Post by Haberino on Jun 16, 2011 17:18:17 GMT -5
In the 2010 offseason, fresh off a crushing conference finals defeat - in which they'd been up 3-0 - the front office in Oklahoma City decided to deal young prospects Stephen Curry and Martell Webster for Eddy Curry. The next year, the two combined to score nearly 55 points per game, and each went on to star on several championship teams. The Thunder, meanwhile, raced to a 48-6 start, but injuries cost them a shot at the title, and within a season, they were rebuilding.
Aaron Haberman, General Manager:
No, I have no regrets about dealing for Eddy Curry. I hear often that we weren't thinking long term with that trade, which I think is silly. Would people be saying that if David West stayed healthy? I didn't hear that when we started the season 48-6.
Rich Cho, Assistant GM:
We were all on board with that deal, and I'd do it again if I could. Our thinking at the time was, essentially, Fuck Chris Bosh.
Gerald Wallace, ex-Thunder star:
If Chris stayed, I have no doubt I would have spent the rest of my career in OKC, and we would've been tough to stop.
Haberman:
Word had spread that we weren't committed to keeping Bosh once he re-signed. Chris was hurt, as Chris perpetually seems to be, and he signed elsewhere. Rich and I hated the guy. A lot of people in the organization did. And then we're one win away from the finals, up 3-0 on Eddy Curry and the Nuggets, and they move Chris Bosh to the 2 and we just have no answer for the lineup they put out there.
Cho:
We were a win away. We wanted to get to the finals and win. At that point, Eddy Curry was the most dominant force in the league. When you've just made the conference finals, and you already have guys like Jamal Crawford and Marc Gasol on board, you go get Eddy Curry.
Haberman:
It's well document what Stephen Curry and Martell Webster went on to do. Two superstars, two career winners, and they could've made an unstoppable backcourt here. But we had Jamal at the 1, and we had a chance to get Eddy Curry and we took it.
Eddy Curry, ex-Thunder star:
It was a weird time. We had a great thing going in Denver, but the league shook things up, Nanz got reassigned to LA, and the core was broken up. But I was thrilled to come here. We barely beat those guys in the conference finals. They were young, they were fun, they were talented, and they wanted to win. I thought the pieces fit perfectly.
Haberman:
I didn't think anyone had any chance to stop us.
Jamal Crawford, Point Guard:
From Day 1 it was different with Eddy here. We weren't underdogs, we weren't threats, we were the absolute top dog. Eddy set the done and we followed.
David West:
It was the best time of my career. I mean we were scoring 125 points a night, winning games by 20 points. I still remember how shocking it was the night we lost at home to Atlanta. I'd been on a lot of losing teams, and I'll tell you, you know you're good when a loss stings that much.
Haberman:
We were 48 and fucking 6 and I'm getting asked if I regret dealing for Eddy Curry.
Marc Gasol:
I had to get hurt. Thank God I was back for the playoffs, but I'll never get over that injury. I'll be honest with you, we wanted 70. We really wanted 70.
Eddy Curry:
What bothers me is that we have to talk about this one season because it was our only chance. Look, to get to the point, David West got hurt against Minnesota and we couldn't get it done without him. But so what? That loss hurts me as much as anyone, believe me, but I've been on title teams, and when you want to win, you don't sit and reflect on your losses for years and years. We won 65 games, we were 48-6, we didn't think anyone could stop us. Why didn't we come back that next season and prove ourselves?
David West:
I got hurt in the playoffs and I guess the next season they lost faith in what we had. The end came too soon.
Jamal Crawford:
The people in OKC were good to me, very good to me, and it was the best time of my career. But I did think they were wrong to move Eddy, and I think they were wrong to sit on their hands in the offseason.
Haberman:
A lot of times you hear about this idea of the playoff team - a team that's not the cream of the crop in the regular season, but a matchup nightmare nonetheless.
Curry:
We were a playoff team in 2012. We were designed for the playoffs.
Haberman:
And I think a few Thunder teams proved there's some validity to that. But what we had that year wasn't a playoff team. Jamal was tired. He'd had an excellent, all-world career, but he gave us a lot of minutes and a lot of energy, and he slowed down at 32. Look at the numbers. We didn't think our backcourt would hold up against Minnesota or Phoenix.
