- 2 days ago
The 2004 Pistons were in a pickle: They wanted to win in 2004, but they didn't want to hurt their chances of winning past 2004. GM Joe Dumars had a lot of options available to adjust the team midseason, but he had to find one that would please his impatient coach, Larry Brown, *and* preserve cap space to keep the team afloat in the years to come. In the end, he went all in on the now. He went for Rasheed Wallace. It paid off, but not without some long-term effects.
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00:00The 2003-2004 Detroit Pistons
00:03are under a ton of pressure.
00:05The Pistons started this season poorly.
00:08They have a new old coach and a new young draft pick
00:12and both are grumpy,
00:14despite what the totally natural chemistry
00:16of this photo might suggest.
00:18But now Detroit is winning enough
00:20that GM Joe Dumars feels like he's got to go for it
00:24and his target is capricious big man Rasheed Wallace.
00:27But, uh-oh, she just got traded to the Atlanta Hawks,
00:32so there goes that opportunity.
00:33And the trade deadline is approaching fast,
00:36unless maybe not?
00:39Is Rasheed Wallace really gonna get traded twice
00:41in the same month?
00:43Is he even worth the trouble?
00:45Yes and yes.
00:47The Pistons trade for Rasheed Wallace
00:49was a championship-sized big deal.
00:55In the 03-04 season, Pistons GM Joe Dumars
00:59put himself in a bit of a predicament.
01:01By far, the hardest part of this script
01:03was choosing when to use the two phones photo.
01:06This spot feels right.
01:08Anyway, for a couple years,
01:09the Pistons had been very good, but not great.
01:12Dumars built a solid core that played terrific defense,
01:15and Detroit recorded consecutive 50 win seasons in 02 and 03.
01:19But come playoff time, stronger Eastern Conference teams prevailed.
01:24In the summer of 2003, Dumars made two huge changes.
01:29One calculated, the other kind of happenstance.
01:32The first was firing head coach Rick Carlisle.
01:35Carlisle had only coached two seasons in Detroit,
01:38and they represented the best basketball
01:40the Pistons had played in a decade, but out he went.
01:44Fans and media were dismayed by the firing,
01:47but if there was one thing to critique about Carlisle's tenure,
01:51it was his reluctance to mobilize youth.
01:53Behind their core, Detroit had a couple rookies
01:56who hadn't gotten to show off their promise until it was too late.
01:59And they were about to add another.
02:02That's the second big change.
02:03Thanks to a past trade and some surprise lottery luck,
02:07the Pistons owned the number two pick in the loaded 2003 draft.
02:12They couldn't snag LeBron James, but they could claim literally anyone else
02:17from one of the most promising rookie classes ever assembled.
02:21A rare, lucky luxury for a winning team.
02:24With a surprise open coaching seat and a surprise primo draft pick in hand,
02:30Dumars, ah man, let's just run it back.
02:32Dumars grabbed both his phones and dialed up more surprises.
02:36First, Dumars hired Larry Brown, an accomplished, if ornery, coaching legend who,
02:43even more than Carlisle, was known for burying young players.
02:47That alone is not surprising.
02:49The surprising part was when Dumars then used his number two pick not as trade bait for a star,
02:55not as an opportunity to add a relatively known quantity at a position of need,
03:00but to pick up Darko Milicic, the youngest player in the draft,
03:05a raw and mysterious teenage center from overseas.
03:08Then Dumars traded away a couple of savvy role-player veterans that Brown might have preferred.
03:14It just didn't quite add up on paper.
03:17And by midwinter, it wasn't quite adding up on the court.
03:21Brown hardly used the hotshot new kid, Milicic.
03:24He and his staff had problems with players up and down the rotation,
03:28youngsters and vets alike.
03:30And the 03-04 Pistons weren't winning at the same clip as prior years.
03:35They did not look equipped to achieve their goal of winning the East,
03:39especially with new rivals entering contention.
03:42By January, Larry Brown was reacting the way Larry Brown notoriously reacted to things.
03:47Fix my roster. Make a trade.
03:50Here, even earlier than expected, was the so-called philosophical contradiction
03:55everyone saw coming.
03:57Brown was thinking short-term. Win-win-win. Now, now, now.
04:00Dumars said, no, don't jump off the bandwagon. You must continue to believe.
04:05The GM felt compelled to balance the present with the future.
04:09Dumars had his eye on the summer of 04,
04:11when second-year Turkish big man Mehmet Okur would become a restricted free agent.
04:16Okur had been a great second-round pick for the Pistons,
04:19and Dumars wanted to get Detroit further below the salary cap so they could match offer
04:23sheets and re-sign the promising Okur.
