Trade (Deadline) Ten Years Later - Spencer Hawes for Henry Sims, Earl Clark, and 2nd Rounders
Which of these players "just drove by a bald eagle that appeared to be crying"? The answer may surprise you!
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: Cleveland Cavaliers receive: Spencer Hawes. Philadelphia 76ers receive: Earl Clark, Henry Sims, 2014 Cleveland 2nd-round pick, 2014 Memphis 2nd-round pick.
The Team Context: The 76ers were quite active at the 2014 trade deadline as they attempted to reshape their roster in line with The Process. They had very few worthwhile NBA players and were actively trying to get rid of them.
It’s been slightly longer since we discussed the status of the Cleveland Cavaliers, but we shouldn’t spend too much time doing so since this was about as uninteresting as Cleveland basketball would be for the rest of the decade. There’s gonna be so many Cleveland trades of significance across all different sports; let’s not burn out on Cleveland for the sake of Spencer Hawes. Suffice to say, the Cavs were still looking to build their young team back to meaningful contention. It hadn’t been going well; GM Chris Grant had been fired and there were whispers that newly-acquired Luol Deng was sick of the situation already.
The Player Context: It was honestly a little surprising that Spencer Hawes was still on the Philadelphia 76ers. Listed at 7’1” and the nephew of former player Steve Hawes, Hawes attracted basketball attention from his early days in Seattle as a top-10 recruit in the high school class of 2006 and the #10 overall draft pick in 2007. Hawes quickly established himself as something like a top-180 player in basketball, hovering between a starting and bench role for the Sacramento Kings for the first four years of his career. He jumped to the 76ers in 2010 and then signed a two-year extension in Philadelphia in the summer of 2012.
This is right around the time when we see a historical rise in the amount of Spencer Hawes hate appearing online. The news of Hawes’ extension was greeted with an absolute screed from Reddit user Scabdates, who deftly wove together solid statistical evidence with all-caps yelling and excoriations to “look at some film and some advanced stats before you start downvoting fans who have watched a player play for an entire season.” Hawes drew ire for his outspoken right-wing beliefs, ranging from the use of Barack Obama toilet paper, creating a Facebook page for fans of Ann Coulter in October 2008(!!!), or tweeting that he “just drove by a bald eagle who appeared to be crying” when the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, 567 U.S. 519 (2012). When reports emerged that his former team the Kings would be purchased and relocated to his hometown Seattle, Hawes tweeted “Pure. Joy.” and then proceeded to get booed on subsequent trips when that sale fell through and he had to continue playing in Sacramento as a visitor.
Nevertheless, Hawes was certainly an NBA-caliber player, which made him stick out like a sore thumb on the 2013-14 76ers. He had started every game for the team and set career highs in minutes, shot attempts, points, rebounds, and assists per game as he got NBA playing time slightly beyond what his past performances had merited. As the three-point shot became more important, Hawes proved to be pretty skillful with it, shooting a then-noteworthy 3.8 three-pointers per game and making about 40% of them. The term “stretch-five” was being coined and Hawes’ face was embossed on one of the lower denominations. With his contract set to expire that summer and the smell of 2nd-round draft picks hanging heavy like chum in the water, it seemed inevitable that Hawes would be sent elsewhere at the trade deadline.
Like Hawes, Earl Clark was a highly-regarded recruit in the class of 2006. After a successful college career at Louisville, Clark was drafted by Phoenix at #14 overall in 2009 but failed to stick around with the Suns, then failed to stick around with the Magic after he was traded there in 2010. Clark had a brief spell of success with the Lakers in 2012-13 after an injury to Pau Gasol in January gave him a crack at expanded opportunity. But by March, his coach Mike D’Antoni was telling the media that “his energy level is way down” and he had returned to a bench role by April. That summer, Clark signed a free agent deal with Cleveland and, despite consternation from Lakers fans about the departure, his statistical outputs declined across the board as a Cavalier.
Henry Sims was actually playing less than Earl Clark, but was doing so with much lower expectations. Sims wasn’t drafted after four years of college basketball at Georgetown and embraced the transience of fringe NBA players during his “rookie” summer of 2012, spending time as a member of the Jazz, Bulls, and Knicks while ultimately only ending up playing five minutes of NBA basketball in 2012-2013 (all for the New Orleans Hornets). He had already reached the “contract with the Petron Blaze Boosters in the Philippines” stage of his career by the spring of 2013, but signed on a two-way contract with the Cavaliers in the summer that had him split time between Cleveland and the D-League Canton Charge. Sims started to see more playing time in 2014 and, while he wasn’t playing every game for Cleveland, his games were getting more meaningful (peaking at 22:03 in a January 30 blowout loss to the Knicks).
