers and missing his one 3-pointer) and snag one rebound. He left the Knicks after the 2016 season and wouldn’t return to the NBA for a few years.
After Shane Larkin had played two games in New York, the Knicks made the puzzling decision to decline their option on the third year of his rookie contract and its $1.65 million salary. When a team rejects the option on their rookie’s contract, they lose the ability to re-sign that player at a higher salary next season, making it highly likely that they’ll go elsewhere in free agency if they don’t wash out of the league. Employing a player through their rookie contract is typically a formality, especially when that player was a first-round pick that you traded for a couple of months ago, so this decision was seen as a puzzling and risky gambit to open up miniscule amounts of cap space for next summer’s free agency. Despite the vote of no-confidence, Larkin played 24.5 minutes per game for the Knicks and got into 76 games (good for second on the team). Since the Knicks had declined his third-year option, he became an unrestricted free agent after the season and left.
League observers weren’t sure whether New York would keep Dalembert on the roster, but Phil Jackson clarified that Dalembert would remain in the fold as Tyson Chandler’s replacement at the center position. Just over six months later, Dalembert called the Knicks season “a tragedy” after the team had lost 21 of 22 games. Dalembert’s final game action was in the 18th game of that stretch, when he had four blocks off the bench in a loss against the Kings. He was waived on January 5 and never played in the NBA again.
Wayne Ellington didn’t even stick around for six months – he got traded away just six weeks after this trade was completed. That left the Knicks with just Jose Calderon as a long-term trade return. Calderon regressed in New York while his salary from the contract he signed with Dallas remained the same, and the Knicks were reportedly shopping him to open up cap space by the time they cut Dalembert. This didn’t end up coming to fruition until the summer of 2016, when Calderon was sent to Chicago as part of a larger trade and then shipped on to Los Angeles for Theoretical Ater Majok along with two 2nd-round draft picks that demonstrate how far his value had fallen.
Tyson Chandler seemed to be revitalized in his return to Dallas. His stats took a step forward in every major category and he played his third-most minutes in any season. In the wake of this trade that reunited Chandler with the Mavericks, owner Mark Cuban responded to a question about whether Chandler would remain with the team long-term by saying “let’s just say I learn from my mistakes.” Well, he definitely made a different mistake that summer, when he let Chandler leave in free agency under the belief that the team could sign Deandre Jordan away from the Clippers to upgrade the center position. That ended up backfiring in legendary fashion, as Jordan’s Clippers teammates convinced him to re-sign and then barricaded themselves in his house until free agency officially opened. Cuban was (inaccurately) reported to be “beside himself. Driving around downtown Dallas begging (thru texts) Jordan’s family for address to Deandre’s home.” It was pretty fun for a neutral observer, likely miserable for Dallas fans.
Being excised from the team twice after just one year left a bad taste in Chandler’s mouth, as he told the Arizona Republic that “I learned in this business that you can’t trust anybody” and calling reports that the Mavericks had offered him an extension “just bull****. Just saving face.” After two unhappy endings in Dallas, the bridges between Chandler and the Mavericks appeared to be permanently burned. On the bright side for Chandler, the sixth time being traded was his last and he retained agency over where he got to live for the remainder of his NBA career.
Raymond Felton pled guilty to misdemeanor charges of “attempted criminal possession of a weapon” and “criminal possession of a firearm,” receiving a no-jail sentence that consisted of a $5,000 fine and 500 hours of community service. He was suspended by the NBA for the first four games of the 2014-15 season, then missed a whole lot more games than that due to a preseason ankle injury. He only played 281 minutes for the Mavericks that year, but bounced back to a regular (if unimpressive) rotation role for the 2015-16 season.
The Mavericks won one additional regular season game in 2014-15 after making this trade, but offset that by winning two fewer playoff games (getting bounced by the Rockets in a five-game first-round exit). It’s kind of hard to argue they “won the trade” when they stagnated under a generous definition and the star player they acquired immediately left in free agency. But the Knicks lost 20 more games in 2014-15 than they did the year before, finishing a putrid 17-65. This could be construed as a victory for New York if it transitioned to a successful tank that let the Knicks emerge as a competitive franchise, but this theory gets invalidated by their identical 17-65 record for the 2018-19 season five years later. The Mavericks may not have won, but they lost less than the Knicks.
