What Shareef Abdur-Rahim can do for you

Shareef started his career with the Vancouver Grizzlies, spending his first five years there and appearing in 375 out of a possible 378 games. Even more impressively, he played in 14,237 out of a possible 18,144 minutes in that span, 78.4% of all available minutes. Playing in over three quarters of almost every game for five years is a pretty Herculean effort for any man. But Reef didn't stop there.

In the 2001 offseason, Shareef was traded to Atlanta in a one-sided deal for Brevin Knight, Lorenzen Wright and the draft rights to Pau Gasol. (Knight, Wright and rights. I see what they did there.) Abdur-Rahim kept up his warhorse approach, and played in 77 and 81 games over the next two years, averaging over 38 minutes per game both times.

(Bonus trivia; the Grizzlies GM at the time of that Pau trade was the much maligned Billy Knight, whose next job was going to Atlanta to clear up the mess his fine trade had put them in. Tough break.)

Even more impressively, Shareef was traded to the Blazers partway through the 2003/04 season, and wound up playing in an emphatic 85 regular season games that year due to the two team's schedules not quite matching up. Reef came off the bench for the Blazers, and the 2,684 minutes that he played that season were a career low for a non-strike shortened season, but he still featured heavily. In total, Shareef had played 618 games and 22,988 minutes in his first 8 years, averages of more than 77 games and 2,873 minutes a season.

Shareef played one more year for the Blazers in 2004/05, playing in 54 games and being back to a 35 minutes per game player. He missed 28 games that year, more than his career missed games total until that point, most of which were due to elbow surgery. At the end of the year, he became a free agent, and agreed to a sign-and-trade deal to the New Jersey Nets.

Then it got weird. In a move that very rarely happens, the Nets rescinded the trade, due to some bad times that they foresaw in Shareef's physical examination results. A scan of his right knee revealed a build-up of scar tissue, and despite the fact that Shareef had not missed a single game in his career until that point with any injury with his right knee, the Nets found the prognosis sufficiently bad to rescind the trade, and to miss out on the high scoring big man that they needed so badly.

The Nets were roundly denounced as scaremongering pansies for this. Shareef wasn't happy, feeling that his name had been besmirched, and New Jersey's subsequent acquisition of Marc Jackson instead didn't quite bring with it the same hint of quality that Shareef did (who averaged as-near-as-is 20 points and 8 rebounds for his career at the time).

But in the end, they were right.


After the trade was rescinded, Shareef signed a five year full mid level exception contract with the Sacramento Kings, making basically the same money that he would have done under the original Nets deal. His first season with the Kings was solid, averaging 12.3 points in 27 minutes of 72 games, posting a PER of 17.2 and a true shooting percentage of .588%.

However, it then started to go wrong; his second season was a career worst, with averages of 9.9 points and 5.0 rebounds in 25 minutes per game, along with a troublesome 3 fouls a contest and a true shooting percentage of only .524%. Shareef still managed to appear in 80 games with 45 starts, but he had started to drop off rapidly.

From there, it capitulated; Reef appeared in only 6 games and 51 minutes the following season, missing almost the entire shaboodle with knee trouble, and he never recovered. He retired last offseason with two guaranteed years left on his contract, and with only 158 games games played to show for the $29 million that the Kings spent on him. The knee, which hadn't been a problem early in his career, had broken down in exactly the way that the Nets doctors said it would.

So you can see how the Nets were correct not to give him a six year contract.



A similar event occurred at the 2006 trade deadline. The Philadelphia 76ers, who had had their cap woefully mismanaged by their President Billy King (not Jean), decided they needed to save some money. At the same time, the New Orleans Hornets are looking for immediate big man depth to fill the void left by Chris Andersen's two year suspension, handed down the previous month.

The two agreed to a deal that saw Steven Hunter traded to the Hornets for two future second round picks, getting the Hornets some much needed big man cover and getting the Sixers out from under one of King's more ambitious contracts (a five year guaranteed deal to a backup big man who had only played more than 60 games once). However, this deal was also vetoed, after the Hornets doctors found a whole load of bad news in Hunter's right knee. Hunter had torn the ACL in the knee back in 2002, and even though he was healthy and playing at the time, the Hornets doctors didn't like the knee's prognosis, and viewed something that the Sixers doctors had deemed to be insignificant as being significant enough to cancel the deal, much to Billy and Jean's chagrin.

