Trade (Deadline) Ten Years Later - Byron Mullens for Nothing
May all your dreams be top-55 protected.
The NBA Trade Deadline was on February 21, 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 upcoming week can be found at the end of this post.
The Names: 76ers receive: Byron Mullens and 2018 2nd round pick. Los Angeles Clippers receive: 2014 2nd-round pick, top-55 protected.
The Team Context: The Los Angeles Clippers were about the same as they were when I wrote about them yesterday.
The Philadelphia 76ers in 2014 were seen as an affront to the basketball gods. Sam Hinkie was hired as general manager ahead of the season and immediately traded away young All-Star Jrue Holiday for an injured Nerlens Noel and a future first-round pick, the shot heard around the world in what would eventually be dubbed “The Process.” The argument underlying the Process is simple: basketball teams typically require elite players to compete for championships, and basketball scouting is advanced enough that such players are typically selected at the front of drafts by the teams with the worst records in the prior year. If you embrace the premise that being the 15th-best team in the league isn’t all that much better than being 25th-best, then the rational decision is to prioritize future draft capital and, in service of that goal, make your current team as bad as possible. The Process has been criticized as “tanking,” or the intentional losing of games, but the key distinction is that nobody involved with the games is actually trying to lose. They’ve just been intentionally hamstrung by a front office that maybe would rather not win right now.
A related advantage of The Process is providing ample opportunity to develop prospects. The 76ers had selected Michael Carter-Williams with the 11th pick of the 2013 draft and he was running the show already. MCW went on to win Rookie of the Year despite offensive limitations that held back much further advancement in his career simply because his 25.7% usage rate and rookie-leading 34.5 minutes per game allowed him to have more impact than anyone else in a weak draft class. Sure, good players may not want to play on a team with no present intent or capacity to win, but mediocre-to-bad players may just be happy to play anywhere at all.
The 76ers were on a 10-game losing streak entering the trade deadline.
The Player Context: Byron James Mullens was born on Valentine’s Day 1989 in Canal Winchester, Ohio. Eight years later, his dad started the process of teaching his son basketball by throwing him a bounce pass. The pass hit Mullens in the face and he stopped playing basketball for several years. But then he grew eight inches when he hit middle school, standing 6’7” in the summer of his seventh-grade year, and he was offered a scholarship at Ohio State as a 6’10” freshman. Basketball suddenly seemed like a “ticket out” of the tough circumstances he grew up in. Mullens eventually ranked as the country’s top prospect in the class of 2008 as he averaged 26 points and 15 rebounds in his senior year. But Mullens was fairly mediocre as a bench player on a Buckeyes team that got bounced in the first round of the NCAA Tournament against Siena, declaring for the NBA draft despite a general feeling that he had yet to live up to the hype.
Mullens was drafted 24th overall, defying expectations that he would go sooner as one of the few 7-footers in the draft, with a pick that belonged to the Mavericks. He was immediately sent to Oklahoma City, and since the Seattle SuperSonics had just relocated to become the Oklahoma City Thunder in July 2008, this represented the first time in history that an NBA draft pick was immediately sent to Oklahoma City. A few weeks after the draft, the player previously called B.J. Mullens declared that he would now be Byron Mullens, prompting a “We like it!” from the OKC Thunder Twitter account (four likes on that post and no hateful replies from Seattle fans, I miss old Twitter). Mullens played a total of 139 minutes across two seasons with the Thunder before he was traded to Charlotte ahead of the 2011-2012 season. There, Mullens was a key cog in putting together arguably the worst team season in NBA history – the Bobcats went 7-59 and got outscored by 14 points per game. Mullens took the 3rd most shots on that team and made 42.5% of them. The Bobcats improved to “merely horrible” in 2012-2013, but Mullens shot an even worse 38.5% on field goals to make history as the fourth player since 1970 to shoot below 40% while standing over seven feet tall. Part of this was a result of taking a futuristic 208 3-point attempts, on which he shot 31.7%, but it’s not like he was making the 2-point attempts either.
Mullens entered free agency in the summer of 2013 at the age of 24 with a basketball reputation that peaked five years prior. When he signed with the Clippers on a two-year deal at a near-minimum salary, Adam Fromal wrote that the signing would “likely be ridiculed” but predicted that “Mullens will actually help out the Clippers offensively,” largely on the reasonable premise that Mullens had some skills and would have much better supporting talent in Los Angeles than in Charlotte. That actually seemed to be a consensus opinion and there was little ridicule to be found. But in Mullens’ first game with the Clippers, he took exclusively three-pointers, missed all four of them, and tossed in two missed free throws and a turnover for good measure. Tough first impression. Mullens’ playing time had all but dried up by Thanksgiving and all of his subsequent Los Angeles appearances were under seven minutes.