The Aftermath: Tyson Chandler signed a four-year contract with the Suns as a free agent in the summer of 2015, but injuries started to catch up with him as he transitioned from “early-30s” to “mid-30s.” His games played for Phoenix across the four years of the contract declined from 66 to 47 to 46 to 7, after which he was waived in the final year of his deal. Chandler signed with the Lakers for the tail end of that season and then joined the Houston Rockets for 2019-20. Chandler didn’t play much for Houston, and when the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted the NBA season, it looked like his career was going to end on a sour note. In his last regular season game of that season, Chandler checked in for the final second of a game that the Rockets led 113-111. That one second was enough time for Bojan Bogdanovic to make a three-pointer and win the game for Utah, 114-113.
Nobody would have blamed Chandler if that was his final game – he was 37 and playing fringe minutes for a team that was unlikely to win the championship. But when the NBA checked into the Disney bubble to finish the 2020 season, Tyson Chandler was right there alongside the others. Sure, this didn’t lead to a surge or even a trickle of playing time, but it did allow him action in one more NBA game. In a playoff game against the Oklahoma City Thunder, Dennis Schroder and P.J. Tucker got into an altercation that resulted in both players being ejected and fined $25,000. Schroder was charged with a type-2 flagrant foul, and for some reason Tyson Chandler checked into the game and strode to the line to attempt his first free throws since December 28, 2019 (eight months prior). He missed both and was then subbed out, ending the game and his NBA career with an insane statline of zero seconds played and two free throws missed. Since retiring, Chandler has mended fences with the Mavericks and currently works as a player development coach for the team. He serves as a mentor to young big men in Dallas, including recent breakout first-round pick Dereck Lively II.
Raymond Felton signed with the Clippers as a free agent in 2016 and then joined Oklahoma City the next summer. He spent the final years of his career as a reliable bench guard on teams that were good enough to make the playoffs, but not much else. Felton’s last NBA game was a Game 5 loss to the Portland Trail Blazers, which started with him playing a few minutes in the first half and ended when Dame Lillard decided to end it. His NBA career ended after 2019, and according to a video from December, he ended up starting Felton Skills Academy a few years later (which would seem to be affiliated with the Felton Elite AAU Basketball team he coaches). He’s recently been hosting a podcast with Derek Holland and Rufino Vargas called “Tha Throwbacks,” though they haven’t uploaded a new episode in a couple of months.
After being waived by the Knicks, Samuel Dalembert signed a contract to join the Mavericks for preseason 2015. He didn’t end up making the roster after suffering a leg injury and was waived on October 24, after which he signed with the CBA’s Shanxi Zhongyu and played there for a couple of seasons. I’ve certainly biased this algorithm with my research so far, but I’m sure Samuel would be happy to know that the 8th-most suggested search by his name is “best mavericks players all time” (he was not even a top 5 player on the team during his one season in Dallas):
Shane Larkin played the 2015-16 season with the crosstown Nets, then had a successful year playing for Baskonia in Spain in 2016-17. Larkin reportedly turned down a multi-million dollar contract offer from Baskonia to return to the NBA and sign on with the Celtics, where he was a bench player behind Kyrie Irving and Terry Rozier. Larkin played at least nine minutes in the first ten games of the Celtics’ playoff run, but only played 1:45 in the eleventh game (posting no stats) and then never played in the NBA again. Larkin expressed a desire to play more regularly and found that opportunity in Turkey, when he signed with Anadolu Efes. He was an immediate star in Turkey, taking Anadolu Efes to the EuroLeague Finals in his first season and winning the championship in each of 2021 and 2022. Larkin is such a star in Turkey that he became a citizen in February of 2020 and competed with the Turkish national team in FIBA EuroBasket 2022. Based on the other names in the box score, he’s the only foreigner that has taken this path. He doesn’t appear to still be on the active Turkish roster, but is still anchored to the country through 2028 after signing a four-year contract extension with Anadolu Efes in May.
