Trade (Deadline) Ten Years Later - Austin Daye for Nando de Colo
In which we finally try to decipher the various levels of European basketball and rip the job performance of a civilian.
The Names: San Antonio Spurs receive: Austin Daye. Toronto Raptors receive: Nando de Colo.
The Team Context: A landmark moment for the blog! We’ve previously discussed this season’s Toronto Raptors, but it was long enough ago and the context changed enough that the team bears revisiting. Not much revisiting, but still: on December 9, the 7-12 Raptors traded away Rudy Gay. On February 19, the Raptors had gone 22-13 to boost their season record to 29-25, good for the third seed in the Eastern Conference.
That’s cool for the Raptors, but the San Antonio Spurs held themselves to a higher standard and, like always, they were meeting it. In the 1988-89 season, the Spurs went 21-61. Their 1987 first overall pick, David Robinson, had attended the U.S. Naval Academy and spent his first two post-draft NBA seasons as LTJG Robinson, a civil engineering officer at Kings Bay Submarine Base. In the 1989-90 season, Robinson joined the NBA and got an immediate promotion to become “The Admiral,” elevating the Spurs’ win total by 35.
The Spurs spent the next seven seasons as one of the NBA’s best teams under The Admiral’s command, but in 1996-97, a back injury and a broken foot limited Robinson to six games. The Spurs finished an atrocious 20-62, putting them in prime position to draft Tim Duncan first overall the next season. The “Big Fundamental” was another immediate NBA star, and in his rookie season San Antonio began a ridiculous 20-season streak where they finished with at least 50 wins in every season. The one exception was the lockout-shortened 1998-99 season, where only 50 games were played. The Spurs went 37-13 that year (about a 61-win pace over 82 games) and won the first NBA Championship in franchise history, so it was still what you could call a “solid season.” This 20-season streak also included the lockout-shortened 2011-12 season, where only 66 games were played, but that was enough for the Spurs to go 50-16 and eliminate any need for an asterisk.
2014-15 was the 17th season of the Spurs’ 50-win streak, but after winning four championships between 1998-99 and 2006-07, San Antonio was on a seven-year mini-drought. The team was still among basketball’s best, but the actuarial tables suggested that 37-year-old Duncan, 36-year-old Manu Ginobli, and 31-year-old Tony Parker were running out of time to win another one. The Spurs were 40-15 at the time of the trade and had little reason to think that the presence or absence of either Nando de Colo or Austin Daye would alter that trajectory.
The Player Context: Like other teams in one-sport towns, the Spurs know that they’re the only exposure many people will have to the concept of “San Antonio, Texas.” As part of their cultural stewardship, the Spurs became notorious for rosters full of international players – how else do you convince a guy born in Belgium to visit the Riverwalk? There were 19 players who suited up for the 2013-14 Spurs and only 9 were born in the United States; in comparison, 20 players suited up for the 2013-14 Toronto Raptors (emphasis on “Toronto”) and 17 were born in the United States.
One of the 10 international players on the Spurs and 3 international players on the Raptors was Nando de Colo, a French guard selected by San Antonio with the 53rd pick of the 2009 Draft. De Colo had excelled playing with Cholet Basket in France from 2006-2009, assuming I’m parsing the significance of the following accomplishments correctly. During de Colo’s time with the team, Cholet Basket won the “Semaine de As” in 2008 (it’s kinda like the NBA Cup presented by Emirates, but French) while reaching the finals of the 2008 French Basketball Cup (it’s kinda like the Semaine de As, but with more teams) and the 2009 EuroChallenge (I think it’s kinda like the UEFA Conference League, but everything is ten times as confusing and they play basketball instead of soccer). Right after being drafted by San Antonio, de Colo signed a three-year deal with Valencia in Spain, where his team won the 2010 EuroCup (it’s kinda like the UEFA Europa League) (if none of the soccer references help, it’s kinda like the NIT but with less stigma).
