Trade (Deadline) Ten Years Later - Marcus Thornton for Jason Terry and Reggie Evans
The second piece of writing to use the phrase "aforementioned Grand Rapids Gold" online (and the first is a podcast transcript that only beat me by a month).
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. If I make the post at 11:59 PM PST (like I’m doing now) it still counts as “on schedule.”
The Names: Sacramento Kings receive: Reggie Evans, Jason Terry. Brooklyn Nets receive: Marcus Thornton.
The Team Context: Part of the appeal of “Trades Ten Years Later” was recreating the temporal context. You’d understand the timeline for a December 30, 2013 trade because you’d be reading about the trade on December 30, 2023.
I’ve now SLIGHTLY thrown that concept away to avoid writing about zero trades for three weeks and then ten in 24 hours, with the unfortunate consequence that I’m packaging this Nets trade very closely with two trades that happened about a month earlier. While most of the context is the same as it was on January 21, 2014, things had improved somewhat by February 19, 2014 - the Nets had gone 8-5 between the two trades. They were still only 25-27, but in a dreadful Eastern Conference this was a “comfortable playoff position” record rather than the “firmly mediocre” record it looks like or the “woefully inadequate” record it would constitute in the Western Conference that year.
The other relevant aspect to remember from last time is that the Nets had a very rich owner who was making his own personal game out of outspending everybody else. They had invested heavily and were going to continue investing heavily, and we’re using “invest” super euphemistically.
It’s been a bit longer since we’ve discussed the Sacramento Kings, but fortunately I’ve got several more years where I can say “they were a pretty awful team” and not look into it too much beyond that. The Kings were 18-36 on the day this trade was consummated and rolled into the All-Star Break having lost 10 of their last 13 games. Even with Rudy Gay in the fold, this team wasn’t going to be good this year (or anytime soon, as it would turn out).
The Player Context: Now here’s some NBA trade content that involves NBA players! We can start with Marcus Thornton, who made his own luck to become the kind of NBA player that contending teams trade two veterans to acquire. Thornton started his career at Baton Rouge’s Tara High School, and while it’s tough to find Louisiana high school basketball information from the early 2000s, we can use his team’s first-round ouster from the state tournament in his junior year and complete absence in his senior year to contextually infer that he wasn’t dominant despite making All-State second team with 25.8 points per game. Thornton was not ranked by recruiting services in high school and headed to scenic East Texas, where he played for two years as a Kilgore College Ranger and finally gathered national attention as a first-team All-American junior college player in 2007, a season in which he averaged 27 points and 6.5 rebounds. This domination of junior college was enough to make Thornton a… three-star recruit, ranking 9th among Juco recruits (as the only guy I’ve heard of in the top 50). Three stars was enough to bring Thornton home to Baton Rouge, where he immediately took off as a starter for the LSU Tigers in his junior year and reached new heights as the SEC Player of the Year in his senior year. NBA teams responded to Thornton’s incredible performance in the SEC by selecting him with the… 43rd overall pick in the 2009 draft, with his hometown New Orleans Hornets giving up their 2010 and 2012 second-round picks to snag Thornton from the Miami Heat.
It turns out Marcus Thornton had been underrated by player evaluators once more. It only took five games for Thornton to post his first 20-point game (leading his team and one of just three players to hit double digits), and he threw in a 37-point performance on his way to making the All-Rookie second team. With his contract set to expire, his defensive efforts inconsistent, and a much bigger payday on the horizon, the NBA-owned Hornets traded Thornton to Sacramento at the deadline, where he re-signed on a four-year, $31 million contract that probably seemed unlikely on his first day at Kilgore College. After several cycles of basketball decisionmakers undervaluing Marcus Thornton, there may have been a slight overcorrection, as Thornton’s scoring average declined from 18.7 points per game to 12.7 points per game after the contract was signed, then fell further to 8.3 points per game in the 2013-2014 season. Mere hours before the trade was completed, Bill Simmons ranked Thornton’s remaining contract as the 11th-worst contract in the NBA, noting that the Nets’ ongoing efforts to trade for Thornton should constitute the “Awful Contract Stamp of Approval.”