Cho:
We had a chance to get guys we thought would be main cogs in our next effort to win. We though we could get younger and still contend with no years off. We took it.
Curry:
I was doing 26 and 13 the year they dealt me. Great percentages, 3.5 blocks. Who was going to stop me and Marc up front?
Crawford:
From the minute the new guys came in, we knew the writing was on the wall. I tried to be that leader, to get Marc to be dominant, and I knew these guys were talented, so I thought hey, maybe we can win with this team. We lost in the first round, and the next year all of a sudden the new guys are shipped off and I'm a veteran on a 23 win team.
Gasol:
I still don't understand how it was that I got dealt.
Haberman:
That offseason, we reassessed some things, and we thought our best play was a complete rebuild.
Cho:
His great problem isn't impatience. It's miscalculation. He got Kevin Love, Marc Gasol, and Martell Webster for Gerald Wallace, and he turned Love into Stephen Curry. So he got three all-time great players in one deal and that was the guiding force in moving Gasol, with the logic being that he could apparently get three more future stars.
Haberman:
I don't know. I guess I thought I was Billy Beane, constantly flipping established pieces for good prospects.
Cho:
But hitting it big with one package of prospects clearly is in no way predictive of what will happen with the next batch.
Haberman:
I got two fucking busts back for Marc Gasol. Plain and simple. Those guys didn't work to improve, and they have themselves to thank for their nothing careers. No love lost. They were the downfall of our winning culture, and if we didn't pick Ray McCallum, I don't know where we'd be.
Cho:
That deal's saving grace was that we got our pick back. And of course, where Ray McCallum's concerned, the rest is well known history.
Haberman:
We loved him. Still do.
Cho:
The next year, Aaron was in a rush to prove his prospects were still the real deal. We thought, well, we have a franchise point guard, we have two really good other young players. Do we need to tank another year? Why not bring in talent?
Haberman:
I was impatient and I thought we had all the youth we could ever need, so we tried to win in 2014. And we won 48 games, but these guys weren't pieces to win with long term. Hinrich and Yao were old, and Amir Johnson was gonna cost a lot of money to keep. But hey, we made the finals.
Ray McCallum, Point Guard:
It was weird, because from Day 1 I was hyped as the savior, and my rookie year we won 48 games and made the finals. So I thought I was gonna step in for Kirk and we'd keep winning, and instead they decided to rebuild.
Haberman:
It took a lot for us to make the finals that year. Deron Williams went down in Round 1 and we pulled off the major upset. Minnesota pulled off a major upset, too, and we were able to take them down in Round 2. I still don't know how we took down that Dallas team in the conference finals. They weren't dominant, but we had nobody on par with Gerald Wallace or Andrew Bynum.
Cho:
That time, I thought it was the right decision to rebuild. Unfortunately we didn't put together the best core.
Haberman:
Another fucking one year rebuild. Another core of fucking busts. We still thought Tobias Harris was good. Wrong. We brought in the #2 pick from a few years prior, a 23 year-old with all the skill in the world, Terrence Jones. Bust. Terrence Ross didn't improve, either. Earl Dawson panned out, sure, but we already had Ray at the 1.
Cho:
You absolutely have to take the good with the bad with his style of GMing. I hated dealing for Durant, Josh Smith, and Andrew Bynum. These guys were all expensive and around 30. I didn't want to see Ray get dealt like all the others just because we were too short-sighted to build a core of guys his age. But who's to say he wasn't right? That wasn't a dominant core, but they made it to the finals, pulling off an all-time great upset. And the guys we built around Ray the previous year have never been relevant.
Haberman:
The next year we get two all-world shotblockers and make the finals. That was a team built for the playoffs. We were dominant in all the important ways: huge steals, huge blocks, low turnovers. A backcourt that did 50 points a night, a frontcourt that shutdown everyone.
Cho:
The last thing that was, was a fluke. A fluke team doesn't take down 67 and 60 win teams in consecutive rounds. Upsets, sure, but that team fit together real well.
