Trade (Deadline) Ten Years Later - Gary Neal and Luke Ridnour for Ramon Sessions and Jeff Adrien
One is now an agent, one is now a high school teacher, one is now a baseball player, one is secret.
The NBA Trade Deadline was on February 20, 2014. We had a post pretty much 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: Charlotte Bobcats receive: Gary Neal, Luke Ridnour. Milwaukee Bucks receive: Ramon Sessions, Jeff Adrien.
The Team Context: According to official NBA records, the Charlotte Bobcats are the same franchise as the Charlotte Hornets that previously played in the city, so I can truthfully say that we’ve discussed them before. In practical terms, this was a new franchise that was still working to develop any on-court success. The Bobcats were on their fourth coach in four seasons, even if rookie coach Steve Clifford seemed to be putting together a better run of success than his predecessors. They were 25-30, so it wasn’t great, but expectations were extremely low – the new franchise had only played in one playoff series (a first-round sweep by the Orlando Magic in 2009-10) and were the eighth seed at the time of the trade.
On November 18, 2013, two Bucks fans launched a website called SaveOurBucks.com out of concern that their team could be on the way out of Milwaukee. They put together some excellent information about the state of the team, but I’ll just link the executive summary and try not to repeat all the information therein. In general, the concerns went something like this: (i) the Bucks were playing in the BMO Bradley Center, a stadium that incoming commissioner Adam Silver had identified as “unfit for the NBA,” with a lease that expired in 2017, (ii) the archaic stadium and consistently mediocre-to-bad team led attendance to plummet to bottom-five in the league, (iii) the Bucks’ owner, former U.S. Senator Herb Kohl, employed a “very chaotic management structure” with high turnover in the front office, and (iv) Kohl was on the verge of selling the team and would likely make substantial additional profit if he sold to buyers who wanted to relocate the Bucks.
In the eyes of SaveOurBucks, the solution was clear – trade away veterans from the Bucks roster to give playing time to an interesting young core and maximize the odds of getting a top pick in a loaded 2014 NBA Draft. The site commissioned billboards begging the team to tank, or in their preferred words, “eschewing the Bucks’ usual strategy of band-aid acquisitions.” When viewed through that prism, and only through that prism, things were going great. The Bucks were 10-43 for a woeful .189 winning percentage. The Philadelphia 76ers were actively and intentionally horrible, as we’ve discussed, but had still won five more games than the Bucks.
The Player Context: Ramon Sessions got his start in Milwaukee as the 56th pick of the 2007 NBA Draft. Expectations are low for a pick so late in the second round; you may recall that a team would select a fake player at #57 overall a few years later. Sessions started in the D-League and didn’t make his NBA debut until March, but then played 26.5 minutes per game in the 17 games he got into. He established himself quickly as a legitimate NBA player, though only a starter for 21% of his career games, and found himself floating around the league as a desirable yet expendable backup point guard. Sessions was only 26 when he joined the Bobcats, but they were already his fifth team.
Jeff Adrien had gone undrafted after four years at the University of Connecticut, spending 2009-10 in Spain playing with Rio Breogan. His second stint at NBA Summer League was enough for him to catch on at Golden State Warriors training camp, and that got him started as an NBA journeyman. The 2013-14 season was his fourth in the NBA and second spent with the same team, following a stint with Charlotte in the prior year. The second year was going less favorably than the first, as Adrien was squeezed out of the rotation. His only game time in the three months leading up to the trade was a few garbage time appearances.
But both of these guys were really the “return” for the trade; the “players” were the ones being traded to the playoff-contending Bobcats. The first player moving to Charlotte was Luke Ridnour, already on his second stint with Milwaukee. Ridnour was drafted in 2003 by his hometown Seattle SuperSonics and spent the first five years of his career there, receiving an extension after his rookie contract expired. In 2008, the SuperSonics left Seattle to move to Oklahoma City and Ridnour was traded to the Bucks to finish out his contract. He signed a 4-year contract with Minnesota in 2010 and spent three seasons there before, once again, an NBA team decided to send Ridnour to Milwaukee to finish out his contract. While Milwaukee was clearly no stranger to trades involving Luke Ridnour, this would be their first time on the other end of the Luke Ridnour trade experience.
