I love sports. I love baseball, basketball, and hockey. I have a passing interest in football and soccer, but an interest nonetheless. My favorite times of any season are the trade deadline and the draft. That’s because my favorite aspect of any sport is teambuilding. Every year, GMs and team presidents come together to fit new puzzle pieces together, then cast their lots to see who wins at the end.
I love trades. I love seeing how each team plays out after a big transaction. I love that there is
no consensus philosophy on who “wins” trades. Some people would say that the team that got the best player wins the trade, while others value young players and draft picks. Either way, it is always context-dependent.
Given that the Suns’ season is over, I want to explore some trades from the past to see if they tell us anything about the future. But I don’t just want to explore the base details of any given transaction. I want to go deeper. Let’s explore any subsequent transactions following that until we reach the full butterfly effect of the original trade.
The Rules
- Subsequent trades count. If Player A was traded to Phoenix, played there for 2 years, and was traded again, that second trade is included in our analysis.
- We go until there is nothing left. The transaction chain continues until a player is waived or leaves in free agency
- All pieces returned will be analyzed. If the Suns received two players and one pick in the deal, we analyze the entire transaction tree of each asset.
- Partials count. If a player is received in a trade, then is flipped alongside two other players in a second trade, the full amount back in that second trade will be counted with the “(Partial)” title.
- There is no real way to quantify the percentage of value that any one piece has in a trade, so this is how we will compromise. This way a player does not get full credit for value that they did not provide in a trade.
- Transactions will be listed in chronological order so that we can analyze the story that was being told by the transaction timeline.
With that, let’s get started in the middle of the 2003-2004 season.
January 5, 2004
Phoenix Suns trade:
- Anfernee Hardaway
- Stephon Marbury
- Cezary Trybanski
New York Knicks trade:
- Howard Eisley
- Maciej Lampe
- Antonio McDyess
- Milos Vujanic
- Charlie Ward
- 2004 1st round pick (Kirk Snyder)
- 2010 1st round pick (Gordon Hayward)
Let’s start with the players who actually played for the Suns. Howard Eisley played 34 games for the Suns before being waived in October, 2004. Maciej Lampe played 37 games before being traded (more on that later). Finally, McDyess, in his second stint with Phoenix, played just 24 games before leaving in free agency.
Milos Vujanic never came to the NBA and Charlie Ward was waived once the trade was completed.
The draft picks that became Kirk Snyder and Gordon Hayward were traded in a subsequent trade that we will explore shortly.
None of Eisley, Lampe, or McDyess contributed much to the Suns. This trade did one thing, clear up cap space. Both Stephon Marbury and Anfernee “Penny” Hardaway were set to make $14.625 million in 2005.
Marbury was still playing at an all-star level. He had made the All-NBA 3rd team as recently as 2003. Penny, however, was not his former self. He was 32 years old and averaging 8.7 points in 26 minutes per game.
In 2005, the NBA salary cap was $43.87 million. Spending almost $30 million on these two players was not going to get the Suns anywhere. In fact, the suns were 12-23 on January 5, 2004. It was time for a change.
This first trade gives us three branches on our trade tree. Lampe, Snyder, and Hayward. Eisley, McDyess, Vujanic, and Ward were not traded away and so do not give us new branches. The value the Suns got out of them is listed in its entirety below:
February 19, 2004
Phoenix Suns trade:
- Tom Gugliotta
- 2004 1st round pick (Kirk Snyder)
- 2010 1st round pick (Gordon Hayward)
- 2005 2nd round pick (Alex Acker
Utah Jazz trade:
- Keon Clark
- Ben Handlogten
A month after the Penny/Marbury trade, the Suns weren’t done dumping salary! Gugliotta was on an expiring $11.67 million contract and the Suns wanted to dump it. In return, the Suns got Keon Clark, who never played for the Suns and was on a $5 million deal and Ben Handlogten, who was waived shortly after the trade. Handlogten made $366,000 in 2003-2004.
This trade kills me. Gugliotta was on an expiring contract. The Suns did not need to trade him away. They packaged two first round picks, one of which went on to become Gordon Hayward, to save a raw salary maximum of about $6.3 million in a losing season.