The Trade: The Cleveland Cavaliers came to Philadelphia on February 18, 2014 and left with a 114-85 victory. Spencer Hawes played poorly, missing five of his six shots while playing turnstile defense that led Tyler Zeller to an 18-point, 15-rebound performance. At Grantland, Zach Lowe wrote that Hawes “was actively avoiding any responsibility to defend shots at the rim. Like, he was jumping out of the way. It was a masterpiece of not giving a fuck.”
Perhaps this show of support for his soon-to-be teammates inspired the Cavaliers to trade for Hawes two days later. With a pretty mediocre record and vague hopes at opening up cap space in the summer, there was some expectation that Cleveland would send players away at the deadline. But GM David Griffin was somewhat ahead of his time in expressing that Hawes’ shooting ability would help space the floor for his team and create room for athletic young guards Kyrie Irving and Dion Waiters to drive to the basket. It seemed to be a buyer’s market, so the Cavaliers opted to buy at a relatively low cost.
The Reaction: The trade was met mostly with confusion on the side of Cleveland. Conrad Kaczmarek wrote that the trade “doesn’t make sense” given crowding in the Cavaliers’ frontcourt. With a record still firmly below .500 and so many rumored trade candidates on the roster, it was odd to see Cleveland giving up future assets for an expiring contract.
Michael Levin at SB Nation’s Liberty Ballers was thrilled with the trade as “an unabashed Earl Clark fan from his days at Louisville.” While acknowledging that Clark couldn’t do much well and would be the oldest member of the 76ers rotation at age 26 (lol), there was still excitement around the athletic and relatively young forward. A few hours later, Clark had been waived and was off the roster. Levin was disappointed, but admitted that “even though I’ve liked him for a very long time, I kept forgetting Earl Clark’s name over the course of the day. That was probably a bad sign.”
76ers fans were pretty excited to get rid of Spencer Hawes and a deeply-poisoned fanbase was thrilled at the concept of having so many 2nd-round draft picks. In typically understated Philadelphia sports fan fashion, Reddit user lardbiscuits wrote the following:
I can't breathe. Having trouble breathing. Been waiting for so long. He was so embarrassing. Now he's gone. Somebody else's problem. He's just so bad. Such a [p----]. So ugly, too. The Cavs don't know what they've done. Don't let them start him. We barely made it out alive. Get to them. Tell them what we know.
The Results: Despite Earl Clark’s higher draft pedigree and NBA experience (or perhaps because of it), Henry Sims was the one who got to stick around on the 76ers. After coming off the bench in every prior game of his career and his first game in Philadelphia, he started the remainder of the season with an average of 27.2 minutes per game. He averaged nearly 12 points and 7 rebounds, coming up just short of the production they were getting from Spencer Hawes. The next season, Sims saw a decrease in playing time as an influx of young players like Nerlens Noel pushed for minutes, but still seemed to be a key part of the rotation at a still-young 25. Then, the 76ers needed to offer a measly $1.18 million dollars in order to retain his services and declined to do so, making him an unrestricted free agent.
Clark eventually signed a 10-day contract with the Knicks, which some very unfortunate Knicks fan referred to as the “best news all year.” It wasn’t good news for very long; he got into nine games with the Knicks across two 10-day contract and that was it for the rest of the season.
After playing at his best level yet on a talentless 76ers team, Hawes somehow improved further on a still pretty bad Cleveland team. The outburst was generally fueled by Hawes sinking his 3-pointers at a 44.8% clip that far exceeds what he accomplished in any other season. The trade to acquire Hawes ended up looking pretty savvy, except for the part where Cleveland finished 33-49, missed the playoffs by five games, and then didn’t have a 2nd-round pick.
Since the Cavaliers didn’t end up being very good, that 2nd-round pick ended up falling at a pleasant #39. The 76ers selected Jerami Grant at the spot and made him a regular part of their rotation by December of his rookie season. The 2nd-round pick from Memphis was pick #52 and, with their roster already getting full with unproven rookies, the 76ers drafted Vasilije Micić out of Serbia. He signed a contract with Bayern Munich that summer.