The other player was Gary Neal, who had already enjoyed the kind of career that usually gets discussed in “The Aftermath.” After going undrafted in 2007, Neal signed with Pınar Karşıyaka and led the Turkish Basketball Super League in scoring before his contract was purchased by Euroleague competitor Barcelona just a few months later. Neal spent a season with Benetton Treviso in Italy, making the All-EuroCup second team, and then was on to Unicaja in Spain until the summer of 2010, when the Spur’s prodigious international scouting managed to find the American who was tearing it up in Europe. Neal made the All-Rookie First Team as a 26-year old and quickly became a local icon in San Antonio, car dealership commercials and all. In the summer of 2013, he hit free agency after playing 171 NBA Finals minutes and making 14 NBA Finals three-pointers in a seven-game loss to the Miami Heat. Neal chose to accept a move to Milwaukee that guaranteed him $6.5 million – not bad for a guy who had to create his own NBA future.
Neal’s stint in Milwaukee “can be categorized as disastrous,” according to Bleacher Report’s Dan Favale. Things started out okay, but were awful by the time the calendar turned to 2014 – Neal sat the final six games before New Year’s Eve, played three straight games, and then sat out the next six. During the latter run, Neal got into an altercation with Larry Sanders, the potential Bucks star who had been given a large and so far ill-advised extension the prior summer. Neal and Sanders had to be separated after the fight, which ended with Neal saying “I earn my money, you should try it sometime.” A week later, Neal spoke bluntly about his unhappiness with Milwaukee, saying “I could have stayed in San Antonio on the qualifying offer, but then you miss out on $6 million. Sometimes all the cards fall in your favor, sometimes they don’t. Right now, it’s hard with the record being [7-28] and my role basically being non-existent. It’s a tough spot. You’ve just got to fight through it.”
The Trade: The perceived-valuable players in this trade were Neal and Ridnour, headed to reinforce the guard depth of a Charlotte team attempting to make a rare postseason run. Even if things had gone as poorly as possible in Milwaukee, memories of Neal draining three-pointers in the 2013 NBA Finals were still fresh in the minds of league decisionmakers. Although Sessions was earning a higher salary than Neal, Neal’s contract had an additional year and “the inclusion of Ridnour in this deal reportedly convinced Bucks owner Herb Kohl to take on Sessions,” with Ridnour and Sessions essentially seen as replacements for each other’s role. Put to the side in all of this discussion is the very real argument that “Sessions [was] a better player” than Neal; apparently this never really occurred to Charlotte (or Milwaukee).
Charlotte had back-to-back games in the days leading up to the trade deadline, the first on the road in Detroit and the second at home against Detroit (seems efficient). On February 20th, after the trade was officially consummated, Milwaukee had a scheduled game against Denver, which they lost to fall to 10-44. Ramon Sessions didn’t make it in time to play in that game, but did manage to play in every other game on the Bucks schedule just as he had played in every game on Charlotte’s schedule. He ended up playing in a mathematically impossible 83 games across the 82-game season, which quite obviously led the NBA. The 83-game club is highly exclusive, and only two more players have joined since Sessions was inducted in 2013-14.
The Reaction: Since 2014, professional sports leagues have made small adjustments to minimize the incentives for teams to actively tank. The theory goes that tanking hurts interest in a team and therefore the league – fans won’t want to spend their money to root root root for the home team if they don’t have any indication that the home team is trying to win. That is probably true for the general population. But the reactions to this trade shows the merits of being awful for the devotees serious enough to talk about transactions online. Charlotte fans had been so scarred by basketball in the 21st century that they were thrilled to have shooting on a quasi-competitive team. Bucks fans acknowledged that they got “nothing much of value,” but were still happy with a trade that opened up cap room and roster spots (or less euphemistically, got rid of players). It may have required poisoning an entire NBA season, but Milwaukee had managed to make their hardcore fans thrilled by a trade that sent players away for basically nothing.