They were right, too. Hunter played in only 19 games and 120 minutes in the 2007/08 season due to his right knee, then missed all of last season because of it, and nearly retired at Christmas time due to the unrelenting pain. He has since been traded to the Memphis Grizzlies as a pure salary dump, where he is once again not expected to play because of the knee. If he doesn't play, this would mean a total of 120 minutes played over the last three years, while earning a tasty 8 figures for his troubles. The team rescinding the trade had once again made the right decision.

(The Hornets later suffered some karmic retribution when a salary dump of their own - Tyson Chandler to Oklahoma City - was rescinded on medical advice this past February. Given the precedent the rest of this post has set, Tyson had better take care of himself and perhaps turn to Buddhism if he wants to make the next decade.)



The obvious question, considering the nature of this blog, is "what in the name of Gary Trent does all this have to do with the Bulls?" And the answer to that question involves two of our favourite protagonists; Taj Gibson and DeJuan Blair.

Like oh so many of you, I wanted the Bulls to pick DeJuan Blair at #26. When they didn't, I aired my angst in a variety of ways, ranging from the romantic to the vitriolic. And even though I'm warming up to the Taj, I still would have preferred Blair. He was perhaps the tenth best talent in the draft, definitely the second best rebounder, and everybody knew it. Yet he still dropped all the way to 37th anyway. And that's where the 1,000 rambling words that opened this post come in.

Blair dropped that far in the draft because of the perceived health of his knees, which apparently both have no anterior cruciate ligament in them. [How is that even possible?] This was sufficient to scare away all the teams that would otherwise have snapped him up, and even though Blair's knees weren't an issue for him at all during his college career.....well, that doesn't mean that they won't be. See also; Abdur-Rahim, Shareef.

The Bulls were just one of many teams to pass on Blair for this reason, but they were also one of the ones that perhaps shouldn't. With the Bulls rebounding being decidedly average last season (giving up the third worst offensive rebounding percentage in the league) and with an ever-present itch for size on the interior still going unscratched, they passed on the second best rebounder in the draft in order to take a skinny shot blocker with pretty bad defensive rebounding skills. It didn't really make any sense, and Taj's early showings of control, grace and surprising skill haven't changed the fact that Blair is the superior player.

And Blair hasn't really assuaged our pain any by leading his Spurs in points (17.7 ppg), rebounds (8.3) and steals (1.67) per game in preseason. If there was ever any doubt, he can play.

Nevertheless, while the Spurs may have picked him up with an unapologetically low pick, Blair's long term prognosis is not something that they have completely overlooked either. Despite Blair being a lottery talent at the tender age of 20, the Spurs have been cautious in their first contract with him, and they haven't committed too much money or too many guaranteed years to a player with speculative long term health. They signed him for a chunk of the MLE and for far above the minimum salary, to a deal that will pay Blair $1.768 million over the next two years, but the final two years of the deal are fully unguaranteed, just like they would be on a first rounder's rookie scale contract (contrary to what Sam Smith says).

However, the cost is still really, really small. And it's one we should have paid. Taj Gibson is only to be paid $2.157 million over the next two years, and they could be the only two guaranteed seasons of his rookie scale if we wanted. This is all it would have cost to take Blair with the 26th pick. For the production he would give, that's a comparative steal, and the two option years at a combined $3.35 million would have made it even more of one.

Furthermore, even if it HAD gone wrong, the Paxson incarnation of the Bulls franchise has paid staggering amounts of dollars over the last few years to players that they don't want to play for them. From Cezary Trybanski, Dalibor Bagaric and Mike Wilks, to Eddie Robinson, Jerome James and Tim Thomas - twice - the Bulls have paid approximately $50 million over the last 6 years to players that weren't playing for them. The absolute worse case scenario for Blair's health would be him signing his rookie contract and then never playing a single game, yet even in that situation, the Bulls are stuck with only a $2.157 million bill, with the possibility of insurance paying some of it.

In the grand scheme of things, how significant is that amount? Not very.



Taj Gibson is a solid player and should be a solid contributor off the bench for the Bulls during the four years of his rookie deal. He has demonstrated a better-than-advertised offensive skillset, as well as the shotblocking for which he is noted, contributing on both ends with a measure of poise and technique that a Tyrus Thomas-led power forward rotation has been otherwise starved of.

But DeJuan Blair is still emphatically better than him. His knees may be in alarming shape for a 20 year old, and the medical scans may well have shown some worrying glimpses into his future. As we've seen with the Shareef and Hunter examples, such things are possible. Yet even if Blair doesn't make it to the age that Gibson is at now, he will most likely still be better from the ages of 20 through 23 than Taj will be from the ages of 24 through 27. And that's using a particularly unpropitious projection of his health.

If only for the short term gains on a team with no short term aims, it was still totally worth it.