De Colo took his talents to the NBA for the 2012-13 season and was the only rookie to crack the Spurs rotation (Aron Baynes was the other rookie on the roster, but got 141 minutes in 16 games compared to de Colo’s 920 minutes in 72 games). But in 2013-14, Patty Mills took a step forward to displace any opportunity de Colo would’ve had at point guard, forcing him to transition from his natural playmaking role to fit in as an unremarkable shooter. De Colo played 34% of his minutes at point guard and 51% at shooting guard in 2012-13, but spent 65% of his Spurs minutes in 2013-14 playing small forward as a primary backup for 22-year-old Kawhi Leonard.
In this respect, Austin Daye’s big advantage over Nando de Colo may have just been that he was actually a forward by trade. The son of five-year NBA veteran Darren Daye, Austin Daye was scouted early and often. He ranked 4th among small forward recruits in the Class of 2007 and then saw his stock rise enough in two seasons at Gonzaga to be the second small forward drafted in the 2009 NBA Draft (15th overall, by the Detroit Pistons).
“Small forward” is a bit of interesting terminology for a guy whose combine measurements listed him at 6’10.75”, 192 pounds – he towered over the 6’5” and 65% small forward Nando de Colo, but the nominal guard outweighed Daye by eight pounds. You’re reading this sometime after February 14, 2024, so a rail-thin basketball player with a 7’3” wingspan and a 42.2% 3-point rate in college probably sounds incredible to you (assuming you follow the NBA draft; if you don’t then I imagine you’re somewhat creeped out by a man’s “wingspan” sounding “incredible”). But the archetype we’re thinking of didn’t quite exist yet in 2009, and Daye struggled to find a suitable role on his early career Detroit teams.
It probably did not help matters when, in Daye’s third season, his shooting performance dipped from “poor” to “ungodly.” He went 0-3 in his first game of the season and 0-5 in his second game. Daye got into 41 games that season and had good shooting performances in like three of them; besides those, you can really take your pick of which sort of poor shooting performance you like best. The net result was a hilarious 32.2% field goal percentage (at 6’11”!) and 21% 3-point percentage, along with the enduring ire of Detroit. Daye was perceived as lacking effort and was not to be missed when he was sent to Memphis in a trade the next season. He became a free agent and then signed a 2-year, $2 million contract in Toronto to lukewarm reception. Daye lived up to that reception in his time with Toronto, getting 33 minutes of game-time and going 3-13 on field goals (0-8 on 3-pointers).
The Trade: It’s an easy enough trade on the surface, as the two lightly-used but sorta-promising players could provide a better positional fit on their new teams. But I think the Spurs had a more sinister motivation. San Antonio was getting incredible contributions from Danny Green and Patty Mills, the 46th and 55th picks of the 2009 NBA Draft. They were also getting minutes from the 53rd pick, though they could take or leave those minutes. Meanwhile, like Detroit and Memphis before them, the Raptors couldn’t find playing time for the disappointing 15th pick in the same draft. The guy taken with the 53rd pick seemed like he might be a little better, but if you’re San Antonio, you’re gonna be a great team with or without Nando de Colo. Why not use the trade deadline to rub your excellence in the face of every other NBA team? Sure, we’ll allow you to retroactively trade down 38 spots – we just have so much second-round talent that we can spare this one!
The Spurs press release announcing the trade was written by a guy named Ben Hunt and I think he made an error with this second sentence.
“The San Antonio Spurs today announced that they have acquired forward Austin Daye from the Toronto Raptors in exchange for guard Nando De Colo. Per club policy, terms of the contract were not announced.”
I’ve gotten familiar with that "sentence in recent weeks; you often see it in the official announcements when teams sign free agents. You tend not to see it in trade announcements because it doesn’t really make sense in that context — what contract are we not announcing, exactly? The Spurs typically follow this pattern too. But the template for these announcements is probably just one blank Word document titled “New Player Press Release_2014_Final_vF.doc,” and the Ben Hunts of the world are relied upon to remove the canned language about not disclosing terms of the contract when the transaction bringing the player in is a trade rather than a signing. He just forgot to remove it here. Really understandable and insignificant mistake, especially when the inadvertently-included language doesn’t even come close to containing any substance.
