Quote:
Originally Posted by
Peep Game 
Quote:
Originally Posted by
JesusShuttlesworth34
It was a modern day miracle a 40 year old MJ even got those scrub squads close to .500. Tyrone Nesby.....Tyrone freaking Nesby!? You serious? Jahidi White and Popeye Jones?
An old disinterested lackluster Mitch Richmond (Who we traded Chris Webber in his prime for)?
Stop the horror....the memories.
How in the world did that happen???
That was after Webber's arrest in 1998.
The club needed to break up the Howard/Webber duo once their partying became a PR issue and the team failed to meet expectations. They'd signed Juwan Howard to an impossibly stupid $100 million contract back in '96, after nearly losing him to the Miami Heat. (The deal had already been signed, but the league invalidated it as a violation of the salary cap.) Given his production, no team in the league would touch him. It took years before they were finally able to dump him off on Dallas. That left Webber as the only player left they could possibly move.
Mitch Richmond was considered one of the best "under the radar" players in the league. (The guys on NBATV's "Open Court" acknowledged as much in a recent episode.) MJ himself thought highly of him, and prevailing wisdom held that Richmond would've been a superstar had he only played in a major media market. He was also a model citizen.
The Wizards' logic - and, granted, it's stupid - was to dump a "knucklehead" and bring in a franchise-caliber player who the organization and the city could be proud of. The Kings' motivation was obvious, but bear in mind that Webber was still considered something of a risk at that time. The Kings felt that the dearth of nightlife activities in Sacramento helped minimize that risk, which made them a more eager trade partner than most.
It's impossible to believe that Richmond really was the best deal on the table, as it rarely makes sense to trade big for small, let alone young for old, but this was a very "image conscious" team and bringing in more young kids frightened the club's increasingly-conservative management.
What they did was similar, in spirit, to Portland breaking up the so-called "Jailblazers." They got worse - much worse - under the rationale that fans would prefer clean-cut losers to "thugs." (This was only a few years before the NBA instituted its "professional dress requirements" to placate racist fans.)
Everyone knew it was a lopsided trade and the Wizards were roundly lambasted in the press for it, but the local media also flipped out when it seemed the Wizards had lost Howard to the Heat. (I remember Michael Wilbon, then a journalist, dashed out a particularly indignant rant on the subject for the Washington Post.) The team was damned if it did and damned if it didn't, and management resigned themselves to failure. Webber/Howard/Strickland never lived up to their billing, earning only a first round sweep at the hands of the Bulls - and they needed a tie-breaking win against the Cavs in the last game of the regular season to even accomplish that. Rebuilding was inevitable and they likely wanted to at least have one true pro on the roster to help future picks progress.
It'll go down as one of the worst trades in league history, but it is helpful to place it in its proper context. It was a bad decision on every level, but it wasn't strictly a basketball decision.
), Christian Laettener, Mitch Richmond, Popeye Jones 
...wow