Greivis Vasquez:
We liked the matchup with Memphis. We knew our frontcourt was better than theirs. We felt there wasn't a guy in the league who could get his numbers on Josh Smith. But I have to hand it to coach, he took a big risk in that series, because I hadn't started all season, and I never started at point guard before for him.
Haberman:
Greivis had a lot of advantages on Stephen at 6'6, 200 pounds. He was our do-it-all, and it took a lot to decide maybe Ray wasn't the right option at the 1. Here was a 25 and 10 PG moving out of position, but everyone handled their new role and we pulled off the upset.
Josh Smith:
I was in OKC for 4.5 years. It's a goofy organization, because they always want something different from what they have, but they make it work. It was weird, because I thought I was coming into this great organization and helping keep them a contender, and then that offseason I'm shipped off. A few years later, I'm back and we're sort of floating in the water. But we liked what we had in 2017, and that was one of the best playoff runs I've been apart of. I can't tell you what it was like to beat two 60 win teams on the road and end up in the finals.
Rich Cho:
That offseason, we had a lost of decisions to make. We were all tired of the up and down, and we believed firmly that this was a winning core. Ray was becoming one of the best players in the league, and we had the necessary rebounding, shotblocking, and depth of scorers. We thought Andrew Bynum's 11 million dollar expiring contract was the only thing standing in the way of us turning this into a contender.
Haberman:
We had a contender, but it was a really fragile one. We didn't have the assets or the individual talent to survive one of our key pieces leaving, and unfortunately this league is full of fucking assholes who jump ship irrationally. We offered Bynum more money and a team that was 10 times better and he chooses to go to fucking Utah. Well, we won 52 games the next year with an inferior team, and didn't have a good playoff run for 5 or 6 seasons because he left a team that had just made the finals.
Bynum:
There's too much turnover in that organization, and I saw what I thought was the writing on the wall. Kevin, Josh and I weren't young, but Ray was. I thought hey, they're gonna deal me to rebuild around Ray again, so why not just pick my own place to play?
Cho:
We told Bynum we were totally committed to competing, and if you look at the history of it, we were. The only losing season we've had since then was the year we 38 games because Josh missed 65 of them, and last year, when Kemba and Derrick were hurt. But he ended up getting his ring, so I'm sure he has no regrets. The rest of us do.
Coming soon: Part II, 2019-present
Aaron Haberman, General Manager:
No, I have no regrets about dealing for Eddy Curry. I hear often that we weren't thinking long term with that trade, which I think is silly. Would people be saying that if David West stayed healthy? I didn't hear that when we started the season 48-6.
Rich Cho, Assistant GM:
We were all on board with that deal, and I'd do it again if I could. Our thinking at the time was, essentially, Fuck Chris Bosh.
Gerald Wallace, ex-Thunder star:
If Chris stayed, I have no doubt I would have spent the rest of my career in OKC, and we would've been tough to stop.
Haberman:
Word had spread that we weren't committed to keeping Bosh once he re-signed. Chris was hurt, as Chris perpetually seems to be, and he signed elsewhere. Rich and I hated the guy. A lot of people in the organization did. And then we're one win away from the finals, up 3-0 on Eddy Curry and the Nuggets, and they move Chris Bosh to the 2 and we just have no answer for the lineup they put out there.
Cho:
We were a win away. We wanted to get to the finals and win. At that point, Eddy Curry was the most dominant force in the league. When you've just made the conference finals, and you already have guys like Jamal Crawford and Marc Gasol on board, you go get Eddy Curry.
Haberman:
It's well document what Stephen Curry and Martell Webster went on to do. Two superstars, two career winners, and they could've made an unstoppable backcourt here. But we had Jamal at the 1, and we had a chance to get Eddy Curry and we took it.
Eddy Curry, ex-Thunder star:
It was a weird time. We had a great thing going in Denver, but the league shook things up, Nanz got reassigned to LA, and the core was broken up. But I was thrilled to come here. We barely beat those guys in the conference finals. They were young, they were fun, they were talented, and they wanted to win. I thought the pieces fit perfectly.
Haberman:
I didn't think anyone had any chance to stop us.
