Trade (Deadline) Ten Years Later - Aaron Brooks for Jordan Hamilton

Snacking on One-Year Bird and Nishinomiya Stork at the Guangzhou KFC.

The NBA Trade Deadline was on February 20, 2014. We will have a post each weekday until then looking at the NBA trades that were made in the month leading up to the deadline (most of which happened in the 24 hours beforehand). A schedule for the remainder of this series can be found at the end of this post.

The Names:  Denver Nuggets receive: Aaron Brooks. Houston Rockets receive: Jordan Hamilton.

The Team Context: The Denver Nuggets were founded in 1967 as the Denver Rockets – the name changed by 1974, but the city stayed the same. Denver was coming off a fairly frustrating decade, making the playoffs in every season since 2003-04 but losing in the first round in every year but one. The Nuggets won 54 games and made it to the Western Conference Finals in 2008-09 as a highwater mark, but that was all that passed for non-disappointment in Colorado. The prior season, Denver went an impressive 57-25 before losing in the first round yet again. Years of regular season success were not enough to save the job of Nuggets coach George Karl, who was fired and replaced by Brian Shaw. 

It was impossible to know how Brian Shaw’s playoff performance would compare to George Karl’s at this point, but his regular season performance was certainly worse. The Nuggets were 24-28, good (bad) for a 10th seed in the feisty Western Conference. The team was on a 5-game losing streak and would have lost all five games in any permutation – the most points they scored in a game during that five-game run (109 in a 17-point loss) would still have lost to the lowest point total they allowed (112 in a 5-point loss). 

The Houston Rockets were founded in 1967 as the San Diego Rockets – the city changed by 1971, but the name stayed the same. The Rockets had started off the 2010s with a bit of an identity crisis after injuries forced Yao Ming into an early retirement. From 2009-2012, the Rockets finished in a worst-case scenario “ninth seed” in the Western Conference – one spot too low in the standings to make the playoffs, but too competitive to earn a top draft pick and acquire a franchise-reshaping talent. The Rockets made their own luck with a 2012 trade that converted James Harden from the Sixth Man of the Year in Oklahoma City to one of the NBA’s leading stars in Houston, then managed to land a whale in free agency when they signed Dwight Howard in the summer of 2013. 

Expectations were high for Houston in 2013 and the Rockets might have managed to exceed them in the first half of the season. The Rockets were 37-17, good (good) for a 3rd seed in the feisty Western Conference. The team was operating like a scientist’s dream; the Rockets led the league in 3-point attempts and free throw attempts. They were last in the league at attempting 2-point shots, but 2nd in the league at making them. In addition to Harden and Howard, the Rockets saw continued solid play from Jeremy Lin and a leap forward from Patrick Beverley in their second seasons with the team. 

The Player Context: That improvement from point guards was tough news for Aaron Brooks, who had signed with the Rockets that summer on a one-year minimum contract. Brooks, not to be confused with the NFL quarterback Aaron Brooks, was a four-year starter at the University of Oregon and led the Ducks to an Elite Eight in 2007 as a finalist for the Wooden Award (it’s like the Heisman Trophy but basketball). Brooks was drafted by the Rockets 26th overall and started his career there, winning a Most Improved Player award in 2009-10 before he was injured, displaced by Kyle Lowry, and traded to Phoenix at the 2011 trade deadline for a first round pick and future Most Improved Player Goran Dragic. 

In the summer of 2011, an NBA lockout led many players to sign contracts in foreign leagues. I’ve typically ignored those signings when discussing player histories because most guys “signed contracts” and then immediately came back to the states when the lockout ended. Brooks was the rare exception who stuck out his contract (probably because it did not include an opt-out clause), spending all of 2011-12 as a Guangdong Southern Tiger. Brooks made the CBA All-Star game, took Guangdong to the CBA finals, and otherwise “spent a lot of time in [his] room, trying to figure out where to go … a lot of time at KFC, McDonald’s and Pizza Hut.” Brooks signed a two-year, $6.6 million contract with the Kings in the summer of 2012, which went so poorly that the Kings bought out his contract and released him after just 46 games. This led him back to Houston in the spring of 2013, where he played sparingly in the regular season and then a lot more often in the playoffs. The Rockets brought him back in the summer, but Brooks was undeniably surplus on a roster built without him in mind. He had fallen out of the rotation in February. 

