Trade (Deadline) Ten Years Later - Danny Granger and Pick #60 for Evan Turner and Lavoy Allen
This post has like 30 million views right now, and probably about a million are from me.
The NBA Trade Deadline was on February 21, 2014. We will have a post each weekday until then looking at the NBA trades (and one MLB trade) 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: Philadelphia 76ers receive: Danny Granger, 2015 2nd round pick from Golden State Warriors. Indiana Pacers receive: Evan Turner, Lavoy Allen
The Team Context: We continue our coverage of the Process-era Philadelphia 76ers, who spent the trade deadline scavenging the last vestiges of scrap metal from their broken-down jalopy of a franchise. Don’t worry, they are almost out of players!
I am pretty sure the Pacers have not been discussed before, a remarkable testament to the weirdly consistent things they were cooking in this era. An unfortunate aspect of living through a dominant superstar like Lebron James is the warping effect he can have on the rest of history. When one guy makes the NBA Finals as the representative of the Eastern Conference for basically an entire decade, it obscures what other great teams were doing at the same moment in time. By February 2014, the Indiana Pacers had established themselves as perhaps the foremost rival of the Big Three Heat. In 2011-2012, the Pacers took a 2-1 lead in their Conference Semifinals series before ultimately losing in 6 games. It was even closer in 2012-2013, as the Pacers lost to the Heat in a 7-game Eastern Conference Finals series.
The one-sided nature of the results blinds us from remembering Heat-Pacers as a legitimate rivalry, but fortunately sports journalism was invented more than a decade ago. Here’s a December 2013 Miami Herald article whose headline starts with “Roy Hibbert’s continued dominance of Miami Heat” and refers to Indiana as Miami’s “only competition in the Eastern Conference.” Here’s a May 2013 post from USA Today titled “Why the Heat can’t stop Roy Hibbert” that says Hibbert “looked like the most important player on either team” through four games of the 2013 Conference Finals. Here’s a March 2013 GQ interview with Genesis Rodriguez, where she pivots from discussion of the Heat’s Harlem Shake video (“I think it has like 30 million views right now, and probably about a million are from me”) to spontaneously bring up the Pacers as a team she’s concerned about, saying that “defensively, I think that’s the only team that scares me in either Conference.” If the Pacers had gotten a few more lucky breaks and lined up some timelines better, we might accurately remember them as one of the great teams for a moment in NBA history.
The Player Context: When I vaguely say “lined up some timelines better” in the preceding sentence, all I really mean is Danny Granger staying healthy for a while longer. Granger was a standout basketball player in Metairie, Louisiana and a good enough student to get accepted into Yale (claiming this several years later is way better than actually going to Yale). Granger instead played at Bradley (the “Yale of Peoria”) and New Mexico (the “Yale of New Mexico”) before the Pacers made him the 17th overall pick in the 2005 NBA Draft, their first draft after “Malice at the Palace” had ultimately sowed the seeds of destruction within the franchise.
Granger debuted as an already-solid NBA player, finishing 7th in Rookie of the Year voting and playing 22 minutes per game for a pretty good Pacers team. Then he improved the next year, then he improved more in his third year, then in his fourth year he improved so much that they went ahead and gave him the Most Improved Player award for 2008-09. Granger also made his one All-Star appearance that season, scoring 25.8 points per game on a Pacers team that had lost a lot of its surrounding talent in the intervening years and suddenly looked super mediocre other than Granger. The team hadn’t made the playoffs since his rookie season and had posted 35, 36, and 36 wins in the past three seasons. They bottomed out at 32 wins in 2009-10, including an 8-game December losing streak when Granger missed time with a plantar fascia injury.
