Trade (Deadline) Ten Years Later - Marquis Teague for Tornike Shengelia
In case you need more compelling reasons to click: Sunny Delight, suspicious nickel auctions, Kartvelian language, the Colossus of Rhodes?
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: Chicago Bulls receive: Tornike Shengelia. Brooklyn Nets receive: Marquis Teague.
The Team Context: We have previously discussed the unpleasant purgatory of the 2013-2014 Chicago Bulls and I’d like to stick with “unpleasant purgatory” as my entire description here.
Although we briefly referenced what was going on in Brooklyn during our discussion of MarShon Brooks’s first trade of the year (next one coming soon!), there’s quite a bit to cover. We should start with the still-fresh identity of “Brooklyn Nets.” After playing in New Jersey for most of their history, the Nets moved to Brooklyn and the shiny new Barclays Center in the summer of 2012. While the moving process was underway, the Nets had been sold to Mikhail Prokhorov, a 6’8” nickel oligarch who was estimated at the time to be the third-richest man in Russia. Prokhorov moved with all the subtlety that could be expected of a giant billionaire, splashing cash on star players and promising to end his lifelong bachelor status if his Nets failed to win a championship within five seasons. The Nets traded for their first star acquisition Joe Johnson ahead of the 2012-2013 season and made the playoffs that year, then started to trend towards surreal in the summer of 2013. Coach PJ Carlesimo was fired and replaced with franchise icon Jason Kidd one week after his retirement as an NBA player and, on June 24, Brooklyn consummated one of the most storied NBA trades of all time, sending an army of players and an armada of draft picks to Boston in exchange for, most significantly, Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett (with Jason Terry and DJ White also involved, but less excitingly). The Nets entered the season as championship contenders with a then-comical $102 million payroll, inducing an additional $86.9 million luxury tax payment that was higher than any other team paid in salaries that year.
For all that investment, the Nets had very little to show for it on the “results” side of the ledger. The start of the season was mired in injuries, culminating on December 21 when star center Brook Lopez fractured the fifth metatarsal in his right foot. Brook’s right foot had already been operated on three times even though he was just 25, evoking nightmares of other injury-prone big men and casting his future into doubt (a hilarious narrative in hindsight as he plays 30 minutes per game as a 35-year-old today). The Nets were 9-17 at the time of the fracture and entered 2014 just 10-23, but began to heat up in January as Jason Kidd gained familiarity with his new job and team cohesion grew. Leading up to the consummation of this trade on January 21, the Nets had won 8 of their last 9 games.
The Player Context: Any context I could offer on Tornike “Toko “The Tokomotive”” Shengelia’s career has already been done better by the man himself on his website, which I don’t think has been updated in several years but is current for our purposes. One of six Georgians to play in the NBA and one of four to be born in Tbilisi, Shengelia started his professional career in Spain with Valencia Basket and its junior team, which was charmingly known as “Valencia BC Sunny Delight” for the limited time that he played there. He then played in Belgium with VOO Verviers-Pepinster and Spirou Charleroi before he was drafted with the 54th pick in the 2012 NBA draft. “The moment I heard my name and it was on. Dream Came true!,” Shengelia says on his website (sic). He played sparingly for Brooklyn over the next two seasons, with frequent trips to the D-League and numerous DNPs.
Marquis Teague was more heralded on his path to the NBA as his expectations likely originated shortly after birth by virtue of his older brother Jeff Teague. Marquis excelled at Pike High School in Indianapolis, with Rivals ranking him the #5 overall prospect in the high school class of 2011. Teague was ranked one spot behind Bradley Beal and one spot ahead of Le’Bryan Nash, demonstrating that we are very good and very bad and ranking high school basketball players. Teague started every game in his freshman season at the University of Kentucky and won a national championship, then was drafted 25 spots ahead of Shengelia with the 29th overall pick in the 2012 NBA draft.