“Had this trade been made by a brand new Bucks front office we probably would have applauded it as a nice minor move, and not had much further to say,” said SaveOurBucks. But the site put the moves in the context of a larger “revolving door” pattern under general manager John Hammond’s reign, where players had an average tenure of just 335 days with the team (I’m not sure how the sample was selected here but that sounds impossible). The just-ended Gary Neal and Luke Ridnour tenures last 205 and 224 days, respectively. It helps their point that the row was labeled “Luke Ridnour (Part II)” to contrast with the other Luke Ridnour tenure five years earlier. It also helps that Milwaukee was re-acquiring a former Buck in Ramon Sessions.
The Results: Well, Jeff Adrien took to the moribund Milwaukee roster like a fish taking to water, as he set career high marks in basically every statistical average. He more than tripled his number of career starts, starting 12 games and averaging 25.2 minutes per game (compared to a career average of 14.0 which is itself heavily weighted by this season). 32.8% of Jeff Adrien’s career NBA minutes and 43.0% of his career NBA points came in the 28 games following this trade, which reporters claimed “could very well change Adrien’s life, his career.” The winner of this trade was definitely Jeff Adrien, whose contract expired after the season. He entered free agency as a bona fide member of an NBA rotation.
Gary Neal was somewhat of a winner as he finally reentered an NBA rotation, but didn’t fit in quite as cleanly in Charlotte as Adrien had in Milwaukee. He played more, but also received a mysterious one-game suspension for behavioral issues. Neal stuck around in Charlotte for the second year of his contract, but ended up being traded to Minnesota ahead of the 2015 trade deadline after his shooting numbers tanked. By the time he left Charlotte, “all the fans wanted to get rid of [him] so bad.”
Luke Ridnour is where the pendulum probably shifts to losing. Ridnour presumably enjoyed being on a team that was average instead of awful, but his own playing time was more limited as he slid further down the Charlotte rotation. He only averaged 15.1 minutes per game as a Bobcat and it marked the beginning of the end of his career.
Ramon Sessions got more playing time in Milwaukee (a whole extra game, in fact), but didn’t exactly need more playing time to establish who he was in the NBA. This trade really just meant that he had to move and then didn’t get to play in the postseason. Less than a month after the trade, Sessions was on record that he’d like to return to Charlotte in the offseason; it would stand to reason he didn’t want to leave in the first place.
Much to the delight of SaveOurBucks, Milwaukee finished out the season 5-23 to close out at 15-67 (.183); weak enough to receive the #2 pick in the 2014 NBA Draft. In this stacked, franchise-altering draft class, they selected Jabari Parker, who proceeded to do a whole lot of not much in his NBA career. Fortunately, the Bucks had already drafted their savior in 2013 when they took Giannis Antetekounmpo with the 15th pick. Perhaps they should have been starting him to close out the 2014 season instead of Jeff Adrien.
Charlotte closed their season strong, making the playoffs for the second time in new-franchise history and even finishing with a winning record at 43-39 to make them the Eastern Conference’s 7-seed. Unfortunately, that meant they matched up with the Miami Heat in the first round, and they got swept for the second time in new-franchise history. Gary Neal went 0-for-7 from three point range in the decisive Game Four.
The Aftermath: Nobody really bought Jeff Adrien’s Milwaukee experience as proof that he was actually a “bona fide member of an NBA rotation,” perhaps needing to see him perform on a team that wasn’t trying to lose. He signed with the Rockets and was waived prior to the start of the 2014-15 season, but got a lucky break when injuries absolutely torpedoed the Minnesota Timberwolves. Minnesota received a hardship exemption and used it to sign Adrien as the 16th man on their roster. He was on their roster for a 19-game span and played in 17 of those games; the Timberwolves went 1-18 in that span. Interestingly, the one win featured 25:54 from Adrien, who otherwise never exceeded 18:06 in his time with Minnesota. Perhaps they should have been starting him instead of Thaddeus Young (probably not though).