Jamal Crawford, Point Guard:
From Day 1 it was different with Eddy here. We weren't underdogs, we weren't threats, we were the absolute top dog. Eddy set the done and we followed.
David West:
It was the best time of my career. I mean we were scoring 125 points a night, winning games by 20 points. I still remember how shocking it was the night we lost at home to Atlanta. I'd been on a lot of losing teams, and I'll tell you, you know you're good when a loss stings that much.
Haberman:
We were 48 and fucking 6 and I'm getting asked if I regret dealing for Eddy Curry.
Marc Gasol:
I had to get hurt. Thank God I was back for the playoffs, but I'll never get over that injury. I'll be honest with you, we wanted 70. We really wanted 70.
Eddy Curry:
What bothers me is that we have to talk about this one season because it was our only chance. Look, to get to the point, David West got hurt against Minnesota and we couldn't get it done without him. But so what? That loss hurts me as much as anyone, believe me, but I've been on title teams, and when you want to win, you don't sit and reflect on your losses for years and years. We won 65 games, we were 48-6, we didn't think anyone could stop us. Why didn't we come back that next season and prove ourselves?
David West:
I got hurt in the playoffs and I guess the next season they lost faith in what we had. The end came too soon.
Jamal Crawford:
The people in OKC were good to me, very good to me, and it was the best time of my career. But I did think they were wrong to move Eddy, and I think they were wrong to sit on their hands in the offseason.
Haberman:
A lot of times you hear about this idea of the playoff team - a team that's not the cream of the crop in the regular season, but a matchup nightmare nonetheless.
Curry:
We were a playoff team in 2012. We were designed for the playoffs.
Haberman:
And I think a few Thunder teams proved there's some validity to that. But what we had that year wasn't a playoff team. Jamal was tired. He'd had an excellent, all-world career, but he gave us a lot of minutes and a lot of energy, and he slowed down at 32. Look at the numbers. We didn't think our backcourt would hold up against Minnesota or Phoenix.
Cho:
We had a chance to get guys we thought would be main cogs in our next effort to win. We though we could get younger and still contend with no years off. We took it.
Curry:
I was doing 26 and 13 the year they dealt me. Great percentages, 3.5 blocks. Who was going to stop me and Marc up front?
Crawford:
From the minute the new guys came in, we knew the writing was on the wall. I tried to be that leader, to get Marc to be dominant, and I knew these guys were talented, so I thought hey, maybe we can win with this team. We lost in the first round, and the next year all of a sudden the new guys are shipped off and I'm a veteran on a 23 win team.
Gasol:
I still don't understand how it was that I got dealt.
Haberman:
That offseason, we reassessed some things, and we thought our best play was a complete rebuild.
Cho:
His great problem isn't impatience. It's miscalculation. He got Kevin Love, Marc Gasol, and Martell Webster for Gerald Wallace, and he turned Love into Stephen Curry. So he got three all-time great players in one deal and that was the guiding force in moving Gasol, with the logic being that he could apparently get three more future stars.
Haberman:
I don't know. I guess I thought I was Billy Beane, constantly flipping established pieces for good prospects.
Cho:
But hitting it big with one package of prospects clearly is in no way predictive of what will happen with the next batch.
Haberman:
I got two fucking busts back for Marc Gasol. Plain and simple. Those guys didn't work to improve, and they have themselves to thank for their nothing careers. No love lost. They were the downfall of our winning culture, and if we didn't pick Ray McCallum, I don't know where we'd be.
Cho:
That deal's saving grace was that we got our pick back. And of course, where Ray McCallum's concerned, the rest is well known history.
Haberman:
We loved him. Still do.
Cho:
The next year, Aaron was in a rush to prove his prospects were still the real deal. We thought, well, we have a franchise point guard, we have two really good other young players. Do we need to tank another year? Why not bring in talent?
Haberman:
I was impatient and I thought we had all the youth we could ever need, so we tried to win in 2014. And we won 48 games, but these guys weren't pieces to win with long term. Hinrich and Yao were old, and Amir Johnson was gonna cost a lot of money to keep. But hey, we made the finals.