The team started to improve in short order, thanks in part to drafting Paul George and Lance Stephenson in the following draft. They got back to 37 wins in 2010-2011, then up to 42 in a lockout-shortened 2011-12 that made “42 wins” a great 42-24 instead of the mediocre 42-40 it connotes. The Pacers returned to the playoffs and had their first matchup with the Heat, but Granger picked up a knee injury along the way. The knee still hurt during offseason workouts, so Granger underwent blood-platelet injections in September. “They take the blood out and inject it back in, so it hurts,” Granger said of the procedure, presumably understating matters. But his souped-up blood failed to heal him – in November, Granger was diagnosed with patellar tendonosis (or “Jumper’s Knee”) and received cortisone injections that would keep him out for three months. Granger returned for five games in the spring of 2013, all played on a minutes restriction, then was shut down with left knee soreness that culminated in surgery shortly thereafter.
When Granger finally returned to the Pacers on December 20, 2013, the Indiana crowd gave him a standing ovation and chanted his name when he made his first basket. In even better news for Granger, he returned to a Pacers team that was 21-5; after years of trying to do it all on middling teams, it seemed he could finally play a smaller on-court role (but major off-court role) on a championship contender.
I’ve done it again! I lulled myself with “Byron Mullens for Nothing” and forgot that writing about good players takes longer! Picking up the pace.
Evan Turner became known as a college basketball superstar at Ohio State, winning the John Wooden Award in his junior season for prodigious on-court performance while playing a starring role as “The Villain” in the Club Trillion blog written by Turner’s teammate Mark Titus. Turner contributed fairly immediately to the sorta-competitive 76ers, but didn’t look to have the ceiling that would keep him around in Sam Hinkie’s Philadelphia. Ahead of the 2013-14 season, the die was cast for a Turner trade when the Sixers didn’t offer him a rookie contract extension and Turner responded with “Hinkie is not my GM … we’re going in different directions.”
On the court, Turner responded to a talent deficit on the 76ers by chucking shots at an astonishing pace. In Turner’s rookie season, he capped out at 15 shots in a game. The next year, he only exceeded 19 shots in a game once (taking 29 in a game where the 76ers rested key starters). In his third year, he exceeded 19 shots twice. In 2013-14, his fourth season, Turner took 23, 21, and 23 shots in the seventh, eighth, and ninth game of the season, respectively, and proceeded to exceed 19 shots on six more occasions before the deadline. He took double-digit shots in every 76ers game where he played more than 30 minutes, which was the vast majority of them. What were they gonna do, trade him?
Lavoy Allen preferred video games to basketball in his youth and was so “terrible” that he “could barely jump over the Sunday paper.” He started playing organized basketball in eighth grade and, even though he was 6’6”, couldn’t dunk until his junior year at Pennsbury High School (just outside of Trenton). Thanks to what must have been prodigious bullying, Allen managed to improve enough to play college ball at Temple. He was a four-season Owl before he was drafted by the 76ers at #50 overall in 2011, completing a lengthy basketball journey to the NBA that could alternatively have been completed with 80 minutes of driving. Allen had a typically choppy rookie season, but cemented himself as a short-term icon with excellent play in Game 2 of the Eastern Conference Semifinals, including a “desperation 22-footer” that he banked in to retake a lead with 4:33 left in the game. Fortunately for Allen, his rookie deal didn’t include a team option, leading the 76ers to pay $3 million per year over the next two seasons to retain him.
It was an overpay. Allen built on his rookie season in 2012-13, but his playing time had diminished on the 2013-14 76ers compared to the prior season. That seems like it must have been really tough to manage – how do you lose playing time on a team that’s traded away all the other good players? Well, a nice way to start is by oversleeping practice. You’d want to maximize impact by making sure it becomes a news story, so if you could somehow find a way to oversleep a practice that was open to fans it would work great. Amazingly, Lavoy Allen did this in real life. And in actuality, the vibes probably started getting bad at the end of his second season, when reporters asked Allen what he had learned in his second NBA season and, after horribly filibustering (“What have I learned? I mean, what have I learned? That’s a good question,”) came back with “uhh, nothing really.” He was benched for all but 3:50 of the next game.
As you have probably gathered, these are all just fun stories. The context of Turner and Allen, as they related to the 76ers, was that they were present-value NBA players and thus needed to be converted for future-value NBA players. Or, if none of those were available, maybe a past-value NBA player like Danny Granger would work.