04:26In any event, the GM did not make a hasty move to get his coach some veteran help.
04:31He waited and watched, and here's what he saw.
04:34In December and January, the Pistons rang up a 13-game win streak,
04:39tying a franchise record set by the 1990 champions.
04:43The wins were a nice validation of Dumars' plea to stay on the bandwagon.
04:47But the streak also put Dumars in a bind as the NBA's mid-February trade deadline approached.
04:53Once you've used the photo twice, you gotta go in for a third time.
04:56That's it, I promise.
04:58Dumars had to decide.
04:59Should he keep the focus on cutting salary to help future rosters contend for a title,
05:04or shift focus to adding talent so the current roster
05:08could maximize its chances at winning the 2004 title?
05:12The former path was straightforward.
05:14Dumars could trade away some backups for basically nothing to open up more cap space,
05:18then he would almost certainly be able to re-sign Okur in the offseason.
05:22But that would not improve Coach Brown's rotation.
05:25So if and when the Pistons flamed out in the 0-4 playoffs, Brown would absolutely whine,
05:30and people would absolutely blame Dumars, who had fired the prior coach,
05:35and wasted an exceptional draft opportunity.
05:38Which, yeah, drafting Darko was already looking like a huge mistake.
05:43Okay, so what about making a win-now trade?
05:46After trading away Clifford Robinson,
05:49Detroit's foremost position of need remained at power forward.
05:52Ben Wallace was a magisterial defensive center, but had almost nothing to offer on offense.
05:58And Detroit didn't roster a true four built to complement Big Ben.
06:03They were stuck either playing Okur out of position or leaning on 35-year-old Eldon Campbell.
06:09Especially in a playoff race that would bring Detroit up against star power forwards like Jermaine O'Neal and Kenyon
06:15Martin,
06:15this was a big flaw.
06:17Dumars checked the market for low-stakes options.
06:21Chicago's Marcus Fizer?
06:23Probably not good enough.
06:24And Dumars said any rumored deals with the Bulls were bogus.
06:27The Sixers tried to offer up Glenn Robinson, who was a little beat up but still quite a good scorer.
06:33But Dumars didn't want Big Dog's salary.
06:36Other fours supposedly on the trade block didn't quite fit on the court or on the payroll.
06:41Daniel Marshall, Jawan Howard, Malik Rose.
06:45It was slim pickings.
06:46With one exception, Rashid Wallace.
06:50Sheed had worn out his welcome with the Portland Trailblazers, which we'll talk about.
06:55But the big guy had a lot going for him.
06:576'11", natural power forward in his prime, scoring ability inside and out,
07:02defense strong enough to fit in Detroit's style of play.
07:06Fellow Tar Heel Larry Brown was a big, big fan.
07:09That was the guy he wanted.
07:11Wallace also had an expiring contract.
07:14So while Dumars had shut down the notion of trading for Wallace earlier in the season,
07:19acquiring Sheed increasingly seemed like the best way to improve immediately
07:24without squeezing the salary cap later.
07:26It was kind of a perf-
07:28Ah, shit!
07:30A week and a half before the trade deadline, the lottery-bound Atlanta Hawks dumped a bunch
07:35of contracts on the Blazers in exchange for Sheed.
07:38Bad news for the Pistons.
07:40But wait, good news?
07:43The Hawks didn't really want him.
07:45It was a purely cynical salary dump, and by the time Wallace had played literally one game,
07:50Atlanta was willing to trade him once more.
07:52But wait, bad news again!
07:55Sheed was telling friends he wanted to play for the New York Knicks, and his agent outright confirmed it.
08:01And the Knicks liked him back.
08:03Detroit had competition.
08:04So here, with the Pistons slumping again and the trade deadline approaching fast,
08:09was a new version of the Joe Dumars conundrum.
08:12Dumars had basically revealed that Detroit intended to make a move,
08:16but hadn't found a sensible short-slash-long-term fit outside of Rashid Wallace.
08:22Sheed was, oddly enough, available again,
08:25but the lay of the land looked a bit different from the prior week.
08:29Wallace's pros were clear, but the list of cons had gotten longer.
08:32The pre-existing con was a vague cloud of character issues from Portland.
08:37A heap of technical fouls, fines, plus some off-court stuff,
08:41albeit nothing like the grimmest headlines generated by some of his teammates on the so-called jailblazers.
08:48But there was still the potential for bad PR in any Sheed trade.
08:52Then you could add in the new cons.
08:54The dude very clearly wanted to be a Knick.
08:57So this made trading with the Hawks to get Sheed a dicey proposition.
09:02Atlanta wasn't desperate to resolve a headache like the Blazers were.