Ray McCallum, Point Guard:
It was weird, because from Day 1 I was hyped as the savior, and my rookie year we won 48 games and made the finals. So I thought I was gonna step in for Kirk and we'd keep winning, and instead they decided to rebuild.
Haberman:
It took a lot for us to make the finals that year. Deron Williams went down in Round 1 and we pulled off the major upset. Minnesota pulled off a major upset, too, and we were able to take them down in Round 2. I still don't know how we took down that Dallas team in the conference finals. They weren't dominant, but we had nobody on par with Gerald Wallace or Andrew Bynum.
Cho:
That time, I thought it was the right decision to rebuild. Unfortunately we didn't put together the best core.
Haberman:
Another fucking one year rebuild. Another core of fucking busts. We still thought Tobias Harris was good. Wrong. We brought in the #2 pick from a few years prior, a 23 year-old with all the skill in the world, Terrence Jones. Bust. Terrence Ross didn't improve, either. Earl Dawson panned out, sure, but we already had Ray at the 1.
Cho:
You absolutely have to take the good with the bad with his style of GMing. I hated dealing for Durant, Josh Smith, and Andrew Bynum. These guys were all expensive and around 30. I didn't want to see Ray get dealt like all the others just because we were too short-sighted to build a core of guys his age. But who's to say he wasn't right? That wasn't a dominant core, but they made it to the finals, pulling off an all-time great upset. And the guys we built around Ray the previous year have never been relevant.
Haberman:
The next year we get two all-world shotblockers and make the finals. That was a team built for the playoffs. We were dominant in all the important ways: huge steals, huge blocks, low turnovers. A backcourt that did 50 points a night, a frontcourt that shutdown everyone.
Cho:
The last thing that was, was a fluke. A fluke team doesn't take down 67 and 60 win teams in consecutive rounds. Upsets, sure, but that team fit together real well.
Greivis Vasquez:
We liked the matchup with Memphis. We knew our frontcourt was better than theirs. We felt there wasn't a guy in the league who could get his numbers on Josh Smith. But I have to hand it to coach, he took a big risk in that series, because I hadn't started all season, and I never started at point guard before for him.
Haberman:
Greivis had a lot of advantages on Stephen at 6'6, 200 pounds. He was our do-it-all, and it took a lot to decide maybe Ray wasn't the right option at the 1. Here was a 25 and 10 PG moving out of position, but everyone handled their new role and we pulled off the upset.
Josh Smith:
I was in OKC for 4.5 years. It's a goofy organization, because they always want something different from what they have, but they make it work. It was weird, because I thought I was coming into this great organization and helping keep them a contender, and then that offseason I'm shipped off. A few years later, I'm back and we're sort of floating in the water. But we liked what we had in 2017, and that was one of the best playoff runs I've been apart of. I can't tell you what it was like to beat two 60 win teams on the road and end up in the finals.
Rich Cho:
That offseason, we had a lost of decisions to make. We were all tired of the up and down, and we believed firmly that this was a winning core. Ray was becoming one of the best players in the league, and we had the necessary rebounding, shotblocking, and depth of scorers. We thought Andrew Bynum's 11 million dollar expiring contract was the only thing standing in the way of us turning this into a contender.
Haberman:
We had a contender, but it was a really fragile one. We didn't have the assets or the individual talent to survive one of our key pieces leaving, and unfortunately this league is full of fucking assholes who jump ship irrationally. We offered Bynum more money and a team that was 10 times better and he chooses to go to fucking Utah. Well, we won 52 games the next year with an inferior team, and didn't have a good playoff run for 5 or 6 seasons because he left a team that had just made the finals.
Bynum:
There's too much turnover in that organization, and I saw what I thought was the writing on the wall. Kevin, Josh and I weren't young, but Ray was. I thought hey, they're gonna deal me to rebuild around Ray again, so why not just pick my own place to play?
Cho:
We told Bynum we were totally committed to competing, and if you look at the history of it, we were. The only losing season we've had since then was the year we 38 games because Josh missed 65 of them, and last year, when Kemba and Derrick were hurt. But he ended up getting his ring, so I'm sure he has no regrets. The rest of us do.
Coming soon: Part II, 2019-present