The Aftermath: Earl Clark and Henry Sims each ended their NBA careers in essentially the same fashion, one year apart. Clark bounced around a few organizations before he was able to sign a 10-day contract with the Brooklyn Nets in March 2015, which was eventually extended to a permanent contract. He only got into ten games with the Nets and was waived before the start of the 2015-16 season. Clark’s final NBA game was a blowout loss to the Hawks in the Nets’ last game of the season, where he managed to make his one three-pointer but missed all three of his two-pointers. Sims also bounced around before signing a 10-day contract with the Nets in March 2016, which eventually became a permanent contract for the rest of the season. He got into fourteen games with the Nets but played a pretty substantial role in all of them, starting his final NBA game and putting up 10 points and 7 rebounds in a loss to the Raptors. He signed with the Jazz in September 2016 and was waived in October 2016 before playing a game, though Basketball Reference indicates he still got $75,000 for that which seems like a sweet outcome.
In 2018, Clark and Sims were BOTH highlighted in an article about players who chose to play at a high level in Europe rather than chasing playing time in the NBA. Sims says that his “best memories were definitely with the Sixers,” which isn’t really surprising since 2,106 of his 2,542 NBA game minutes were spent there, while acknowledging that the team “did our fair share of losing.” Clark and Sims each seemed content with the lifestyle afforded to them as an overseas basketball player, and that’s supported by the fact that they’re both still at it today.
At the time of the article, Sims was playing for Vanoli Cremona in Italy after an earlier run with the CBA’s Shanxi Brave Dragons. He’s played for four additional Italian teams since then, along with the Incheon Electroland Elephants and Ulsan Hyundai Mobis Phoebus of the Korean Basketball League, the Broncos de Caracas in Venezuela, and currently Ohud Medina of the Saudi Premier League, where he is teammates with fellow former 76er Jonathon Simmons. Ohud Medina won their last game 92-89 as Henry Sims made all five of his field goals to triumph over Al-Fateh.
Earl Clark was playing for Beşiktaş at the time of the article and kindly forgot to mention whatever corporate sponsorship they had at the time for purposes of his interview. Clark has been similarly wide-ranging since then, playing for San Pablo Burgos and Gran Canaria in Spain, Buducnost in scenic Montenegro, the Bahraini powerhouse Al-Manama, the NLEX Road Warriors in the Philippines, and each of Cariduros de Fajardo y Gigantes de Carolina in Puerto Rico. Amazingly, Clark also played for Ulsan Hyundai Mobis Phoebus (how does one shorten that), but missed overlapping with Sims by one year. He is currently a Hsinchu Lioneer, playing in Taiwan’s P. League+ along with the New Taipei Kings, who they play on February 16. Clark is averaging 17.2 points and 11.5 rebounds on the season. Although the Lioneers and Kings have clashed a few times, there has not yet been a game where Clark and fellow 76ers trade deadline target Byron Mullens were both healthy and available to play – here’s hoping that changes.
Spencer Hawes signed a four-year contract with Los Angeles that looked a whole lot scarier when he started shooting a career-worst instead of a career-best. Hawes was sent to Charlotte after one season and played there for a year and a half before one last deadline trade to Milwaukee. Hawes closed the season and his career with 19 games before Milwaukee waived him to stretch the salary cap hit from his final contract year. He played in the G-League in 2018-19, but besides that, his last game was April 20, 2017. His Bucks beat the Raptors to take a 2-1 series lead, thanks in small part to Hawes’ one rebound in 3:46 of action. Hawes is still active on Twitter, though seemingly mostly about University of Washington athletics. The political takes have mostly been localized to Seattle, but let’s answer the questions you’re surely wondering about: on February 13, 2021, he tweeted “how dumb are senate Republicans for not seizing the easy opportunity to put Trump out to pasture once and for all? Sad!” On July 22, 2021, he tweeted in response to discussion of NFL players speaking out against COVID vaccine mandates “all that toradol every Sunday is much worse for the organs than the vaccine ever will be” with a laughing emoji. On December 30, 2023, he referred to finding out about your trade via Twitter as “a [rite] of passage. You get used to it.”
Ah yes, there were draft picks involved? Jerami Grant made it to the ripe age of 22 in Philadelphia before the Process dictated he be moved on for future assets. The 76ers were able to send their recent 2nd-round pick Grant to Oklahoma City for Ersan Ilyasova and a 2020 1st-round pick, then use that pick to select current star Tyrese Maxey. Vasilije Micić never signed with Philadelphia, but his rights still had some value when they were ALSO sent to Oklahoma City in 2020 as part of a larger trade. He eventually signed a contract with the Thunder this past July and became a 30-year old rookie, playing 30 honeymoon games before getting his true “welcome to the NBA” moment with a trade to Charlotte on Thursday at the 2024 NBA trade deadline. Don’t worry Vasilije, I hear you get used to it.
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