09:05The Hawks were just holding Sheed hostage to see if they could make good teams bid against each other for
09:10a trade.
09:11Through this lens, Wallace's expiring contract had a downside.
09:16If he was just going to go to New York come summertime,
09:18was it really worth ponying up players and picks to outbid other teams,
09:23all for a guy who was just going to leave town in a couple months?
09:26Joe Dumars, sorry, I lied, weighed his options, considered the pros and cons, and said,
09:32yes, it is worth it.
09:35Here is the full trade, consummated with help from the Boston Celtics on February 19th, 2004,
09:42just 10 days after the Hawks acquired Wallace.
09:44The Pistons got Rasheed Wallace from the Hawks and point guard Mike James from the Celtics.
09:49The Pistons sent bench players to each of those teams, thus clearing some salary,
09:53and they also sent each of those teams a future first-round pick.
09:57All parts of this warrant unpacking.
09:59The top-line outcome here is straightforward.
10:02This was a win-now move.
10:04Trade skeptics said, well, Detroit better win the title or this is going to look bad.
10:09Pistons rivals felt like Detroit had just been handed a massive boost to those title odds.
10:14Indeed, Rasheed Wallace fit exactly as one would hope alongside the unrelated Ben Wallace,
10:20did not cause trouble, played splendidly on both ends,
10:23and helped the Detroit Pistons win the 2004 NBA championship.
10:29Detroit vanquished their old rival in the Nets,
10:31took down the upstart Pacers to break through to the NBA Finals,
10:34and then pulled off a shocking takedown of the stacked LA Lakers to win it all.
10:40Throughout that run, Sheed was an X-factor.
10:43Plenty productive on the court and a critical locker room voice-slash-vibes guy-slash-face of the franchise.
10:49And Mike James pitched in too.
10:51The answer to, is it worth it to trade real assets for a guy who's only under contract for three
10:57months,
10:58is a resounding yes if you're going to win the title.
11:01But winning the title did change things.
11:03Remember, Joe Dumars knowingly traded for a guy who wanted to join the Knicks.
11:09That was acceptable because it would let Detroit re-sign Mehmet Okur.
11:13But first of all, Okur was displeased with the way Sheed's arrival affected his role.
11:18And most of all, the short-term payoff of the Sheed acquisition
11:22was so great that all involved were like, forget it, let's stay together.
11:28Signing Sheed meant abandoning what was once Joe Dumars' off-season priority.
11:33Detroit could not match Utah's offer sheet for Okur.
11:37Wallace played five more very good years on very good Detroit teams that didn't win another title.
11:44Okur also had a very good next five years on very good jazz teams that also did not win a
11:49title.
11:50Statistically, they were pretty close and Okur was much cheaper and younger.
11:55None of this is to say Joe Dumars spent a single moment regretting that shift in priorities.
11:59He was too distracted by the gleam of his 2004 championship ring.
12:04I'm just saying, the immediate success of the trade did have ripple effects on the future of the Pistons.
12:10And this applies to the other teams too.
12:13Yes, Boston and Atlanta for sure helped Detroit win the 2004 title.
12:18But don't forget they also each received a 2004 first-round pick from Detroit.
12:23Atlanta got to pick 17th.
12:25And I mean, Josh Smith's whole deal is too funky to summarize right now,
12:29but that's a valuable draft pick and a valuable player, at least for a time.
12:33And for facilitating the salary balance of the Sheed trade,
12:36Boston received Detroit's 25th pick in 2004.
12:40And hey, they too got a key player who would help them win a title one day.
12:45Boston and Atlanta each got something out of the exchange.
12:48It was not a total robbery.
12:51Really, the only pure loser here is the Knicks,
12:54who didn't feel pressure to pony up for Wallace midseason,
12:58since they thought they could sign him in free agency,
13:00only for summertime Sheed to change his mind because things went so great in Detroit.
13:05Oopsie-daisy.
13:07Everyone else got something, and the Pistons clearly got the most the fastest.
13:12Rasheed Wallace had a legendary individual run in Detroit
13:15and helped them achieve a legendary team run the moment he arrived.
13:20All of this happened because Joe Dumars faced a conundrum of his own making,
13:24struggling to balance the near-term and long-term promise of a talented roster,
13:29playing for an impatient coach.
13:31Dumars addressed his problem with a win-now trade for Rasheed Wallace,
13:36and it ended up being the perfect solution.
13:38The 2004 Pistons won now.
13:41That trade was a big, big deal.
13:47AD-
13:49That trade was a little more serious for the year before,
13:49You've got this idea to find a better way to reach the same community.
13:50You've got the concept.
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