Please forgive me for too much Marcus Thornton information, I’ve been writing about bad players for too long and got excited. I could get through Reggie Evans really quickly by just writing “rebounder,” but should at least have to write it several dozen times or in bold text to hammer home how much of a R E B O U N D E R he was. He couldn’t do anything with the ball on offense, but when the ball was bouncing around after a missed shot, Reggie Evans was the guy to grab it. The three players with a better career rebounding percentage than Reggie Evans are Andre Drummond, Dennis Rodman, and Clint Capela (who is only slightly ahead and better stay on his game to keep it that way). Evans’ first year in Brooklyn was 2012-2013 and serves as his apex performance - he led the league in total rebound percentage (26.7%) as well as both offensive rebound percentage (15.5%) and defensive rebound percentage (a ludicrous 37.98% that stands as the best single-season mark in NBA history), all while playing a career-high 1,967 minutes. Still, for a Nets team mired in disappointment and looking for a spark in 2014, trading the guy with no skills besides rebounding did make some intuitive sense.
Jason Terry was a 36-year-old veteran who was just a few years removed from winning an NBA Championship with the 2011 Dallas Mavericks. “The Jet” never attained the specialized dominance of Reggie Evans, but played well enough and for long enough to end up on the top-100 career leaderboards for some pretty significant stats, such as “points” (70th all-time), “assists” (57th all-time), and “steals” (38th all-time). Terry was extraordinarily durable (10th all-time in NBA games played!) and never missed extended time in his career – that is, until the 2013-2014 season, when he missed a month of games with a knee injury. He returned on December 23 and continued to play in a bench capacity as the Nets began turning around a rough season.
The Trade: On one hand, we had a dynamic but frustrating young player with too large of a contract on a team that wasn’t going anywhere. On the other, we had a man with unlimited nickels who was all too happy to trade two unexciting veterans in return for the upside of Thornton. I’ve spent a couple of posts making fun of the decision-makers in Sacramento and Brooklyn, all of whom were fired several years ago after they were contemporaneously made fun of for these decisions, but this one has a clear rationale for both sides. Brooklyn GM Billy King said that he felt “we needed to add some youth to our team” and empirically could not have been more correct in that assessment.
The Reaction: The online reaction was a weird mix of mourning over the departure of fan favorites while acknowledging that none of the players involved were in the best situations. There were also a surprising amount of comparisons between Reggie Evans and Quincy Acy, and I didn’t really get it at all until I saw a picture of them running down the court in lockstep, which does look hilariously similar:
Even still, one of these guys is constantly wearing a headband and the other one never is? They’re going easy on us!
Kevin Garnett did not seem thrilled about the departure of his close friend Jason Terry and reiterated, shockingly, that the opportunity to play with Reggie Evans motivated him to waive his no-trade clause and come to Brooklyn in the first place. “It’s very hard, especially when you’re trying to integrate chemistry,” said a saddened Kevin Garnett, who is not a person I would want to harbor any negative emotions towards me for any reason. “I respect what Kevin had to say and I know he’s close with both of those guys, but it’s my job and I have to make decisions, so I didn’t reach out to any players,” said Nets GM King, exhibiting reckless disregard for his own safety.
The Results: On March 15, Walker Harrison wrote “Flip a coin: Heads, Marcus Thornton will explode for a big game for the Brooklyn Nets; Tails, and he’ll be a non-factor.” This was intended to be complimentary for a player in Thornton’s position, taking a bench spot on a theoretically loaded Nets team that could capitalize on the heads flips and mitigate the tails. Even with the outsized luxury tax penalties that came with living in Prokhorov’s Brooklyn, Thornton only added about $3 million in expenses to the Nets’ ledger for the season, which was essentially a rounding error.
Jason Terry played 378 minutes across 24 games with the Nets after returning from his November knee injury. But immediately upon becoming a Sacramento KIng, it became clear that he hadn’t felt right all season. Terry opted to rehab his knee in Dallas for the rest of the year and never played a minute in Sacramento. So Thornton was definitely better than that.
Reggie Evans did play games for Sacramento in 2013-2014 and even stuck around for the next season, which would be his final season in the NBA. He continued to do his thing and only his thing, playing 1,264 minutes in Sacramento that included only 309 points but 484 rebounds (approximately one rebound every two minutes and thirty-seven seconds). He had an uncharacteristic performance in his final NBA game, taking and missing three shots while only grabbing a single rebound.