Jordan Hamilton, not to be confused with the Canadian soccer player Jordan Hamiton (you probably weren’t going to do that), played his college basketball at the University of Texas before he was drafted by Dallas with the 26th pick four years after Brooks was taken with the same selection. Hamilton was traded to Denver that evening in a trade that sent Dallas’s second round pick, 57th overall selection Targuy Ngombo, to Portland and then onward to the Minnesota Timberwolves. Ngombo, who would turn 22 a few weeks after the draft, was born in the Congo but had played in Qatar since 2006 and had been rumored to go to the Timberwolves just before the draft. Very little was known about Targuy Ngombo; in fact, so little was known that he was taken with the 57th pick despite actually being Tanguy Ngombo, a guy who would turn 27 a few weeks after the draft and should not have been eligible for it. Apparently this was “easily confirmed by looking at Qatar’s roster on the FIBA website in anticipation of the 2012 Olympics in London.” Whoops!

Perhaps traumatized by the deception of the man claiming to be his draftmate Targuy, Jordan Hamilton failed to capitalize on the limited opportunities he received in Denver. I don’t want to play psychologist for a person I don’t know based entirely on their basketball statistics, but Hamilton missing 15 of his first 31 free throws in the NBA (compared to only 18 of his final 72) suggests a guy who started his career stuck in his own head. Can you blame him? He got drafted by the local Texas team and then immediately traded, then there was a league-wide lockout, then he was sent to the D League Idaho Stampede. Hamilton did not get an extended run of games until February of his rookie season. He played well in his first game with double digit minutes (23:58), then went 0 for 7 from the field in his second (27:12) and then got under 21 minutes a game in every other game for the remainder of his first two years in the league. Hamilton got a fresh start with George Karl fired and was even used as a starter to begin 2013-14. But as you might recall, the Nuggets were off to their worst start to a season in years, so this wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement. Perhaps the most notable moment for Hamilton prior to the trade was when he earned a one-game suspension for punching Steven Adams. 

The Trade: While the trade would cost Houston a fan favorite in Aaron Brooks, it essentially represented an opportunity to cash in Brooks’ value for a gamble on Hamilton’s potential. The Rockets had a couple of quality point guards and a shooting guard in Harden who liked to have the basketball in his hands; the organizational need for a forward who could shoot was greater than the need for a point guard. By contrast, Denver was dealing with injuries to its point guards and was about to trade veteran Andre Miller to Washington (Tuesday’s post) – they’d probably use Brooks as a starter as soon as he learned how to navigate the home locker room. Denver wouldn’t miss Hamilton all that much and Houston could take comfort in recent history that suggested Brooks would just end up re-signing for them anyways. 

Brooks somehow had a no-trade clause in his league-minimum contract (due to being a One-Year Bird; I will not elaborate) and had to decide whether to approve a trade out of Houston. According to an interview he gave to Nuggets.com a week after being traded to Denver, Brooks initially declined the trade before changing his mind and accepting. “Denver’s an up-and-coming team,” Brooks said about a team that was on its way to losing 21 fewer games than it did the year before.

Hamilton was traded while the Nuggets were on a road trip and “only had two outfits [and] had to go shopping almost every day.” Couldn’t he have cut down on those trips by purchasing multiple outfits at once? 

The Reaction: Rockets fans responded with anguish to the loss of Brooks, but at least took comfort that he’d finally get well-deserved playing time. Eric Meyer at NuggLove “liked the trade, as it does address the point guard need the Nuggets have with uncertainty about Ty Lawson’s return and the season ending injury to Nate Robinson.”

In general, it was a minor trade that made sense for both teams and there wasn’t all that much reaction either way. But that’s never universally true, and part of the magic of sports is that each individual play or player can be incredibly significant for the fan who is experiencing it in proper circumstances. For Nate Timmons at Denver Stiffs (and I thought “NuggLove” was good), Hamilton was one of the first young players he got to know as a freshly-credentialed blogger. In an interview he conducted with Hamilton in April when the Rockets came to Denver, Timmons took time to acknowledge his own personal interest in the player:

[Hamilton is] an interesting guy that I knew enjoyed skateboarding, riding bikes, and had a history of basketball in his family. … We root for these guys because they are on the teams that we love. Sometimes we get caught up in thinking about players as commodities and want our teams to discard guys based on numbers we don't like or ceilings we think guys won't reach. We forget that these guys are the best of the absolute best. And we forget that players are also just regular people. With Hamilton gone, I miss seeing his elaborate handshake with public relations head Tim Gelt. I miss being able to chat with him about how his family is doing and what his brothers might be up to … No matter how Hamilton's career turns out, I'll always be rooting for him.