Despite the fact that Wayne Ellington was cut from the Mavericks’ rotation and then excised from the New York Knicks, he still had a tremendous amount of NBA basketball in front of him. Ellington joined the Lakers first and had subsequent stints with Brooklyn, Miami, and Detroit. In the summer of 2019, Ellington consummated his role in this trade by signing with the Knicks as a free agent. He got fewer minutes with the Knicks that year than in any season since his year in Dallas, proving that you should believe people (or NBA franchises) when they tell you what they think you’re worth. His final two years were spent on reunion tours with Detroit and the Lakers, both of which featured more minutes than the Knicks gave him. Ellington’s final NBA game was an April 10, 2022 victory over the Nuggets where he had 18 points on ten shots. He got 29:57 of game time, which would feel more impressive if this game weren’t so stocked with fringe players that Stanley Johnson played for 46:29 (Bryn Forbes led the Nuggets with 36:21). Ellington joined the Heat’s coaching staff as a player development coach in September of 2023.
At the end of his $28 million megadeal, Jose Calderon transitioned into a low-salary, veteran contributor role. He started the 2016-17 year with the Lakers, then was waived midway through the season and joined the Hawks. He joined Lebron James’ Cleveland Cavaliers for the next season and played (sparingly) in the NBA Finals’ fourth installment of Warriors vs Cavaliers. The final season of Calderon’s NBA career was spent with the Pistons, where he shot at a career-worst rate (37.5% on field goals and 24.6% on threes) while taking a career-low number of shots (only 120 field goal attempts for the season). The Pistons were swept by the Bucks in the first round of the playoffs; Calderon got into three of those games for a few minutes each and took zero shots, though he put up two assists and secured a steal in his final game. That fall, Calderon joined the NBPA as a special assistant to the executive director, though he’s since left the union side and now works as a special advisor to the Cavaliers’ front office.
Cleanthony Early returned from his gunshot-induced knee injury about three months after the incident to check in for 19 seconds against the Kings. He got substantial minutes in the final six games of the Knicks’ season, including a season-high 30:22 in a twelve point loss to the Pacers that ended up being his final NBA game. He re-signed with the Knicks in the 2016 offseason, but this time it was the D-League’s Westchester Knicks and he was traded to the Santa Cruz Warriors midseason. His foreign basketball career started in 2017 when he signed a contract with AEK Athens. That relationship would be short-lived, as Anthony’s contract was terminated a few days later for “disciplinary reasons” that seemed to arise because of a lack of vegan restaurants near a tournament location in Belgium. He’s either given up veganism or was able to accommodate it on subsequent teams in the Dominican Republic, Japan, Hungary, Saudi Arabia, France, Taiwan, South Africa, Kuwait, Lebanon, Mongolia, and Bahrain (there is no way he kept up the veganism). Two of the teams he’s played for since 2022 (TaiwanBeer HeroBears and Dynamo Lebanon) have since disbanded, though he’s returned to Lebanon and currently plays for Sagesse/Hekmeh (these are the French and Arabic words for “wisdom,” both of which seem to be used to refer to the team).
Thanasis Antetekounmpo has carved out one of the finest nepotism careers in modern sports history. He returned to Europe between 2016 and 2019, but by this point his brother Giannis had ascended to become one of the NBA’s best players. The Milwaukee Bucks were happy to give a job to Giannis’s brother in order to keep him happy in Wisconsin, so Thanasis joined the team in 2019 and has been a regular member of the bench ever since. 99.6% of his NBA minutes (and counting) have come as a member of the Bucks, though that count will be suspended for at least a season as a result of Thanasis’s Achilles surgery in May. I’m not aware of any higher-profile instances of a Greek athlete undergoing a medical procedure to repair a body part named after a Greek mythological figure.
It’s probably too early in the Phil Jackson Knicks era to include a postscript here, but rest assured that it was going to go poorly.
Miscellaneous: Tyson Chandler’s arrival induced Chauncey Billups’ departure from the Knicks for salary cap purposes. There are ten people named Philip Phillips who have a Wikipedia page (and one puppet from a movie named that who doesn’t have his own page). Shane Larkin stopped playing baseball when a youth coach told him the hitting tips he had received from his Hall of Fame father and his teammates were wrong. Wayne Ellington broke the Miami Heat’s record for threes made in a season with 227 in 2017-18, but Duncan Robinson has subsequently beaten this mark three times. This trade was completed one day prior to Raymond Felton’s 30th birthday (happy 40th, Raymond!).