Trades Ten Years Later - Courtney Lee for Jerryd Bayless
Boston Celtics receive: Jerryd Bayless and Ryan Gomes (theoretically). Memphis Grizzlies receive: Courtney Lee. There are also draft picks and Oklahoma City involved.
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The Names: Boston Celtics receive: Jerryd Bayless, Ryan Gomes. Memphis Grizzlies receive: Courtney Lee, 2016 2nd-round pick (from Boston), cash considerations (from OKC). Oklahoma City Thunder receive: Conditional 2014 2nd-round pick (from Memphis, did not convey), 2017 2nd-round pick (from Memphis).
The Team Context: The Memphis Grizzlies were prepared to build on the best times in franchise history. After languishing as an expansion team, relocated from Vancouver shortly after their birth in 1995, the Grizzlies won their first playoff series in 2010-2011 and advanced all the way to the Western Conference Finals in 2012-2013. For the first time ever, there were basketball expectations in Memphis entering the 2013-2014 season. It was not going well. Reigning NBA Defensive Player of the Year Marc Gasol was in the midst of a 23-game injury absence and the team had fallen to 15-19, good for last place in the competitive Southwest Division.
The Boston Celtics, by contrast, were prepared to dive headfirst into one of the rare bad stretches in franchise history. With 17 NBA championships since their inception and a stretch of division titles from 2008 to 2012, the Celtics were not accustomed to a lifestyle of mediocrity, but were confronted with a 13-22 record on January 7. The Celtics had spent the prior offseason shipping off the stars of their prior championship team, most notably trading Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett to Brooklyn, and embraced a youth movement led by first-year head coach Brad Stevens.
The Player Context: Jerryd Bayless serves as an emblem for the plight of mid-tier NBA players. There’s not much distinctive about Bayless’s career except for his portability - the trade at issue today is the third of four trades Bayless personally experienced in his career. After being drafted 11th overall in 2008, he carved out a role as a solid rotational bench guard. Bayless played for eight teams, none for more than 129 games. He started at least one game every year except his rookie season, but never started more than 19. He averaged 21 minutes per game for his career. He scored his career-high 31 points on December 23, 2009 in Portland in his first career start before settling into a more facilitatory NBA role. If you were familiar with Jerryd Bayless, either as a one-time bench guy for your favorite team or as one of the pieces sent packing at a trade deadline, this all probably feels accurate to you - I didn’t know any of these specific numbers but none are surprising. Not bad, never exceptional.
Courtney Lee also serves as an emblem of the plight of mid-tier NBA players; a slightly better player who had either a better or worse go of things depending on your perspective. Lee was selected eleven picks later than Bayless in the 2008 draft and also played for eight teams in their career, with neither Lee nor Bayless spending more than 22.01% of their career with any one team (Bayless played 129 of his 586 career games with Milwaukee). Lee arrived at almost all of his teams involuntarily, being traded a staggering six times over the course of his career. This wasn’t a situation where his contract was flipped around in one crazy summer week while he was vacationing in Europe, either. Lee was traded in 2009, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2019, as part of the following convoluted structures that involved 43% (13/30) of all NBA franchises:
June 2009: from Orlando to New Jersey
August 2010: from New Jersey to Houston (in a 4-team trade involving Indiana and New Orleans)
July 2012: from Houston to Boston (in a 3-team trade involving Portland)
January 7, 2014: from Boston to Memphis (in this 3-team trade involving Oklahoma City)
February 2016: from Memphis to Charlotte (in a 3-team trade involving Miami)
January 2019: from New York to Dallas
As you have just seen, Lee joined the Celtics in a July 2012 sign-and-trade*, agreeing to a 4-year contract. He claimed to have turned down more money to end up in Boston and join a core that was positioned to “win big, get to the championship and win. And not only for one year but continu[ing] to do it.” After one season, where the Celtics disappointed on their way to a first-round playoff exit and Lee performed poorly enough to fall out of the playoff rotation, the Celtics had embraced their entrance into a rebuilding era and had much less use for three more years of Courtney Lee. He shot quite well in the early stages of 2013, but did so in a limited sample with diminished minutes. It was clear that Boston was ready to move on.