The Results: Hamilton set a new career high in minutes when he got 33:20 of game time (as a starter) in his third game with Houston. But overall, he was just about the same player in Houston as he had been with Denver to start the season. That was not enough to get him any action in Houston’s playoff series and he left the team that summer.

Brooks didn’t start his first game with the Nuggets, but did play nearly 28 minutes and then started the next four. Unfortunately, Denver lost all of these games and continued to skid towards their first losing record in eleven years. But Brooks improved his output across the board in Denver while playing significantly more minutes, rebuilding his value before he entered free agency that summer. He didn’t re-sign with the team either, but the Nuggets get credit for winning this trade just by virtue of actualizing the theoretical “better roster fit.” 

The Aftermath: Aaron Brooks signed consecutive one-year deals with the Chicago Bulls and continued to prove his status as a worthwhile backup point guard. But teams still held off on giving Brooks a serious financial commitment; his version of the Summer 2016 NBA Overpay was a $2.7 million contract from the Indiana Pacers. Brooks’ final NBA season came with the 2017-18 Minnesota Timberwolves and his final NBA game was a 1:03 garbage time appearance in a win over the Memphis Grizzlies, where his only statistical contribution was to commit a turnover by traveling. After a year off, Brooks took his game overseas in 2019 to play with the Illawarra Hawks in Australia. He tore his Achilles in October, bringing his playing career to an end and putting the Hawks in a position to give LaMelo Ball the keys to the offense. Brooks was hired by the Knicks in 2020 to serve as a coach specifically focused on two-way players who bounced between the NBA and the G League, but he’s not listed on the Knicks website in that capacity anymore. 

Jordan Hamilton was about 80% done with his NBA career after the 2013-14 season, but it might have looked like 100% to observers as he was waived by multiple teams and ultimately played in the D-League for the first few months of the season. The Clippers signed him on a 10-day contract after the 2015 trade deadline and he finished the season in Los Angeles. Hamilton’s final NBA appearance was in 2016, when the New Orleans Pelicans were so injured that they were permitted to sign Hamilton as the 17th member of their roster in March. In his final NBA game, he played 34:36 as one of seven players who got onto the court for the Pelicans; the Pelicans lost by 35 and Hamilton’s +/- of -44 was by far the worst on the team. His post-NBA career has included comprehensive traveling, playing for two teams in Venezuela, one in the Dominican Republic, two teams in Turkey, two teams in Israel, one team in Italy, and most recently, four teams in Japan. He is now a member of the Aomori Watts, his second electricity-themed mascot in Japan after a prior stint on the Kumamoto Volters (I am confident a Nishinomiya Stork is not electricity-themed and am pretty sure a Shiga Lakestar is not). 

Tanguy Ngombo spent the rest of his basketball career with the Qatari powerhouse Al-Rayyan, playing through 2020 before retiring at the age of 31 (actually 36). 

Miscellaneous: Aaron Brooks revealed in his Nuggets.com interview that he’s bowled as high as a 299. “I’m excited about the MLB and NFL drafts: Rodon and (hopefully) Bridgewater,” said a wrong-on-all-counts Houston fan. Jordan Hamilton was a fourth-team All-American (I didn’t know they went to four teams). Aaron Brooks (basketball) went to Oregon even though it’s more of a football school and Aaron Brooks (football) went to Virginia even though it’s more of a basketball school. Houston was the third NBA/ABA city to have a “Rockets” basketball team mascot? “Hobson was proud that all five of Oregon's starters on the team that beat Ohio State, 46-33, for the first national title, were from Oregon.”

February 16, 2024:
Charlotte Bobcats receive: Gary Neal, Luke Ridnour
Milwaukee Bucks receive: Ramon Sessions, Jeff Adrien

February 19, 2024:
Sacramento Kings receive: Roger Mason Jr. and cash
Miami Heat receive: “Conditional” 2nd-round pick

February 20, 2024:
Denver Nuggets receive: Jan Vesely (from WAS)
Washington Wizards receive: Andre Miller (from DEN), 2014 2nd-round pick (from PHI)
Philadelphia 76ers receive: Eric Gaynor and 2015 2nd-round pick (from WAS); future 2nd-round pick (from DEN)