The NBA’s White Elephants

We had our holiday party at my office this week. I’m using air quotes here, because, to describe it as a “party” is probably pretty generous. There was no booze. No decorations. Nobody dressed up as Ol’ Saint Nick. In fact, the only way you could tell it was a “party” — and not just another staff meeting — was by looking at the conference-room table, which was covered with a red paper tablecloth and littered with White Elephants.

The White Elephant gift exchange is the one saving grace of our office’s holiday party. I’m sure you’ve played before, right? It’s a satirical game that celebrates a sort of anti-holiday spirit: you scramble for the iPod and scheme to foist the homemade oven mitt onto your unwitting colleague. The game is better when two people can have conflicting opinions about the appeal of a particular item and the best gifts are the ones that inspire internal turmoil: “I think I really want this life-sized nutcracker, but where will I keep him?” Because, a White Elephant is an extravagant gift, but it is also a useless and impractical gift.

And the NBA has White Elephants, too.

Using the (fantastic and underrated) Pro Sports Transactions Archive I dug through 4,952 pro-basketball trades dating back to 1950 and found 56 players who were each traded at least six times during their respective careers. Here’s the whole parade, sorted by the number of times each player was traded and his career Win Shares (as a convenient approximation of his value over the years, available from Basketball-Reference).

You can hover, click, or highlight any of the 56 White Elephants to see more biographical details. In this group of frequently-traded individuals, the typical player was drafted in the middle of the first round and subsequently played for more than a decade on about a half-dozen teams without ever being selected as an All-Star and while being responsible for only a modest number of Win Shares each year (to be specific, here is the median for each career stat: drafted with the 18th pick, played 12 years on seven teams, 0-time All-Star, 34 career WS).

Joe Smith is our quintessential White Elephant. As the No. 1 overall draft pick in 1995 out of the University of Maryland, Smith started each of his first 211 games in the league. He initially impressed, earning All-Rookie honors and racking up 17 points and 8 boards per game during his first two-and-a-half seasons with the Warriors. But when Smith refused to sign a contract extension during his third season, he effectively signaled his intention to leave Golden State the following summer and, so, he was sent packing, preemptively. Unfortunately, those first few years proved to be Smith’s most productive ones and he spent the rest of his career bouncing around from team to team. Ultimately, Smith played for 12 different franchises and he was traded seven different times. He was never an All-Star and he made only minor contributions to the successes of his teams (60 WS over 16 seasons or about 4 WS per year).

Each year, whatever team Smith was playing for at the time would say to themselves: “Shoot. The gift exchange is today — what should we bring?” And every time, after frantically scanning around the arena for something other teams might like, they would see Joe Smith and say “He is a No. 1 draft pick, you know?” And the cycle of re-gifting continued every year, with each subsequent team having increasingly diminished expectations about the usefulness of the White Elephant they were bringing home…

Whoa, this is getting a little dark for a holiday special. Let’s take a brief interlude to discuss some ABA mustaches. [Cue the mustache music].

There were a lot of mustaches in the ABA (it was the 1970s) and there were a lot of trades too (ABA teams constantly needed extra cash) — so there is a disproportionate number of trades exchanging two ABA players with mustaches in my White Elephant database; but WOW, ABA veteran, Johnny Neumann, was really traded for a TON of different mustachioed players.

Yes, over the course of his seven-year career, Neumann was traded for a whole mound of moes: James Edwards’ handsome handlebars, Marv Roberts’ elegant lip luggage, Jim Eakins’ wild whiskers, Larry Miller’s clunky caterpillar, Mike Jackson’s frizzled face fur, and Ronnie Robinson’s stately stache.

Sadly, all of these trades appeared to take a psychological toll on Neumann. Desperate for a chance to live in any city for longer than three months at a time and ravaged by his mustache envy, the once clean-cut kid tried to grow his own facial hair. He failed. At least, initially.

Truthfully, he never did catch on with any of his ABA or NBA teams; but, he DID eventually manage to grow a pretty respectable mustache.

And that’s the thing about White Elephants. They need to demonstrate at least SOME potential — whether it’s proof of a fertile philtrum or lottery-pick credentials — they need to be at least a little bit alluring. Otherwise, nobody would ever trade for them.

The player who took tantalizing talent to its most hilarious extreme is the 34-year-old Greek forward, Giorgos Printezis. If you’re looking for his elephant icon on the chart, you’ll find him all the way at the bottom. He’s never played a game in the NBA and, consequently, hasn’t accrued any Win Shares. Yet —  seemingly undaunted by his remote locale — seven(!) different NBA general managers have made trades to acquire his draft rights.

I mean, I get it. He’s an absolute dreamboat. Like, I’m not sure if his nickname is Gorgeous Giorgos, but it definitely could be. The thing is, can he even play?

Well, he’s spent almost his entire career as a stalwart for Olympiacos, one of the two teams that dominate pro basketball in Greece. He helped them win three Greek league championships and back-to-back Euroleague championships, famously hitting the title-winning shot in 2012 against CSKA Moscow. He’s been named to the All-League team in Greece five times and was an All-Euro 1st Team selection in 2017. So, yea, he can definitely play.

But he’s basically an anomaly, the only player in history to generate so much trade interest without ever helping an NBA team win a game. In general, truly useless players don’t get traded; they get waived. Useless players don’t qualify to be White Elephants; they are the scented candles of the gift exchange, not really part of the fun.

On the other hand, there’s also probably a threshold of productivity ABOVE which a player should become overqualified to be called a White Elephant. Let’s look, for example, at the group of players whose careers were even longer than Joe Smith’s, 17 or 18 seasons, each:

Among the herd of older elephants up at the top of the chart, we find several All-Stars (Mark Jackson, Dale Ellis, Otis Thorpe) and Defensive Players of the Year (Marcus Camby, Tyson Chandler). These guys got traded a lot, sure; but they were also really good.

Currently, Chandler is the only active White Elephant left. At his peak, he was elite —  an all-NBA player, a champion. So it feels silly to saddle him with that pachyderm label; but, he HAS been traded six times. Actually, it would have been seven this season, except he was technically waived by the Suns before being signed by the Lakers a few days later. Still, Chandler’s trade history is hardly an indictment of his utility; anybody who hangs around the league as long as he has will be involved in some trades, eventually.

Now, if you want to look forward to a potential FUTURE White Elephant, Austin Rivers should definitely be at the top of your watch list. His recent move from Washington to Phoenix was already the fifth time he’s been traded in his young career (albeit two of those trades came while Rivers was still a future draft pick, with the first dating all the way back to 2005). The Suns opted to waive Rivers; but, assuming he can get himself picked up by another NBA team, he’ll only need to be traded once more to achieve White Elephant status. Good luck, Austin!

And good luck to you, dear reader, as you take on your own office gift-exchange games. Choose your White Elephants wisely. And Happy Holidays to you as well!