The Trade: This one was pretty ugly. Granger was drafted by Indiana and, at the time of the move, was the sixth-longest tenured Pacer in franchise history. Granger had previously harbored trade rumors but thought he was in the clear, saying in October “honestly, to trade me at this point … we already have a young core group, I don’t know if they would trade me for more younger pieces that probably would play with this group.” The day after the trade, Granger made a surprise appearance at the Pacers practice facility where he “stopped to hug all players, as well as front office personnel.” But one particular legend seemed to be absent from the hug watch.
Larry Bird, then the chief basketball executive of the Pacers, said that he didn’t expect to make a trade. About thirty minutes before the trade deadline, Bird recounted that the 76ers called up to offer Turner as Pacers general manager Kevin Pritchard “was talking to a couple teams about other things that are really nothing.” Bird surmised that the 76ers abandoned their dreams of getting a first round pick for Evan Turner and accepted the consolation prize second-round pick that Indiana was willing to offer. While Bird was “excited” about the pickups of Turner and Allen, he expressed sadness at saying goodbye to Granger, who had “always been [his] favorite” over the past 8.5 seasons in Indiana.
About 24 hours after the trade deadline, and despite taking the time to drive to the practice facility to wish the rest of the team goodbye, Granger had not yet returned Bird’s call. “That’s normal,” Bird said.
Bird’s claim that the trade came together at the last-minute is supported by the fact that news of the trade didn’t leak through the typical channels until 37 minutes after the deadline and further corroborated by Evan Turner, who was setting up postseason vacation plans. Turner believed the deadline passed without a trade getting done and that he would remain a 76er until his agent’s assistant broke the news. It must have been a roller coaster, since he says his jersey was being sold in the team store for half-price 2 weeks before the trade deadline. The surely bizarre day for Turner probably got much weirder when Sam Hinkie literally drove Turner to the airport after trading him away.
There was definitely a 2015 2nd-round pick involved, but it wasn’t clear whether that pick was Indiana’s or Golden State’s. Either way, those were expected to be good teams and a bad pick. It turned out to be Golden State, and they won a championship in 2015. So that was all extremely true.
The Reaction: The “initial reaction” from Sean O’Connor at Liberty Ballers was “that’s it?” while the initial reaction from Michael Levin at the same site was “AHHFDKLSJFHLKSDGSKFJSDKJFNSKJDFn.” O’Connor went on to provide more depth and context, saying the trade was “the only where I felt uncomfortable afterwards” due to the extremely limited return for a player who “did a lot, even if at a horribly inefficient level.” Ultimately, O’Connor makes the (fair) criticism that Hinkie’s failure to even pretend that Turner would be extended probably hurt his trade value. Perhaps proving this point with national reaction, Zachary Arthur at Bleacher Report gave this trade an A- for Philadelphia under the logic that “the Sixers could have traded Turner for a bag of Brussels sprouts and this grade would have been the same” (even though he’s ignoring that the salaries wouldn’t match). Danny Granger was “pissed” when he learned he was traded to the Sixers, according to a tweet from Jake Fischer (then of the Boston Globe) that has seemingly been deleted but was quoted enough times that it definitely existed once. Members of the Pacers were “either irate, bewildered, or caught somewhere in between.” Pacers fans seemed more disappointed, if somewhat understanding, with several upset to lose their favorite player in such a heartbreaking fashion.
The Results: Philadelphia floated that they may hold onto Granger instead of buying him out in hopes of pulling off a sign-and-trade with his contract in the summer. Granger disagreed; he did go to Philadelphia, but only to have negotiations with the front office about terms of his buyout. The parties finally came to an agreement a week later and put out weird PR statements congratulating each other. Granger ultimately signed with the Los Angeles Clippers, playing 194 minutes in the regular season where he shot pretty well and then 134 minutes in the playoffs where he shot terribly.
The final pick of the 2015 draft was used to draft Luka Mitrovic, whose draft rights were traded to Sacramento a couple of weeks later. He has not played in the NBA.
