One of the players who will be traded from the Houston Rockets to the Phoenix Suns as a part of the package for Kevin Durant will be eight-year veteran, Dillon Brooks. The Suns will be Brooks’ third NBA team, having begun his career and spending six years between 2017 and 2023 with the Memphis Grizzlies.
If the Suns had had their way, though, Brooks would have been theirs for a long time. If the Suns had had their way several years ago, Brooks would have just completed his seventh season in Phoenix. But an embarrassing moment born out of a simple – and yet, you would think, entirely avoidable – miscommunication kept him with the Grizzlies for five and a half years longer than the Suns had hoped.
A False Start Without Precedent
Back in the middle of the 2018-19 NBA season, a struggling Grizzlies team would turn to selling off some parts. A year after finishing 22-60, they did not make any substantial improvements, and would in February 2019 complete the deal with the Toronto Raptors that finally ended the tenure of Marc Gasol.
A couple of months earlier, it was thought that they had completed a different trade. While in a mid-December 2018 game against the Miami Heat, the Grizzlies – 16-11 at the time, and looking to buy rather than sell – were reported to have agreed to a three-way trade with the Suns and the Washington Wizards.
The deal, as reported, went like this:
- Memphis trades: Brooks, Wayne Selden Jr
- Memphis receives: Kelly Oubre Jr
- Phoenix trades: Trevor Ariza
- Phoenix receives: Austin Rivers, Brooks, Wayne Selden Jr
- Washington trades: Kelly Oubre Jr, Austin Rivers
- Washington receives: Trevor Ariza
There was one problem. At some point in the process, it was either forgotten – or never made clear – which Brooks was involved.
At that time, the Grizzlies had not only Dillon Brooks on the roster, but also MarShon Brooks. MarShon – at that time 29 years old, and back in the NBA after four years away via a minimum-salary pick-up – was a very different piece on the trade market than Dillon, who had excelled as a rookie in 74 starts.
With all due respect to MarShon, both Memphis and Phoenix wanted Dillon more. He was already better then, and – given that MarShon never played in the NBA again after his Grizzlies stint – he would be clearly better for the future. But someone, somewhere, dropped the ball.
Suns Got Their Guy, Eventually
To be sure, for the Grizzlies to have received a quality contributor like Oubre for such a low cost – what draft picks were included in the deal, if any, was never made clear – could have raised a red flag. Then again, the embarrassing affair could easily, surely, have been avoided altogether. Damage control was required. Awkward conversations had to be had.
An uncharacteristically terse Chris Wallace, then the general manager of the Grizzlies, had to speak to the media and press home his and the team’s insistence that they never intended to trade Dillon, nor ever leaked any of the news. The fact that the same package of Selden and MarShon was traded within a month – this time to the Chicago Bulls in exchange for Justin Holiday – seems to back him up.
What no one denied, though, was that the mix-up had occurred.
The Suns and Wizards would later complete the Ariza-Oubre/Rivers swap as a simple two-team deal later that week, with the Grizzlies having pulled out entirely and no third team deemed necessary. But although Oubre would play two seasons with the Suns before going on to be a part of their trade package for Chris Paul, it appears they wanted Dillon Brooks more all along.
If nothing else, then, they finally achieved that this week.
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