Going from the #5 recruit to the #29 pick in a year was representative of the downward trend Marquis Teague’s reputation would take for the remainder of his NBA career. After struggling through his rookie season, Chicago had seen enough and spent October 2013 trying and failing to trade Marquis Teague for a first round pick. It’s not clear why they thought this would work, since 28 teams had just declined to use a first-round pick on him the year before. Teague was able to get playing time as a result of the Bulls’ injuries, much to the consternation of Chicago fans - he failed to prove that he belonged in the NBA and was sent to the Iowa Energy of the D-League on December 26th. On Reddit, the Bulls faithful discussed the situation:
“Hope he can get some confidence and learn how to make layups! Come back stronger teague…” said ani2691 with pained optimism.
“Yeah. Something tells me a trip to the D-league is not gonna be a cure all for what ails Teague. Which is that he’s bad at basketball,” replied chacer98.
“Well, he is still really terrible that is true,” ani2691 conceded.
These two characters effectively summarize all viewpoints expressed on Marquis Teague in December 2013, which all bounced in the spectrum between “hope he significantly improves” and “never let this man wear my team’s uniform again.”
The Trade: Everybody in this trade felt like they were making money. Chicago actually was - if the Bulls made the (correct) assumption that neither player had an NBA future, then Teague’s 1st-round pick contract carried an undesirable guarantee for 2014-2015 in comparison to Shengelia’s 2nd-round pick contract, which expired after the season. The math is clear on a two-dimensional level.
But the Nets made this trade in conjunction with the trade of Tyshawn Taylor to New Orleans (to be discussed tomorrow!), treating the moves as a money-saving monolith. When the aggregate impact of both trades is considered, the cost of Teague was lower than the cost of Shengelia + Taylor and saved the Nets $2.5 million in luxury tax payments. Now we’re cooking with four-dimensional math. Who among us can say they haven’t engaged in similar financial self-delusion? When I make $6.18 in monthly interest from my savings account it means my next coffee is free.
The Reaction: Tornike Shengelia reacted to his trade with three hashtags, indicating that he was #thankful for every given #opportunity and excited to meet #BullsNation. I’m not sure if the two-period ellipsis has different cultural connotations in Georgia but it reads as somewhat passive-aggressive. Archil Zarkua responded to Shengelia’s tweet with “წარმატებები თოკო !” (it’s just a generic good luck message but this felt like my window to get some Georgian text in). By the time Shengelia had seen his Bulls jersey, he stepped up his excitement to a three-period ellipsis “Can’t wait” while trimming the hashtags to just #BullsNation. For their part, Bulls fans tried to get excited about a minute and a half long YouTube video titled “Toko Shengelia’s Best Game as a Brooklyn Net,” although even that just turned into more excitement about getting rid of Marquis Teague.
Most neutral observers reacted to the trade with the shrug that it merited. At SB Nation, Mark Deeks was willing to intensely criticize the transaction on its financial merits, praising the Bulls for tactfully creating some breathing room at the top-end of the luxury tax line while blasting the Nets for foolishly incurring additional expense with Teague’s guaranteed contract. Deeks’s article is well-informed and practically indisputable with hindsight, best-synthesized by his claim that “the cost of this gamble may be small, but it could, should have been less, and yet wasn’t.” It just seems like the kind of earnest sportswriting you don’t see much these days, where we’ve moved to a point of cynical acceptance with the ultrawealthy’s splurges and invented terms like the “Cohen tax.” We’re talking about Literally Mikhail Prokhorov, the guy who made his riches by paying about $170 million in a suspicious auction to buy a state-owned nickel company with annual profits of $400 million, who then sold his stake in that nickel company in 2008 for close to $8 billion, who would ultimately refer to this season’s $144 million net loss as “not a big deal.” You mean to tell me he could have gotten a backup point guard for cheaper?
The Results: I include a “results” section in these write-ups under the tried-and-true wisdom that sports trades have “winners” and “losers.” Strictly speaking, the Nets “lost the trade” because neither of these guys contributed and the Nets were the ones that took on additional salary (which they ultimately “paid” by sending a future 2nd-round pick in a trade with the final year of Teague’s contract). On the other hand, this was the best season of this Nets era - they won a playoff series against Toronto before losing to the Heat in the Eastern Conference Semifinals. Maybe it’s worth overpaying for Marquis Teague when it’s your franchise’s competitive window (it wasn’t; Teague did not appear in the playoffs).