The additions of Turner and Allen were not enough to propel the Pacers to their ultimate destination, or maybe the loss of Granger was too big of a blow. The Pacers went 41-13 before the trade and 15-13 afterwards. Turner shot a career-worst field goal percentage as his volume fell off a cliff, then got in a fight with Lance Stephenson at a team practice during the playoffs. Allen played 112 minutes in the regular season and 15 more in the postseason. For the third straight year, the Heat eliminated the Pacers in the playoffs, this time in a 6-game Conference Finals series. Miami-based Dan Le Batard delivered a rant that featured the line “What do you call a beautiful person in Indiana? A visitor.”
David West, then starring on the Pacers, referred to the trade as “the death-knell” some years later, claiming that “when we did that for Danny, I just sort of in my gut, I knew we weren’t going to be able to get by the Heat.” He was right in more ways than one; the Pacers never seriously challenged in the Eastern Conference again and every player from the Finals team had left the roster three years later, apparently in no small part because they were mad about this trade.
The Aftermath: Evan Turner immediately left the Pacers, saying “I think we both understood I needed to go somewhere where I could play more.” He rebuilt his value on a 2-year deal in Boston, giving him the great fortune to enter free agency coming off his best season in the summer of 2016 when the NBA salary cap spiked. He got a four-year, $70 million contract from Portland that neither Turner nor his mother could believe wasn’t actually a $17 million contract, and somehow it aged even worse than would be expected. Turner’s role diminished in each successive season until the contract’s final year, when he was traded to Atlanta to close out his NBA career with 19 games before he was thrown into a 4-team trade and waived to bring things to a close. His final NBA game was February 4, 2020, and his final NBA play was missing a layup, grabbing his own rebound, and then dishing it to John Collins to get the assist. Turner spent 2020-2021 as a Celtics assistant coach but is now co-host of the “Point Forward” podcast with Andre Iguodala.
Lavoy Allen ended up being the haul of the trade for either team as he signed a contract extension and played the rest of his NBA career in Indiana. The final three NBA games of his career were in the Pacers’ first round sweep by the Cavaliers in 2017, but to find the last game where he took a shot we have to go back to the 2017 regular season. Allen returned to Philadelphia on April 10th as the Pacers beat the Sixers by nine; nobody who played for the 76ers had played for the team during Allen’s final Philadelphia appearance three years earlier. Allen played 27 games across the next two seasons for the G League’s Northern Arizona Suns and Capital City Go-Go. As of March 23, 2020, he was living in Dallas with his wife and three sons. He was elected into the Pennsbury High School Hall of Fame in 2023, his second year of eligibility.
Danny Granger attempted to work his way back to NBA relevancy, signing a two-year contract with the post-Lebron Miami Heat. Granger got some meaningful time in Miami, but the lower-body injuries never fully recovered and he never played again after being sent to Phoenix at the deadline. The Heat beat the Knicks in his final NBA game as Granger contributed 9 points off the bench, including a 3-pointer for his final basket. By then, Granger had shifted his focus and was making more money from his growing real estate empire than from basketball. In explaining his draw to a safer but lower-yield asset class, Granger made the reasonable if obvious point that he was rich already and “[did]n’t need to hit the lottery again.
Miscellaneous: This is a new section for when things come up in research that aren’t shoehorned into an existing section. Roy Hibbert was fined $75k for making a “no homo” joke in a press conference following Game 6 of the 2012-2013 Eastern Conference Finals. Danny Granger has a scar in his leg from a bullet that ricocheted off a street and hit him when he was 12. Indiana Pacers GQ photoshoot. Lavoy Allen is the second former 76er we’ve covered here who publicly voted Romney in 2012. "There's probably 15 or 20 treatments people use to quiet it down. The fact that there's so many treatments tells you not one of them works great. If one was great, the other 19 would go away." Fan fiction(?) of Lavoy Allen in therapy(?). Here’s a 2010 Heat-Pacers game (Heat win in overtime) where Danny Granger played 47:21, Dwyane Wade played 44:01, and Udonis Haslem played 34:04.
February 13, 2024 (MLB):
Tampa Bay Rays receive: Nathan Karns
Washington Nationals receive: Jose Lobaton, Drew Vettleson, Felipe Rivero
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