Adrien signed with the Guangdong Southern Tigers after his Minnesota release but lost his roster spot when Emmanuel Mudiay returned from injury. Adrien spent the next four years playing in Israel, then joined Al Itthad in Saudi Arabia in February 2020. I guess it didn’t go well, because by May he was retweeting reports that he was pursuing legal action against the club for unpaid salaries of $35,500. That fall, Adrien signed with San Lorenzo in Argentina and that seems to have been his last professional basketball. In December 2021, his agency tweeted at the NBA (perhaps overly ambitiously), informing teams that Adrien was available and in the US. In January 2023, Adrien responded to an article placing him on the UConn men’s basketball all-decade team with “Thanks. I haven’t retired yet!” He reaffirmed his non-retirement on March 16. Apparently, this is because Jeff Adrien is a baseball player now. I am unable to find any statistics from baseball leagues Adrien has played in, if any.
Ramon Sessions did finally get the chance to return to Charlotte, but not until he had spent time with Sacramento and Washington first. Sessions’ final season was 2017-18, where he played for the Knicks and then made a return to Washington. He closed his NBA career having been a member of eight teams, three of which he rejoined after leaving. In an eleven-season career, that’s an average of one move per season – exhausting to think about, but vindicating when placed in the context that all of those teams passed on Sessions in the draft until he fell to pick #56. On November 3, 2018, Sessions signed with Maccabi Tel Aviv and left the team seventeen days later due to personal reasons, thereby concluding his very brief international career. He is now an NBPA Certified Agent and the Founder and CEO of On Time Agency, where his clients include recent Celtics draft pick Jordan Walsh.
Gary Neal had a couple seasons left in his NBA career with Minnesota and Washington, then entered the D League system ahead of the 2016 season. His final NBA action came through a 10-day contract with Atlanta that he signed on January 18, 2017. In his first game with Atlanta, Neal missed his four field goal attempts but made his four free throws. In his second game with Atlanta, Neal missed his three field goal attempts and didn’t attempt any free throws. He did not have any more games with Atlanta or elsewhere in the NBA. Neal signed for Zaragoza in the 2017-18 season and finished third place in Liga ACB MVP voting that year, but he didn’t globetrot for much longer. Neal started coaching in 2019 as a graduate assistant at Towson and is now the head coach and social studies teacher at his alma mater Calvert Hill College High School. The team went 10-21 in his first season and improved to start 17-12 last year, but that’s an inconclusive record since whoever was updating their scores on the official website last year stopped as of February 1. They seem to have gone 12-14 this year and play Archbishop Spalding High School in the league quarterfinals on Tuesday, 7 PM ET.
Luke Ridnour is going to be a Trades Ten Years Later megastar next summer; let’s save our material until then.
On September 22, 2015, SaveOurBucks celebrated the final legislative approval for the Bucks new arena and indicated that they would “wind things down here and start to enjoy the actual basketball games soon to come.” They’ve exercised admirable restraint during this run of Milwaukee Bucks glory years and their only post in the past five years came when co-owner Marc Lasry sold his 25% share of the team to Jimmy Haslam for about $900 million.
Steve Clifford continued for four more middling seasons in Charlotte, never winning fewer than 33 games or losing fewer than 34. He was fired after the 2018 season and replaced by James Borrego. Borrego had similarly uninspiring results in his four seasons in charge until he was fired after the 2022 season and replaced by an exciting new hire, Steve Clifford. Clifford went 27-55 in his first season back in charge and is pacing to finish even worse this season. Charlotte still has not won a playoff series in the franchise’s second iteration.
Miscellaneous: Steve Clifford has somehow coached 21 playoff games in the past decade while only coaching Charlotte or Orlando. Herb Kohl is one of the Kohl’s Kohls. The first player that comes to mind when Jeff Adrien sees the 2000s Warriors logo is Jeff Adrien even though the Warriors had switched logos by the time he was on the team. SaveOurBucks projected that the Bucks would take Andrew Wiggins with their #2 pick, but that was because they thought Joel Embiid would go #1 — those guys are good!
February 20, 2024 (I am just going to roll right into these):
Sacramento Kings receive: Roger Mason Jr. and cash
Miami Heat receive: “Conditional” 2nd-round pick
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)