You might be wondering if there were luxury tax implications in this trade, and there were. The Suns got just below the luxury tax threshold, which saved them about $5 million more. In total, the Suns traded away two first-round picks (one future All-Star) for around $11-12 million dollars in salary and tax savings.
Four months later in June, Robert Sarver would take control of the team. Was this deal done so that Sarver wasn’t coming into a team where he had to cut a check for deals he didn’t make? Maybe. I’lll argue, probably.
If the Suns hadn’t done this and had cleared cap space while also bringing in two first round picks, the Penny/Marbury trade probably looks a lot better today.
This, by the way, brings us to the end of our first branch of the butterfly effect trade tree. Both first round picks, the ones that became Snyder and Hayward, end here as the Suns received nothing in return that could be traded away for more value.
January 21, 2005
Phoenix Suns trade:
- Maciej Lampe
- Casey Jacobsen
- Jackson Vroman
New Orleans Hornets trade:
- Jim Jackson
- 2005 2nd round pick (Marcin Gortat)
This trade is simple. The Suns traded three bench guys that didn’t mean much to the organization for a bench guy and a 2nd round pick. None of Lampe, Jacobsen, or Vroman ever did much for the Suns and, as you can see below, neither did Jim Jackson. Overall, this was actually a pretty good value trade for the Suns.
What this trade does not do, is end the Maciej Lampe trade tree. The Suns received Gortat in this deal, who was later dealt on draft night in one final trade in our butterfly effect.
June 28, 2005
It’s draft night in the NBA. The Phoenix Suns are coming off a 62-20 season, and fans are excited to see what young players get added to their favorite team. The Suns have the Bulls’ pick in the first round, which they got in the last draft when they traded away the draft rights to Luol Deng. With that 21st overall pick, Phoenix selected Nate Robinson, whom they turned around and traded that night for…Kurt Thomas. Thomas would go on to play a grand total of 120 games for Phoenix.
But never mind that, the Suns are up again in the second round, and they pick the Polish Hammer himself, Marcin Gortat! He didn’t come over to the NBA until the 2007-2008 season, so this was a “draft and stash” pick. Gortat’s three seasons in Phoenix would be the best of his career, averaging 13.3 points, 9.3 rebounds, and 1.5 blocks from 2011 to 2013.
What’s that, you say? I said he was drafted in 2005? He was! But, he was promptly traded to Orlando for Robert Sarver’s favorite player, Cash Considerations. The Suns ended up trading for him again in December of 2010, righting a wrong perpetrated half a decade before.
Final Result
And that brings us to the end of the Penny Hardaway and Stephon Marbury trade trees. Here is the final result of what the Suns got back for those two players.
Along the way, they traded away a future All-Star and a starting-caliber center to get to this result. What a pitiful return. This is a whole lot of nothing returned for a trade that involved a recent All-NBA player. The Suns better have at least used that cap space well. Who did they go out and sign that offseason anyway?
Oh…right. Well, then I suppose the final tracker should look more like this:
When you look at it like that, this isn’t a bad trade after all, is it? If you could go back in time, you do this over and over and over again.
As a side note, Steve Nash was traded to the Los Angeles Lakers in 2012 but I am not going to continue down the Steve Nash trade tree in this article, as he was not directly acquired in a trade from the Dallas Mavericks, he was signed. While the cap space generated from the Marbury & Hardaway butterfly effect brought Nash to the Suns, the trade tree does not directly lead to him.
Why start here?
I wanted to start with this trade because it was a salary dump. There are other, more complex trades, such as the one that brought Kevin Durant or Mikal Bridges to Phoenix, that I could have started with. But this one checks a few boxes. It is low complexity to establish the rules of our Butterfly Effect series, and it had a high impact. Steve Nash is probably the highest impact acquisition in Suns history, depending on whether you put him or Barkley at #1.
Another thing I want to point out with this series is just how disappointing any one given transaction can be in the long run. I am of the opinion that most trades are not four quarters for a dollar, but rather three quarters and a dime for a dollar. Eventually, if you make that kind of trade enough times, you are left with pennies. Maybe we will find out that I am right, maybe we will find out that I’m wrong. Hopefully, we can identify what kind of trades bring the most value to a team.
So as the offseason continues, let’s explore the butterfly effects of some of the biggest trades in Phoenix Suns history.