The Aftermath: Despite Marcus Thornton’s seeming fit in Brooklyn, he was traded in July in a transaction that included Theoretical Edin Bavcic. He proved to be the type of high-upside, low-downside player that teams could always talk themselves into trading for or trading away as circumstances saw fit, resulting in a lot of movement. Thornton ended up back in Brooklyn on February 22, 2017 following stops in Boston, Phoenix, Houston, and Washington, where he spent his final month inactive. He was waived upon arrival in Brooklyn, making his final NBA game a 113-105 January 3 loss to the Dallas Mavericks where he went 1-for-3 on exclusively 3-pointers and committed three fouls to go out with a bang. While he had a brief Beijing Duck stint, he spent more time in the G-League, with multiple seasons as a member of the Pistons-affiliated Grand Rapids Drive (which have since become the Nuggets-affiliated Grand Rapids Gold) and a brief four-game cameo with the Pistons-affiliated Motor City Cruise (which were previously the Phoenix-affiliated Northern Arizona Suns). The trail gets a little murky because there’s a different Marcus Thornton (born 1992) that played in Italy and a Marcus Thornton (born 1993) that’s still playing in Greece, but I’m pretty sure the final competitive basketball played by Marcus Thornton (born 1987) was in The Basketball Tournament (2022) with Eberlein Drive (presumably unaffiliated with the Detroit Pistons). Eberlein Drive gained notoriety as the “lost cause” of the original Basketball Tournament (2014) after they lost their first-round match by 42 points, featuring a dunk that hospitalized team co-founder Jacob Hirschmann. While the team had better showings in the intervening years, they also bowed out in the first round of 2022 to a team composed entirely of University of North Texas alumni (brutal). Thornton, who certainly didn’t seem to help matters, took eight shots and only made one.
Reggie Evans had his own alternative basketball career in the 3-on-3 BIG3 tournament. He was the third pick in the inaugural 2017 draft, playing on the Charles Oakley coached “Killer 3’s.” It should not surprise you to know that Reggie Evans led the 2017 BIG3 in rebounds, offensive rebounds, and double-doubles, throwing in field goal percentage for good measure. The 2018 BIG3 season seems to have started with a draft where the eight teams only selected 19 players, none of which were Reggie Evans. He ended up with the Three Headed Monsters – I guess he had already been drafted and there might’ve been a trade involved, but this is a very slippery slope for me and I won’t look into it further. Evans led the BIG3 in rebounds once more, then did it again the next season, then did it again the next season. He is now a Three Headed Monster legend and “by far, the best rebounder in the history of the BIG3,” and I am quoting his profile on the BIG3 website. After missing the 2022 season with injury, Evans returned for 2023, but the team scuffled to a 1-5 record and the BIG3 website quality deteriorated enough for me to doubt the fidelity of any 2023 stats.
Jason Terry simply spent his entire basketball career in the NBA, playing a reasonable role for the Rockets and Bucks through his age-40 season. After the careful knee rehab that cost him his entire career in Sacramento, Terry returned to his reliable self, playing more than 70 games in each of the next three seasons. 40 proved to be more than just a number though, as he picked up a calf injury that cost him games in the early parts of the 2017-2018 season. He recovered enough to play in every game from February 4th through the end of the season, ending his career with an uncharacteristically brief five minute appearance in a blowout loss to the 76ers. Terry took a year off before joining the management ranks as assistant general manager of the G League Texas Legends, then quickly pivoted to coaching. His coaching career has progressed incredibly quickly, spending 2020-2021 as an assistant at his alma mater Arizona, then becoming a head coach of the aforementioned Grand Rapids Gold in 2021-2022, and then joining the NBA staff of the Utah Jazz for 2022-2023, and THEN moving to be one of the three “front-of-bench” assistant coaches for 2023-2024. It really seems like a charmed life for Jason Terry, and I’d like to take him down a peg while ending on a less-serious note, so here’s a story about a September lawsuit that alleges Terry rented a Rolex to go to a Vegas nightclub, wanted to buy the watch for $25,000 after presumably having an excellent night (good enough to want the watch at least), and then never paid.
February 6, 2024:
Los Angeles Lakers receive: MarShon Brooks, Kent Bazemore
Golden State Warriors receive: Steve Blake
February 7, 2024:
Atlanta Hawks receive: Antawn Jamison
Los Angeles Clippers receive: Draft rights to Cenk Aykol
February 8, 2024:
Philadelphia 76ers receive: Byron Mullens, conditional 2nd round pick
Los Angeles Clippers receive: Future 2nd round pick
February 9, 2024:
Cleveland Cavaliers receive: Spencer Hawes
Philadelphia 76ers receive: Earl Clark, Henry Sims, draft picks