My guess is that Ben Hunt submitted his press release for publication, looked at the live version online, and cursed to himself 15 seconds later when he realized the error. 30 seconds after that, he had probably moved on and the negativity left his life. I would assume I’m the first person to comment on it. Sorry Ben!
The Reaction: This is the most fun type of trade for a fan. Your team gives up a guy who you’ve watched fail to make an impact. In exchange, your team receives an exciting talent that you can easily convince yourself will be unlocked in a new system. Besides predictable jokes about the elite Spurs system finally unlocking Austin Daye, most of the reaction is fans of the two involved teams discovering that the player they had just received was regarded as “trash” by the other fanbase.
Poor D.J. Foster at Bleacher Report was tasked with assigning instant grades to all the flotsam and jetsam produced by this trade deadline. It’s the exact kind of ephemeral content that we love here at Trades Ten Years Later; there’s no way Foster could correctly grade these trades day-of, but by the time anybody could check his accuracy, nobody cared anymore. How have I not gotten to this article sooner? In this instance, Foster basically nailed it by embracing the latent mediocrity, giving the Spurs a C and the Raptors a C+. No GM who builds a career with trades like this should graduate with honors.
The Results: This was not a meaningful trade. Neither player exceeded ten minutes per game in the rest of the season with their new teams and both got playing time in precisely one of their team’s playoff games. Fortunately for Austin Daye, the Spurs won a whole bunch of playoff games without his help and won the 5th championship in franchise history. He got a ring for his efforts. The Spurs chose to exercise Daye’s $1 million team option for 2014-15, then thought better of it midway through the season and released him on January 18. In the words of Spurs writer Michael Erier, “Man, you all hated Austin Daye. Media colleagues of mine weren't shy about expressing their disgust with him in private conversation. Fans wrote me irate emails about him, as though I was [Spurs general manager] R.C. Buford. ... An anonymous scout even fired shots at him, telling Mike Monroe of the San Antonio-Express News that ‘he's soft, physically and mentally.’” This one does not really feel like a win for San Antonio!
After the season, Nando de Colo’s contract expired. The Raptors wanted to retain him and extended a qualifying offer that made him a restricted free agent, but de Colo chose to sign with CSKA Moscow and return to Europe. On Reddit, the most hardcore of Raptors fans inquired whether the organization would still retain his rights. Reddit user tkfu explained the process nicely: Toronto would retain de Colo’s rights until they chose to renounce them, but would have to make a qualifying offer each summer. The cap hold for that qualifying offer would remain on the books at the start of each league year until the Raptors and de Colo each sent a letter to the league office indicating that he would play in a non-NBA league for the upcoming season, at which point they’d be removed. In fateful words, tkfu ended their explanation with “repeat as necessary.”
On June 29, 2022, the Raptors repeated (as necessary) and extended a qualifying offer to Nando de Colo that made him a restricted free agent, just as they had done for the prior eight summers. The Nando de Colo Qualifying Offer Process had become a beloved institution among the most depraved Toronto basketball fans, one that seemed like it could continue for years to come. Fulfilling his role in the beautiful dance, de Colo opted to spend 2022-23 in Europe instead of returning to the NBA. But tragedy struck at the 2023 trade deadline, when the Raptors and Spurs reunited to make a trade sending Jakob Poeltl back to Toronto (I’m using “reunited” in this context to refer to this crappy Nando de Colo trade, not the much more famous Raptors-Spurs trade that sent Jakob Poeltl to San Antonio in the first place). For arcane salary cap reasons (that they were apparently $94,136 from avoiding), the Raptors were forced into a decision between giving up an additional player on their roster and renouncing the rights to all of their cap hold free agents. They opted for the latter and Toronto said goodbye to Nando de Colo, or at least goodbye to the concept of saying hello to him once again someday.