Ryan Gomes was really just an innocent bystander. He had signed with the Thunder that year after playing a season for the Artland Dragons of the German Basketball Bundesliga and had gotten 34 minutes across 5 games in Oklahoma City, spending the rest of the time at the end of the bench. It would seem exceptionally precarious to be this type of fringe NBA player, as your low market demand forces you to sign a one-year, low-salary contract that makes you easy fuel to power a much larger trade. Simultaneously, you can be pretty confident any acquiring team won’t want you to play NBA basketball for them, since if they did you wouldn’t have ever been an Artland Dragon. You probably aren’t excited to get phone calls from your agent when you’ve played 34 minutes across 5 games at the halfway mark of the season.
The Trade: The basketball trade that took place was a swap of Courtney Lee for Jerryd Bayless and the business trade that took place was a swap of Courtney Lee’s long-term contract for Jerryd Bayless’s expiring contract. To comply with the NBA’s salary-matching rules, a tractor beam was focused on Oklahoma City and Ryan Gomes’ $1.2 million contract was honed in, with a 2017 2nd round pick thrown in their direction by Memphis to keep anyone from asking any questions. The Celtics indemnified Memphis by giving up their own 2016 2nd round pick. Lee would slot in as a key contributor for the Grizzlies as they tried to turn their season around. Bayless would slot in as a bench contributor for the Celtics until his contract expired in the summer. Ryan Gomes would probably go back to Germany or something.
The framework of Lee for Bayless was reported a couple of days before the final trade involving Gomes was finalized. At the time of the trade, Celtics coach Brad Stevens “barely knew anything about Bayless,” suggesting the trade was primarily conceptualized as a convenient Courtney Lee removal service. Reporter Jay King asked Bayless about the living situation for a player who had already moved so frequently in his career and had the misfortune of joining the Celtics in the midst of a west coast road trip. “The team will have a hotel, but I don’t know where it is or anything, and after that, just got to find somewhere,” Bayless said, incredibly transiently. He went on to reiterate his desire for consistency, saying “I’m trying to find a home, somewhere I can kind of plant my roots and grow with the organization. Hopefully this is it. I’m really hoping that this is it.” King doesn’t specify whether Bayless then gazed into the rafters wistfully as one tear crawled down his cheek.
This was not “it.” Bayless would play for three more teams in the five remaining years of his NBA career.
The Reaction: Celtics fans liked Courtney Lee, but understood the poor team fit and were excited by the concept of financial flexibility. There was a surprising amount of discourse in support of Ryan Gomes, who is evidently a nice guy to play poker with. I can’t find original emotional reactions from Memphis fans, but discourse a week later indicated that it was originally negative (but getting much more positive as Courtney Lee started making shots for the Grizzlies).
Ben Golliver of SI evaluated the trade as a swap of Lee for Bayless that would be accomplished by using trade exceptions, which was ultimately replaced by the Gomes-inclusive structure but was close enough. Golliver gave Boston an “A” in the swap primarily on the basis of freeing up budget to allocate elsewhere on a non-competitive roster. Memphis received a “B,” with Golliver acknowledging the excellent fit on a team that ranked last in three-pointers made that season but noting the significant investment for a team that was four games outside a playoff spot at the time of the trade.
CBS Boston spoke favorably of the trade, describing Lee as “an overpaid veteran-role player on a team looking towards the future.” They praised Celtics GM Danny Ainge for getting anything at all in exchange for Lee, failing to consider whether a half regular-season of Jerryd Bayless for a team with no present ambition is really much of “anything.”
The Results: Boston may have won the business trade, but the basketball trade worked out quite nicely for Memphis. The Grizzlies lost to the Spurs in overtime on the day this trade was finalized, with Courtney Lee playing off the bench. Lee took Mike Miller’s spot in the starting lineup within the week and kept a starting job for the rest of the season. The Grizzlies proceeded to win eleven of their next twelve games, ultimately finishing the regular season 50-32. Lee’s additional offense and the contemporaneous return of a healthy Marc Gasol was enough to power the Grizzlies to what was only a 7-seed in a loaded Western Conference, where the Oklahoma CIty Thunder awaited. The Grizzlies took the Thunder to seven games before losing in the first round, but continued their playoff streak for each year that they rostered Courtney Lee.
