P.J. Tucker's Power Rankings
One year after Tucker floored me by sharing how much a championship he won in Israel years earlier had stuck with him, he finally reached the NBA summit for a new career peak
The 2021 offseason moved quickly, as it so often does in the modern NBA, but without delivering a certifiable rock-the-league surprise. This, sadly, has not been a summer for that.
Not yet, anyway.
Monday's out-of-the-blue trade that sent Eric Bledsoe back to Clipperland was such a welcome thunderbolt for fans of the Transaction Game in part because there have been so few memorable jolts since the Los Angeles Lakers arranged a trade for Russell Westbrook in the hours before the NBA Draft on July 29.
Miami won the Kyle Lowry Sweepstakes, but you could see that coming the day before free agency started. Apart from the Lakers' pivot to a Westbrook swap when they appeared to be headed for a Buddy Hield-centric deal with Sacramento, and the sign-and-trade deal DeMar DeRozan scored with Chicago when it looked like his market was evaporating, there hasn't been much that could be deemed blockbuster-y.
Other potential candidates include Washington expanding the Westbrook deal to five teams to enable the Wizards to acquire Spencer Dinwiddie via sign-and-trade, or the Knicks' bargain signing of Kemba Walker after Walker negotiated a buyout with Oklahoma City, but my favorite underrated nominee for a wow moment was hearing that P.J. Tucker was leaving the newly minted champions in Milwaukee to head for South Beach.
For all of the Bucks' luxury-tax concerns, I still expected Tucker to stay with them, just as Milwaukee found a way to retain Bobby Portis. Seeing Tucker switch teams, less than a month after he played such a pivotal on- and off-court role in the club's first championship in 50 years, certainly did some jolting — especially given where he landed after the Bucks and Heat tangled in the last two postseasons.
Tucker was a Buck, then, for only 20 regular-season games and 23 more in the postseason. Yet it will be recorded as an unforgettable stint, beyond the brevity, because of the various stars Tucker guarded — ranging in size from Kevin Durant to Trae Young to Chris Paul — and the confidence and edge he brought to a team that had been relentlessly doubted for years.
Confession time: I take a strong personal interest in Tucker's story because of the pivotal chapter that took place in Holon, Israel, during the 2007-08 season. Holon is a Tel Aviv suburb and where my father’s parents eventually settled after their escape from Communist rule in Romania. In his solitary season with Hapoel Holon, Tucker led the tiny club to its only Israeli league championship over perennial EuroLeague power Maccabi Tel Aviv and, in the process, changed the trajectory of his career.
About a year ago in the Walt Disney World bubble, I had my first chance to sit down with Tucker after a Houston Rockets practice and hear some of his Holon stories, which I naturally couldn't wait to inhale after making numerous summer visits there in my youth. He shared tales of walking the streets, eating shawarma and rejecting coach/owner Miki Dorsman's offer to live in a Tel Aviv apartment because he enjoyed the comforts of unfashionable Holon. He insisted that the only crowd that could rival Holon’s fans were the Cameron Crazies at Duke.
“They are loud the entire game,” Tucker said, recalling Holon’s raucous home dates in a gym that held only 2,800 fans. “You look up there and they’re beating their drums and it looks like they’re fighting, but they’re really chanting.”
What stayed with me most from our chat was how Tucker, then in his ninth NBA season and a crucial cog for a Houston team that gave Golden State two almighty scares in the playoffs when the Warriors were at their peak, regarded Holon’s championship run as the highlight of his pro career to that point.
"To this day," Tucker said in late July 2020, "it's the best year of my life."
In late July 2021, of course, those rankings had to be revised. The Bucks outlasted Durant’s wounded Brooklyn Nets in seven games in an instant classic series in the second round, closed out the Atlanta Hawks in the Eastern Conference finals without the injured Giannis Antetokounmpo for Game 5 or Game 6 and erased a 2-0 deficit to the Phoenix Suns in the NBA Finals with four straight wins to finally capture the crown that Tucker chased in vain with the Rockets. Before free agency began, I had a chance to exchange a couple texts with him to confirm that there had indeed been a reshuffle at the top.
“Milwaukee is 1000000% No. 1,” Tucker wrote, with a “hahahahaha!” attached to convey the requisite laughter. “There is nothing like winning an NBA championship.
“It’s hard to explain how it feels. It’s surreal almost. I got so close in previous years and remembering the heartache of falling short kinda haunts you. The feeling of finally getting over the mountaintop is unreal.”
In that brief exchange of messages on July 30, Tucker acknowledged that the Bucks’ title “really hasn’t sunk in yet” and shared how he had already been advised by more seasoned champions that the “ring ceremony is when it really sinks in.”
“I’m excited for that night,” Tucker wrote.
Just a few nights later, he was accepting a two-year, $15 million deal with the Heat, followed by an Instagram post that only amplified the notion that Tucker didn’t enter free agency looking to leave.
“I’m still a little lost for words to be honest,” Tucker said to start the post, ultimately describing his decision to sign with Miami as “a hard turn on the road of my career.”
In other words: Quite the surprise.