Any of these analytical approaches are just exercises in overthinking, since whatever victory was extracted was on too small of a scale to register in the national landscape of professional sports. Marquis Teague played 201 minutes as a Net, 41.5 of which came in the meaningless final game of the season where Johnson, Pierce, and Garnett were among the six Nets that sat as Brooklyn lost by 29. Teague contributed much more than the four points in seventeen minutes of game time Toko Shengelia gave the Bulls, with his peak performance coming in the three minutes of garbage time he played against the Nuggets on February 21 (the first of two Chicago games in which he scored points). After the season, Shengelia’s contract expired, Teague was traded to the 76ers with a future 2nd-round pick for the similarly anonymous Casper Ware, and that was that. There were no “results,” this is just an event that occurred.
I don’t want to give away my closely-guarded research methods, but this screenshot hammers home the caliber of transaction we’re dealing with here. It’s the same thing for Marquis Teague but just meaner.
The Aftermath: We can almost say that each player’s NBA career ended after the season, but Marquis Teague got three random games in 2017-2018 to make the narrative messier so we’ll start with him. Teague was waived by Philadelphia three days after he got there, then spent the next two seasons as a member of the Oklahoma City Blue of the D-League. The 2016-2017 season launched Teague’s international career, with stints in Israel and Russia preceding a March 2017 return to the D-League as a Fort Wayne Mad Ant. A few months later, the D-League was renamed the G-League as part of a sponsorship deal with Gatorade and Teague was selected by the Memphis Hustle in the first ever G-League expansion draft. The Grizzlies evidently saw enough in Teague to sign him to a 10-day contract in March 2018 (as “the first GATORADE Call-Up in Hustle franchise history”), then to sign him for the remainder of the season after his first two games. Despite his newly-guaranteed contract, Teague only played one more game with the Grizzlies and in the NBA, a 123-95 loss to the New Orleans Pelicans where he missed his first four shots, made a three-pointer, and then missed one more shot to close things out the right way. Teague has since played for Jeonju KCC Egis in Korea, the London Lions in England, and most recently Kolossos Rodou in Greece (I’m guessing that’s named after the Colossus of Rhodes, which is sick), where he had 10.6 points per game on 12.1 field goal attempts in the 2022-2023 season. His brother Jeff just became the head men’s basketball coach at their alma mater Pike High School.
Tornike Shengelia’s personal website trails off in 2014, when he signed with Saski Baskonia in the Basque Country of Spain. In 2015, he helped instigate a brawl between Baskonia and Bilbao Basket (say that five times fast) in a game his team was losing by 22 points in the fourth quarter. Shengelia was ejected, but apologized to a child seated in the first row on his way out of the arena. The Tokomotive became a fixture for Baskonia, with his best year coming in a 2017-2018 season that saw him make the All-EuroLeague First Team and finish second in the Spanish MVP race to Luka Doncic. In 2020, he joined CSKA Moscow, the Russian powerhouse that rose to prominence as a department of the Soviet Army. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Shengelia terminated his contract with the team in protest and joined his current squad, Virtus Bologna in Italy. His most recent game was a tough 24-point loss to Anadolu Efes on January 12, where Toko missed three shots and had two turnovers. His final NBA game was the second of two Chicago games in which he scored points - he went 1 for 2 in 1:50 against the Washington Wizards, the same team against which he had posted his “Best Game As A Brooklyn Net.”
The Nets did not win a championship within five years of Mikhail Prokhorov’s purchase of the team and their drought continues to this day. Prokhorov weaseled out of the bet by claiming that NBA commissioner Adam Silver would “take the plunge in my place” by getting married, notwithstanding that Silver probably made that decision without thinking about Mikhail Prokhorov very much at all. In 2019, Prokhorov finalized the sale of the Nets to Joe Tsai for approximately $3.5 billion, netting approximately $2 billion in profit on his nine-year investment. Losing $144 million in a season REALLY wasn’t a big deal, huh?
February 2, 2024:
New Orleans Pelicans receive: Tyshawn Taylor
Brooklyn Nets receive: Draft rights to Edin Bavcic
February 5, 2024:
Sacramento Kings receive: Reggie Evans, Jason Terry
Brooklyn Nets receive: Marcus Thornton
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