The Aftermath: While Theoretical Nando de Colo was becoming a Toronto institution, the basketball player was becoming a European legend. De Colo played with CSKA Moscow for five seasons, during which time the team won the Russian league every season and won two EuroLeague championships (it’s kinda like the UEFA Champions League, but players are allowed to use their hands), then joined Turkish powerhouse Fenerbahce from 2019-2022. He floated a return to the NBA ahead of the 2019 season, to which both Spurs and Raptors fans responded lustily, but chose to continue dominating Europe. De Colo was named to the EuroLeague first-team or second-team in every non-COVID season between 2015 and 2021, is the top European club competition scorer in history, and is second all-time in EuroLeague scoring since 2000. He currently plays for the French team LDLC ASVEL, who is an unfortunate 5-21 in their EuroLeague play so far this season. De Colo has been out with a calf injury since December; it seems like he picked it up after 3:28 of play against Emporio Armani Milano, during which time he had 5 points and 2 rebounds. Get well soon Nando!
Daye’s post-Spurs NBA career consisted of 8 games with the Atlanta Hawks, the final of which was a 12-minute performance where he missed the last four shots of his NBA career. Daye went to the NBA fringes from there and joined “ConsultInvest Pesaro” in Italy’s Lega Basket Serie A, the league in which he’s spent a plurality of his pro career. He re-signed a contract with the same club in March 2023 (now “Carpegna Prosciutto Basket Pesaro”), but played most of his Italian career with Venezia from 2018-2022. Besides Italy, Daye has played in Bahrain, Turkey, Israel, and in Taiwan with the New Taipei Kings, causing this to be the third post mentioning the New Taipei Kings in the past week.
In March 2018, a Pistons fan wondered whether Austin Daye could have developed better in a more modern NBA. The post was heavily downvoted; the top comment started with the sentence “Austin Daye was terrible” and concluded with the clause “he would have just sucked in 2018 instead of 2009.” While these guys were hating, Daye was winning the 2018 FIBA EuroCup (I think it’s kinda like the UEFA Europa League, but if the European Super League became a thing and all the good teams left to play in that instead). It seems that his basketball career has now come to an end – the last update I have is that he was experiencing technical difficulties in Call of Duty on January 17.
Ben Hunt left his job with the Spurs after the 2014-15 season, perhaps in shame over the Austin Daye Press Release Gaffe or perhaps just to take a promotion and become the Director of Digital Media with the Denver Broncos. In May 2022, he was finally allowed to return to the NBA, or perhaps just took another promotion to become the Director of Digital Marketing for the Atlanta Hawks. Despite the information I’ve revealed today, I believe Ben Hunt should be allowed to keep his job.
Miscellaneous: Nando de Colo’s first head coach, Erman Kunter, holds the professional basketball record for most points scored in a game with 153 in a 1998 Turkish League game. “No one wants to trade with Buford or [Raptors GM Masai] Ujiri so they just trade with each other,” said a deleted account who could never imagine what the future had in store for Kawhi Leonard. Austin Daye’s “rail-thin” combine measurements produce a 20.1 BMI firmly within the “normal” range – my apologies for body-shaming. The 2013-14 Spurs went 62-20 while going 0-8 against the Thunder and Rockets; they went 4-2 against the Thunder in the Western Conference Finals. De Colo also starred on the French national team and was arguably the team’s best player in the gold medal game at the Tokyo Olympics. Speaking of press release errors, Lyft made a typo yesterday that led their stock to surge 62% before it was corrected.
February 15, 2024:
Denver Nuggets receive: Aaron Brooks
Houston Rockets receive: Jordan Hamilton
February 16, 2024:
Charlotte Bobcats receive: Gary Neal, Luke Ridnour
Milwaukee Bucks receive: Ramon Sessions, Jeff Adrien