After deciding that re-signing Tucker would constrict its ability to further address team depth, Milwaukee used the resulting flexibility from his departure to sign Rodney Hood and Semi Ojeleye, bring back George Hill and trade for Grayson Allen. One of the more persistent questions we’re likely to be asking throughout next season’s title race is whether the new additions can offset the defensive versatility and savvy presence supplied by Tucker — even as we acknowledge that, at 36, he has no shortage of detractors when it comes to his offensive limitations.
Miami’s interest was the most predictable element of the switch, given the Heat’s past attempts to trade for Tucker and what appears to be his natural fit in Pat Riley’s universe. The suddenness of it all, though, was tangible in Tucker’s Instagram farewell, in which he specifically thanked “the city of MILWAUKEE!!!!”
“You took me in and had my back throughout our journey,” Tucker said, “and I will be FOREVER be grateful and hold you near to my heart.”
The post made Wisconsin’s Brewtown sound a bit like Holon, Tel Aviv’s southern neighbor, and as a relentless nostalgist who also enjoys the unexpected, these were surprises that filled a pressing need.
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Personal Howl
I'm going to keep rotating items here in the Tuesday newsletter's midsection for a TBD period. The long-term plan has not changed: I still intend to make this a space for more personal reflections once the new season starts, but I am enjoying these weekly flirtations with different concepts. I'm an overly regimented person — way too obsessively regimented — so refusing to lock into a new feature here is (brace yourself) what classifies as me being a rebel.
I'm also trying, especially when I'm tweeting about him, to be cognizant of how often I repeat the specifics about Dennis Schröder's very costly free agency.
You’ve surely heard ad nauseam by now that Schröder turned down a four-year, $84 million contract extension from the Lakers during the season and had to settle for a one-year deal with Boston for $5.9 million. It's a contender for the most expensive misread in the history of free agency, but the inevitable criticism of Schröder’s bet-on-himself backfire is frequently coming across as outright glee.
This is pro sports, so second-guessing is second nature. And Schröder, by all accounts, had plenty of people telling him to take the Lakers' offer when it was on the table. He has never been the easiest teammate, either, so sympathy for Schröder was always going to be in short supply.
But we've reached the point of rampant revelry in Schröder's current $78 million deficit that feels unseemly. Especially when his situation is hardly an NBA first.
Nerlens Noel once bypassed a $70 million contract offer from Dallas and ultimately signed a one-year deal at $4.1 million. Latrell Sprewell's unforgettable quote about how he's "got my family to feed" was prompted by a three-year, $21 million deal he rejected (and never recouped) from Minnesota. Schröder is not even alone this summer: Victor Oladipo could muster only a one-year, $2.4 million deal with Miami on his road to recovery from ongoing right quadriceps woes after turning down extensions from Indiana and Houston worth $113 million and $45 million.
Schröder messed up — hugely. He’s surely going to hear about it for a long time, but his contract follies shouldn’t be generating outright celebration. Should they?
Numbers Game
4
🏀 I'm not trying to discourage the Detroit Pistons at a triumphant time, following a promising summer league run for Cade Cunningham after the Pistons selected him with the No. 1 overall pick in the NBA Draft, but this one was too jarring to ignore: Only four players selected at No. 1 since the inception of the draft lottery in 1985 have won a championship with the team that drafted them. They are San Antonio's David Robinson (1987) and Tim Duncan (1997) and the Cleveland duo of LeBron James (2003) and Kyrie Irving (2011).
6
🏀 Jalen Green at No. 2 was Houston's first first-round pick in six years dating to the selection of Sam Dekker at No. 18 in 2015 via New Orleans. Dekker is back in the NBA with Toronto after spending the past two seasons in Russia and Turkey.
7
🏀 Golden State's Jonathan Kuminga has quite a legacy to live up as the seventh overall pick. Players previously selected by the Warriors at No. 7 include Chris Mullin (1985), Stephen Curry (2009) and Harrison Barnes (2012).
40
🏀 Extensions signed during free agency this month by Golden State’s Stephen Curry, Brooklyn’s Kevin Durant, Dallas’ Luka Dončić and Philadelphia’s Joel Embiid have hiked the NBA to 12 active contracts featuring an average salary of $40 million or more, according to Spotrac. Joining Curry, Durant, Dončić and Embiid in that club are Giannis Antetokounmpo (Milwaukee), Paul George (LA Clippers), Damian Lillard (Portland), LeBron James (Los Angeles Lakers), James Harden (Brooklyn), John Wall (Houston), Russell Westbrook (Lakers) and Rudy Gobert (Utah).
31
🏀 Just a reminder that Daniel Oturu, who was packaged with Patrick Beverley and Rajon Rondo in the Clippers’ trade to acquire Eric Bledsoe from Memphis, took 21 shots (making only five) in LA’s regular-season finale at Oklahoma City. Oturu took a total of just 31 shots from the floor in the other 29 regular-season games he appeared in as an NBA rookie. The Clippers lost that game to the tanking Thunder, who won just two of their final 25 games, to lock themselves into the West’s fourth seed and a first-round match with Dallas that they ultimately won in seven games despite losing their first three home games in the series.