The Celtics did not go on to a miraculous turnaround, but that was never going to be a part of this story. Jerryd Bayless did enjoy one of the more productive stints of his career, playing more minutes per game in Boston (25.3) and taking more shots per game (9.2) than he did with any other team. There’s probably people in Massachusetts who have fond memories of a good Jerryd Bayless game they were able to attend in person, and maybe two or three who bought his jersey before he left. But there’s not much intrigue in a postscript analysis of a trade where a team is primarily motivated by saving money - they did in fact save money, but we didn’t need to wait ten years to do that math.
The 2016 2nd round pick received by Memphis was traded to the Utah Jazz for Jarnell Stokes and ultimately used to select Joel Bolomboy, who scored 31 points with 27 rebounds and 2 assists across his 18-game NBA career with the Jazz and Bucks. Jarnell Stokes, meanwhile, scored 67 points with 40 rebounds and 7 assists across his 27-game NBA career with the Grizzlies, Heat, and Nuggets. Today is his 30th birthday - happy birthday Jarnell, and thanks for reading Trades Ten Years Later!
The conditional 2014 pick sent to Oklahoma City did not convey, so I didn’t bother looking into what the conditions were. The concrete 2017 2nd round pick sent to Oklahoma City was traded with another 2nd round pick to the Nuggets for Joffrey Lauvergne. Those 2nd round picks were used on Vlatko Čančar (the one in this trade) and Monte Morris.
The Aftermath: Courtney Lee stuck around in Memphis for almost the entire duration of the contract he had signed with Boston, averaging 30 minutes per game and finally having what passes for stability in the basketball career of Courtney Lee. He was traded in 2016 to Charlotte, then had the unprecedented* experience of choosing his own employer, signing a free agent contract with the New York Knicks. His role diminished in his years with the Knicks until he took part in his sixth and final trade, where he was sent to Dallas along with Kristaps Porzingis. His last career game came on March 11, 2020, a date we all remember for being the date of Courtney Lee’s last career game and also the day on which the NBA suspended its season due to COVID-19. The other three games that were successfully played that day were in Eastern Time while Lee’s Mavericks hosted the Denver Nuggets in Central Time, making his final game the last pre-Disney Bubble NBA game played that season. Lee scored seven points on six shots with a +/- of -6, the only Mavericks player with a +/- below 0 in a decisive victory. In the early days of the pandemic, before the NBA launched its bubble, Lee suffered a calf injury that reportedly required surgery, ending his playing career.
Jerryd Bayless continued to get NBA jobs as a backup guard for the duration of his twenties. His contract expired in 2014 and he signed a two-year contract with the Bucks, then signed a 3-year, $27 million contract with the 76ers. A wrist injury caused him to miss all but three games in his first season, his diminished performance caused him to fall out of the rotation in the second season, and a knee injury delayed the start of his third season until he was traded to the Minnesota Timberwolves as part of the Jimmy Butler package. He continued to play well once he got on the court for the Timberwolves, even notching a career high with 12 assists in a game. His final NBA game was an April 5, 2019 victory over the Miami Heat, where he scored five points and tied for a team-high with five assists. He stopped playing basketball after the season, with his LinkedIn indicating that he’s now an “Operator” at Jerryd Bayless Company and his Twitter indicating more interest in business than basketball. He did sign with the Sichuan Blue Sharks prior to the 2019-2020 season, but I’m not sure whether he played for them. There’s a law firm(?) claiming that they represented him in terminating his CBA contract.
Ryan Gomes was waived upon completion of the trade and never played in the NBA again. His final NBA action was in a blowout win over the Houston Rockets, where he and rookie Steven Adams checked in for the final six minutes and sixteen seconds. He played one game in Spain in the 2014-2015 season, then joined the D-League’s Los Angeles D-Fenders on the two year anniversary of the trade that cast him out of the NBA. With just one game of pro basketball in the last two years and 34 minutes in the preceding season, Gomes crushed the D-League, averaging 18.7 points, 8.2 rebounds, and 2.9 assists per game across 40 games as the D-Fenders advanced to the title game. The worst NBA players are extremely good at basketball. Gomes began a coaching career the next season and can be found on social media at GotGomes.
Upcoming trades:
January 7, 2014 (hmmmmmmm):
Bulls receive: Andrew Bynum and picks
Cavaliers receive: Luol Deng