The Trade: There are a couple of ways to trade your NBA player away for nothing. One form that we’ve seen a couple of times is to trade him for the draft rights to a real person who will spend his career playing basketball in a far-off land. An alternative approach, employed here, is to trade for a draft pick with such heavy protections that you will never receive it. The 76ers sent a 2014 draft pick with “top-55 protection,” meaning it would only go to Los Angeles if it were not in the first 55 picks of the draft. Stating that as if it’s a conditional concept is a joke. The system fails if the impossible happens and Philadelphia (generally not trying to win) finishes with one of the five best records in the league, but in 99.999% of universes and 100% of real ones, you just get to make a fake trade without ever learning how to pronounce a European name.
Remember how Antawn Jamison was traded so close to the trade deadline that he had to be kicked off the Clippers team plane? Byron Mullens was somehow traded after that. Apparently, the scheduled flight departure time was much earlier, but weather delays caused the plane to sit on the tarmac until it “began moving shortly before the noon PT deadline … but then had to stop” when Jamison and Mullens were traded. According to Matt Barnes, the Clippers “sat on that plane for almost two hours looking around in silence, looking at Twitter.” It is hard to imagine a more uncomfortable way to spend two hours with your coworkers.
The Reaction: In a post titled “Making Sense of the Byron Mullens Trade,” Derek Bodner described himself as “legitimately flabbergasted.” Even upon realizing that the trade terms meant that the 76ers “would likely never send anything out,” there was still concern about “the prospects of watching Byron Mullens eat up minutes on my favorite team.” After a deep-dive attempt to find something positive to say, Bodner was able to come away with a list that starts “he’s 7 feet tall” and follows that up with “his deal is only for one more year at the minimum.”
It wasn’t clear whether Mullens would actually play for the 76ers, with some saying “it wouldn’t be surprising if Mullens never even made it to Philly.” In fact, he ended up playing more for Philadelphia than he did for any team except Charlotte.
The Results: As everyone expected, the conditional pick sent to the Clippers did not convey. The 2018 2nd-round pick sent to Philadelphia became part of a pick swap with the Knicks in an October 2014 trade that, in 2018, resulted in the 76ers getting pick #39 while the Knicks got pick #43. This pick was finally sent to Denver in a trade that brought Emmanuel Mudiay to New York.
Initially, I was excited about this trade when I saw that Mullens actually got game time for Philadelphia. My optimism was regrettable. Mullens played his first game for the 76ers on February 24 and got playing time in every game through March 27. The 76ers lost ALL SIXTEEN of those games to extend their losing streak to 26. On March 29, Mullens missed a game against the Pistons with an ankle sprain. The 76ers won by 25 points. Mullens returned for two more games on April 11 and April 12, both of which were Philadelphia losses. He lost every game he played with Philadelphia to end his career on an eighteen-game losing streak; the 76ers waived him after the season.
The Aftermath: Byron Mullens’ last game was at least individually successful – he had 13 points and 7 rebounds in a 111-105 loss to Charlotte. He missed the final two games of Philadelphia’s season, both of which were 76ers wins. Since then, Byron Mullens has played for at least ten different professional basketball teams, getting time in China, Turkey, Dubai, Iran, Japan, Korea, and Great Britain. I’m saying “at least” ten but there are two other candidates in (a) Shanxi Zhongyu of the CBA (signed with the team but did not seem to play a game) and (b) Movistar Estudiantes in Spain (he signed with the team on March 2, 2020 and played four minutes before the team’s season ended due to Pandemic).
Mullens is currently a member of the New Taipei Kings, but is sidelined with a foot injury so far in 2024 (along with current teammate Jeremy Lin). Mullens has 21 regular season games left to return, according to this New Taipei Kings season schedule on which his image features very prominently. He was posting great numbers before the injury, with double-digit points in all ten of the team’s games, and had a particularly nutty 25-point, 23-rebound effort on December 9 to lead the Kings to victory over the Taoyuan Pilots.
The Clippers’ 2018 round pick was ultimately used by the Denver Nuggets to select Justin Jackson, not to be confused with the Justin Jackson that was selected fifteenth overall by Portland in 2017. Unlike 2017’s Justin Jackson, who’s bounced around to six NBA teams already in his 278-game career, 2018’s Justin Jackson hasn’t made the NBA at all. He’s the highest-selected of the three players in that draft class to not play in the NBA.
February 9, 2024:
Cleveland Cavaliers receive: Spencer Hawes
Philadelphia 76ers receive: Earl Clark, Henry Sims, draft picks
February 12, 2024:
Indiana Pacers receive: Evan Turner, Lavoy Allen
Philadelphia 76ers receive: Danny Granger
February 13, 2024 (Baseball!):
Tampa Bay Rays receive: Nathan Karns
Washington Nationals receive: Jose Lobaton, Drew Vettleson, Felipe Rivero (oh no)
February 14, 2024:
San Antonio Spurs receive: Austin Daye
Toronto Raptors receive: Nando de Colo
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